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The Science of Politics in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Bernard Crick
Bernard Crick*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The study of politics in the United States today is something in size, content, and method unique in Western intellectual history. As Professor Pendleton Herring has recently said: “Political science as a subject of systematic enquiry started with Aristotle but as a profession it has won its greatest recognition in the United States and within our generation. One fact is clear: no other country in the world has so large, so well trained, so competent a profession dedicated to the teaching and analysis of government… . This profession … is now part of our national strength.” Not merely has the size of “the profession” grown so much since Aristotle's day, but the method has also markedly changed. American methods have consciously aspired to the modern concepts of natural science. There has been an advocacy of an integrated science of society, resting especially on concepts drawn from modem physics, biology, and psychology, and on a marked displacement of speculative philosophy and historical study. There now follow, from a sceptical foreigner, some reflections on the claims of Professor Herring. It is surely important for friends and neighbours to make some judgment on how a political science profession can become a “partof … national strength” and how relevant these new methods can be to the peculiar historical experience of the United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , August 1954 , pp. 308 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1954

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References

1 “On the Study of Government” (Presidential Address to the American Political Science Association, 09 10, 1953)Google Scholar, American Political Science Review, XLVII, no. 4, 12, 1953, 961.Google Scholar

2 See especially Goals for Political Science (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, the final report of the American Political Science Association's Committee for the Advancement of Teaching. In the summary it says: “training for intelligent citizenship is the predominant interest and emphasis. The real difficulty is not the lack of interest; it is the difficulty of deciding what citizenship means and how to go about producing it.”

3 The National Conference on the Science of Politics held in 1923, reported in American Political Science Review, XVIII, 1924.Google Scholar See also Charles Merriam, “Political Research,” ibid., XVI, 1922, 315 ff. Amongst the notoriously vast “citizenship” literature his Civic Education in the United States (New York, 1934)Google Scholar is of special and curious interest.

4 There is an excellent review of this book by ProfessorMorgenthau, Hans in the American Political Science Review, XLVI, 03, 1952, 230–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar He comments magisterially: “There is an element of tragedy in the spectacle of two superbly endowed minds failing so thoroughly in spite of great ability and great effort. Yet that tragedy is not so much the tragedy of two men as the tragedy of political science and of philosophy in America. For as Mr. Lasswell is the product of a school of political science which was, if not hostile, in any case indifferent, to the necessary contribution of political philosophy to empirical inquiry, so Mr. Kaplan is the product of a school of philosophy which sees in the history of philosophy primarily a history of errors.”

5 Lemer and Lasswell, The Policy Sciences, 10. They seem, with their “dignity of man,” to be in the position of Byron's Don Juan when in love for the first time:

he did the best he could

With things not very subject to control,

And turned, without perceiving his condition,

Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician.

6 The Policy Sciences, 10, my italics.

7 Wilson, Woodrow, “Of the Study of Politics,” Neto Princeton Review, 1887.Google Scholar This is mentioned because it can be interestingly compared to later articles on the same theme. It is not very “methodological,” but it is very practical and very wise.

8 Freud, Sigmund, Outline of Psycho-Analysis (London, 1928).Google Scholar See pages 7, 20, 26, 46, 49, and 64 for definitions of the normal. See also Jones, Emest, “The Concept of the Normal Mind,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XXII, 1942.Google Scholar

9 It is worth quoting at length from a most distinguished review by Lionel Trilling of the Kinsey Report—just to show that the above paragraphs are not entirely an eccentric and rude dissecting of a straw man in a mare's nest: “Much in the report has the intention of habituating its readers to sexuality in all its manifestations; it wants, as it were, a democratic pluralism of sexuality…. But when we have given it all the credit it deserves as something good and enlarging in American life, we cannot help observing that it is often associated with an almost intentional intellectual weakness. It goes with a nearly conscious aversion from making intellectual distinctions, almost as if out of the belief that an intellectual distinction must inevitably lead to a social discrimination or exclusion. We might say that those who wish to practice the democratic virtues have taken it as their assumption that all social facts—with the exception of exclusion or economic hardship—must be accepted, and not merely in the scientific sense but also in the social sense, that is, that no judgement must be passed on them, that any conclusion drawn from them which perceives values and consequences will turn out to be undemocratic.” ( Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination, New York, 1950, 260 Google Scholar)

10 Goals for Political Science.

11 From the symposium “ Goals for Political Science: A Discussion,” American Political Science Review, LXV, no. 4, 12, 1953, 996–1024.Google Scholar To a writer with Professor Hallowell's views the scientific pretensions of political science must appear as a deliberate attack on reason, on ethics, as almost a blasphemy.

12 Ibid., 1004.

13 Certainly the crisis of American tradition has led many to feel the need for “a conscious search for unifying roots,” as Professor Thomas Cook has written. But the “worry” has yet shown no signs of such activity in any significant form, only perhaps a running to extremes in some welcoming of ProfessorVoegelin's, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952)Google Scholar, condemnation grim and heady, but quite supererogatory. Perhaps we may hope that some of the most learned students of political ideas and comparative government, who have kept out of the scientific movement, and whose work has been overwhelmingly in the European field, will turn to look at American politics with some wider perspective than the unreal “conservative versus radical” batde of the books.