The Politics of Political Science: “Value-free” Theory and the Wolin–Strauss Dust-Up of 1963

Abstract

Political theory's relationship with political science over the last 60 years has been fraught with ambiguity and weighed down by epistemological tensions in a manner that suggests an old and extremely prickly marriage. To some, political theory has been nothing less than the theoretical foundation of political science as a discipline—the conceptual and epistemological ground for each and every subfield, cherished and nurtured by tolerant, even ecumenical political science departments. To others, it has been merely a distraction, a needless normative diversion from the empirical responsibilities of hard social science by those who do not understand its rigors. As was perhaps more common in the first half of the twentieth century, some have continued to see in political science and political theory complementary perspectives that need and entail one another, two sides of how we establish and balance the human sciences, doing empirical science even as we assess its epistemological standards and methods. But others have regarded the two as preternaturally antagonistic. At the height of the behavioral revolution in the 1960s, a few self-styled “hardboiled” scientists dismissed theory altogether as little more than mythology: moralizing fairy tales dressed up as a kind of prescriptive philosophy that confounded facts and values. But the real crux of the debate between political theory and political science has been the relationship of political science to politics, as exemplified in historian Alfred A. Cobban's scathing comment excoriating political science as mostly a device for avoiding politics without achieving science“The political scientist, in so far as he wishes to remain a scientist, is limited to the study of techniques. A good deal of what is called political science, I must confess, seems, to me a device, invented by academic persons, avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science” (Cobban 1960, 240).. Cobban's challenge was taken up by many theorists, including Leo Strauss, whose blunt rebuke to the “new” political science suggesting that it was doing little more than fiddling while Rome was burning inaugurated a debate that in 1962 set this mostly fire-proof journal aflame“One may say (of the new political science),” wrote Strauss, “that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns”(Strauss 1962, 327)..