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Theory and the Study of Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

David E. Apter
David E. Apter
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
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Extract

In the omnibus philosophy of an earlier day the pursuit of knowledge was the pursuit of science. Political science became a specialized discipline only very recently, and while it gained by its specialization it also suffered because of it. One of the nice tasks of modern political science is how to avoid the effects of descriptive detail as a substitute for theory and once again relate political phenomena to broader patterns of human activity, without losing the advantages, particularly in research, of the specialized knowledge and lore so laboriously acquired.

Type
A Symposium
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1957 , pp. 747 - 762
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1957

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References

1 Examples of particular interest are Fallers, L. A., Bantu Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1956)Google Scholar, which deals with the development of a civil service system of chieftaincy in an important district in Uganda, and Barnes, J. A., Politics in a Changing Society (London, 1954)Google Scholar, with its interesting thesis of the “snowball state,” and which deals with another African group, the Fort Jameson Ngoni, as the subject for intensive empirical work.

2 See for example, Mannheim, K., “On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London, 1952)Google Scholar, or his Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1946), p. 7Google Scholar. Mannheim says, after discussing the factors which make for awareness of programmatical and ideological differences, “The most significant stage of this communication is reached when the forms of thought and experience, which had hitherto developed independently, enter into one and the same consciousness impelling the mind to discover the irreconcilability of the conflicting conceptions of the world.”

For an interesting and differing view see Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), pp. 24–30Google Scholar.

3 See for example, Parsons, T. et al. , Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, Illinois, 1953)Google Scholar. See also, Almond, G. H., “Comparative Political Systems,” in Eulau, et al. , Political Behavior (Glencoe, Illinois, 1956)Google Scholar.

4 See Mandelbaum, M., “Societal Facts,” in The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, No. 4 (Dec. 1955)Google Scholar, for a good discussion of this problem. Speaking of the problem of reductionism Mandelbaum says, “There can scarcely be any doubt that there is at present a considerable measure of disagreement among social scientists concerning the relations which obtain among their various disciplines. For example there is little agreement as to how the province of ‘social psychology’ is related to general psychology on the one hand or to sociology on the other. There is perhaps even less agreement as to how sociology and history are related, or whether, in fact history is itself a social science. Even the province of cultural anthropology which, in its earlier stages, seemed to be capable of clear definition, is now in a position extremely fluid. This type of fluidity in boundaries of the various social sciences, and the ease with which concepts employed in one discipline spread to other disciplines, has been quite generally regarded as a promising augury for the future of the social sciences. One notes the frequency with which ‘integration’ is held up as an important programmatic goal for social scientists. But such pleas for integration are ambiguous. On the one hand, they may merely signify a recognition of the fact that attempts to understand some concrete problems call for co-operation between persons trained to use the concepts and methods of different social sciences, or that workers in one discipline should be aware of the methods and results of those who work in other fields. On the other hand, what some who plead for ‘integration’ seem to demand is that the various disciplines should merge into one larger whole. On such a view the goal of integration would be the achievement of a state in which all persons who work in the field of social science would operate with the same set of concepts and would utilize the same methods of inquiry.” The latter position is of course absurd if only because of the wide variety of research needs in the differing social sciences and because specialized theory is not easily transferred from one discipline to another.

5 See Von Mises, Richard, Positivism, A Study in Human Understanding (Cambridge, 1951), p. 8Google Scholar. The extremely stimulating introduction of this work nicely covers some of the problems current in political science today when the issues of science, method, and technique are raised as a legitimate course for the political scientist to pursue. In the same work there is a very clearly written discussion of the language not only in interdisciplinary work, but as a barrier to logical analysis, and the need for specialized categories and concepts for technical purposes.

6 See Easton's, David general thesis that properly speaking there is no political theory today, The Political System (New York, 1953), passimGoogle Scholar.

7 See Merton's, paradigm of functional analysis and Marxian analysis in Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Illinois, 1949), Chapter 1Google Scholar.

8 For a good view of Barker's efforts at positive theory construction one need only look at his Principles of Social and Political Theory (London, 1953)Google Scholar, where “out of his later years” he begins to deal in systematic analytical fashion with the materials he had previously worked in brilliant intuitive fashion. The volume is not only a failure as theory construction, but points up how far he has strayed from the tradition of Maitland, or for that matter, Gierke.

9 Parsons, Talcott, “Some Highlights of the General Theory of Action,” unpublished paper presented at the Northwestern University Conference on Analytic Systems, Spring, 1955, p. 3.

10 One of the ways of doing this is of course to teach our students what some of the more basic criteria of science are, as we indicated earlier. The application of Mill's canons are by no means beneath our dignity or our art. Principles of logic are as much a part of the technique of the social sciences as they are of the physical sciences, and as such should be basic training for any political scientist worthy of his salt. In the days when politics was a small part of the large omnibus of social philosophy, mathematics and logic were as fundamental to humanist education as to the scientific, and the false dichotomy of modern times had not then yet been made. More than ever we need now to be familiar with those basic enquiries which make up scientific enquiry. Knowledge must be outspoken in its rules as well as in its information.

11 See Macridis, R., The Study of Comparative Government, Doubleday Short Studies (New York, 1955), Chapter 2Google Scholar.

12 It is interesting to note that others wrestling with similar epiatemological problems come face to face with some of the same kinds of requirements in widely differing areas of social thought. A Danish linguist working towards systematic theory in an entirely different fashion voices a remark as applicable to our own science as to his when, speaking of theory, he says, “A priori it would seem to be a generally valid thesis that for every process there is a corresponding system, by which the process can be analyzed and described by means of a limited number of premises. It must be assumed that any process can be analyzed into a limited number of elements that constantly recur in various combinations. Then, on the basis of this analysis, it should be possible to order these elements into classes according to their possibilities of combination. And it should be further possible to set up a general and exhaustive calculus of the possible combinations. A history so established should rise above the level of mere primitive description to that of a systematic, exact, and generalizing science, in the theory of which all events (possible combinations of elements) are foreseen and the conditions for their realization established.” He goes on to remark about the humanities, what is equally applicable to political science, “It seems incontestable that, so long as the humanities have not tested this thesis as a working hypothesis, they have neglected their most important task, that of seeking to establish the humanistic studies as a science.” Hjelmslev, Louis, “Prolegomena to a Theory of Language,” p. 5Google Scholar. Translated by Whitfield, Francis J., in Supplement to International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 19, No. 1, Indiana Univ. Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics, Memoir 7 (Jan. 1953)Google Scholar.

13 This paper was stimulated by the Conference on Analytical Systems held at Northwestern University in the Spring of 1955. My thanks are due to my colleagues at Northwestern for helpful criticism and stimulation. I wish particularly to acknowledge the help of Heinz Eulau, Antioch College, David Easton, The University of Chicago, Harold Sprout, Princeton University, and Richard C. Snyder and Roland Young of North-western University for reading and commenting on the manuscript. Their help is no token of their responsibility.

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