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The Behavioral Sciences and the Study of Political Things: The Case of Christian Bay's The Structure of Freedom*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Walter Berns
Walter Berns*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

One result of the advent of the behavioral sciences in political science is that political things are now being studied, to an ever increasing extent, by men with little or no training in political science. Of the 27 authors of essays in the Burdick and Brodbeck volume, American Voting Behavior, for example, only six are political scientists, the others being mainly sociologists, social psychiatrists, and, to a surprising extent, psychiatrists; so that if people were once thought to vote for political reasons, and if a decade ago they were said to vote for sociological reasons, we are now told that in fact votes are expressions of “individual needs to secure gratification of repressed wishes for a certain type of parental image ….” I use the example of voting studies because it is in this area that the approach and the research techniques of modern behavioral science are said to have had the greatest impact.

There would be no disposition to resist this development—certainly it would be indefensible for political science to cut itself off from the insights provided by other social sciences—were it not for the tendency in such works for the political to be reduced to the sub-political and the danger that in this process the political will disappear altogether, so that we will have a political science that refuses to address itself to political questions. This is not a remote possibility. The basic premise of modern social science is the so-called distinction between facts and values.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , September 1961 , pp. 550 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

*

A paper delivered at the Annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, September, 1960.

References

1 Wahl, C. W., “The Relation Between Primary and Secondary Identifications: Psychiatry and the Group Sciences,” in Burdick, Eugene and Brodbeck, Arthur J., American Voting Behavior (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1959), pp. 263–4Google Scholar.

2 Truman, David B., “The Impact on Political Science of the Revolution in the Behavioral Sciences,” Research Frontiers in Politics and Government (Washington, The Brookings Institution, 1955), p. 213 Google Scholar.

3 Hoffman, Stanley, in a review of Introduction à la Science Politique, this Review, Vol. 53 (12, 1959), p. 1120 Google Scholar.

4 Jaffa, Harry V., “The Case Against Political Theory,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 22 (05, 1960), p. 259 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Bay, Christian, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 4 Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 8.

7 Ibid., pp. 375–77.

8 Ibid., p. 14.

9 Ibid., p. 3.

10 Ibid., p. 5.

11 See below, p. 555.

12 Bay, op. cit., p. 15.

13 Ibid., p. 7.

14 Ibid., p. 372.

15 Ibid., p. 92.

16 Ibid., p. 102.

17 Ibid., p. 126.

18 Ibid., p. 103. Italics supplied.

19 Ibid., p. 117.

20 Ibid., p. 112.

21 Ibid., p. 379.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 381.

24 Ibid., p. 130.

25 Ibid., p. 135.

26 Ibid., p. 152.

27 Ibid., p. 146.

28 Ibid., p. 145.

29 Ibid., p. 373.

30 Ibid., p. 374.

31 Ibid., p. 371.

32 Ibid., p. 372.

33 Ibid., p. 85.

34 Ibid., pp. 95–6.

35 Ibid., p. 86.

36 Ibid., pp. 83, 88, 95.

37 Ibid., p. 83.

38 Ibid., pp. 22–3.

39 Straus, Erwin W., “On the Form and Structure of Man's Inner Freedom,” Kentucky Law Journal, Vol. 45 (Winter, 1956–1957), pp. 260–61Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., p. 261.

41 This, and part of the discussion that follows, is adopted from Dr. Erwin Straus.

42 Plato, , Phaedo, 99 D4–E6 Google Scholar.

43 Second Defense of the People of England, in The Works of John Milton, Vol. 8 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1932), pp. 239–41Google Scholar.

44 See White, Howard B., “Comment on Morgenthau's ‘Dilemmas of Freedom,’” this Review, Vol. 51 (09, 1957), pp. 724–33Google Scholar, and especially this sentence on page 731: “That a variety of forces in modern society, ranging from Communist brain-washers with ruthless aims and coercive powers, to public relations experts, advertising copywriters, psychiatrists, and psychological warriors, with their milder aims and their more moderate powers, are bound and determined that the minds of as many as they can get hold of, are not going to be free, Almighty God to the contrary notwithstanding, is a clear and simple fact, of primary importance, in its own way perhaps as important as the presence of periodic elections.”

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