Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T21:00:34.511Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comment on Smith and Apter: or, Whatever Happened to the Great Issues?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Arnold A. Rogow
Arnold A. Rogow
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time. But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word ‘wisdom” mentioned! Do you want to hear something funny? In almost four years of college—and this is the absolute truth—in almost four years of college, the only time I can remember ever even hearing the expression ‘wise man’ being used was in my freshman year, in Political Science! And you know how it was used? It was used in reference to some nice old poopy elder statesman who'd made a fortune in the stock market and then gone to Washington to be an advisor to President Roosevelt. Honestly, now! Four years of college, almost! I'm not saying that happens to everybody, but I just get so upset when I think about it I could die!”—Comment by Miss Franny Glass in “Zooey,” a story by J. D. Salinger in The New Yorker, May 4, 1957.

Type
A Symposium
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1957 , pp. 763 - 775
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1957

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Stouffer, Samuel A. et al. , The American Soldier: Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (Princeton, 1949–1950)Google Scholar.

2 Say, , Mailer, Norman, The Naked and the Dead (New York, 1948)Google Scholar.

3 An attempt to develop such a framework for study of the whole area of international politics is contained in Snyder, Richard C., Bruck, H. W., and Sapin, Burton, Decision-making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics (Foreign Policy Analysis Project, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J., 1954)Google Scholar. See also Snyder, Richard C. and Furniss, Edgar S. Jr., American Foreign Policy (New York, 1954)Google Scholar.

4 For example, the measurement of influence in James G. March, Robert A. Dahl, and David Nasatir, “Influence Ranking in the United States Senate,” paper read at the American Political Science Association Meeting in Washington, D. C., September 6–8, 1956; game theory in Luce, R. Duncan and Rogow, Arnold A., “A Game Theoretic Analysis of Congressional Power Distributions for a Stable Two-Party System,” Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April, 1956)Google Scholar.

5 This appears to be the point of view expressed in Bailey, Stephen K. et al. , Research Frontiers in Politics and Government (Brookings Lectures, Brookings Institution, Washington, 1955)Google Scholar.

6 A recent example of such work is Key, V. O. Jr., American State Politics: An Introduction (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. See also Truman, David B., “The State Delegations and the Structure of Party Voting in the United States House of Representatives,” this Review, Vol. 50, (December, 1956), pp. 1023–1045Google Scholar.

7 It is equally curious to read, with reference to the allegedly undeveloped theoretical state of the discipline, that college students are “‘voting with their feet.’ The best students in the social sciences today tend not to go into political science, but into those disciplines where a genuine body of research theory is emerging.” If this statement is intended to imply that the “best students” (by what standard or measurement?) go into other disciplines because political science lacks a genuine body of research theory, I know of no evidence to support it.

8 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel, The People's Choice (New York, 1944)Google Scholar; Berelson, Bernard, Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William, Voting (Chicago, 1954)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Barton, Allen H., and Linz, Juan, “The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior,” in Lindzey, Gardner, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. II (Cambridge, 1954)Google Scholar.

9 Hunter, Floyd, Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers (Chapel Hill, 1953)Google Scholar; Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (New York, 1956)Google Scholar.

10 Kornhauser, Arthur, Sheppard, Harold L., and Mayer, Albert J., When Labor Votes: A Study of Auto Workers (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin, Trow, Martin A., and Coleman, James S., Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (Glencoe, Ill., 1956)Google Scholar.

11 Centers, Richard, The Psychology of Social Classes (Princeton, 1949)Google Scholar; Mills, C. Wright, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, 1951)Google Scholar.

12 Boulding, Kenneth, The Organizational Revolution (New York, 1953)Google Scholar; Whyte, William H. Jr., The Organization Man (New York, 1956)Google Scholar.

13 Seeley, John R., Sim, R. Alexander, and Loosley, Elizabeth W., Crestwood Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Spectorsky, A. C., The Exurbanites (Philadelphia and New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

14 As Bernard Berelson has pointed out, public opinion research was once a major interest in political science. He observes in a recent paper: “The Advisory Committee for the 1935 bibliography in this field (public opinion) was composed mainly of political scientists; the Advisory Committee for the 1953 Reader consisted mainly of sociologists. The earlier academic contributions came from political scientists like Gosnell, Lasswell, Odegard, Herring; the later contributions were more likely to come from psychologists like Newcomb, Cantril, and Hovland; or from sociologists like Lazarsfeld and Stouffer; or, an academic generation later from a combined psychologist-sociologist like Hyman.” The principal reason for this shift, he suggests, (Professor Smith take note) is “the dominance of method. Political scientists were not trained in the techniques of social research, and, when the techniques became so important, the proprietors of the method took over intellectual ownership of the subject matter, too. And in some important respects, they changed it.” Berelson, Bernard, “The Study of Public Opinion,” in White, Leonard D., ed., The State of the Social Sciences: Papers presented at the 25th Anniversary of the Social Science Research Building, The Univtrsily of Chicago, November 10–12, 1955 (Chicago, 1956)Google Scholar.

15 Brown, Harrison, The Challenge of Man's Future (New York, 1954)Google Scholar; Seidenberg, Roderick, Posthistoric Man (Chapel Hill, 1950)Google Scholar; Gartmann, Heinz, Man Unlimited: Technology's Challenge to Human Endurance (New York, 1957)Google Scholar.

16 And sometimes not so privately. Thus, in editing Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Illinois, 1957)Google Scholar, Professor Mirra Komarovsky did not include any papers written by political scientists. The social sciences, as she defines them, consist of history, economics, and sociology.

17 E.g. Dahl, Robert A. and Lindblom, Charles E., Politics, Economics and Welfare (New York, 1953), 3Google Scholar. “In economic organization and reform, the ‘great issues’ are no longer the great issues, if ever they were.”

18 Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, 1950)Google Scholar.

19 See above, note 12.

20 See above, note 13.

21 Political science as such has yet to make any contribution to discussion of the educational environment in which, as a teaching profession, it flourishes (or does not flourish).

22 This statement begs the question, of course, whether political scientists read “serious” books after receipt of the Ph.D., and if so, what kinds of “serious” books they read. How many of us, for example, keep abreast of the literature in our particular fields of Interest, let alone of the literature in related fields?

23 Lasswell, Harold D., “The Political Science of Science,” this Review, Vol. 50 (December, 1956), p. 979Google Scholar.

Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.