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Politics and Pseudopolitics: A Critical Evaluation of Some Behavioral Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Christian Bay
Christian Bay
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

A curious state of affairs has developed within the academic discipline that bravely calls itself Political Science—the discipline that in a much-quoted phrase has been called “a device, invented by university teachers, for avoiding that dangerous subject politics, without achieving science.” A growing and now indeed a predominant proportion of leading American political scientists, the behavioralists, have become determined to achieve science. Yet in the process many of them remain open to the charge of strenuously avoiding that dangerous subject, politics.

Consider a recent essay on the behavioral persuasion in politics. The conclusion stresses the purpose of political inquiry: “The Goal is Man.” There is to be a commitment to some humane purpose after all. But what kind of man? A democratic kind of man, a just man, or perhaps a power-seeking man? The answer follows: “These are philosophical questions better left to the philosophers.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 39 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1965

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References

1 Cobban, Alfred, “The Decline of Political Theory,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 48 (1953), p. 335Google Scholar.

2 Eulau, Heinz, The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (New York, 1963), p. 133 and pp. 133–37Google Scholar.

3 Dahl, Robert, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), p. 6Google Scholar.

4 “Priorities” here refers to norms for guiding the choice among conflicting needs and demands. Political ideals and visions of the good life enter in here, and would do so even if our knowledge of needs and of human nature were as extensive as our knowledge of demands and of social determinants of “public opinion.”

4A Karl Mannheim employs a similar dichotomy of terms, though with different concepts, in his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York, 1954), pp. 51–60Google Scholar.

5 Almond, Gabriel A., The American People and Foreign Policy (New York, 1950), p. 4Google Scholar.

6 The term is from Leo Strauss. See his “Epilogue” in Storing, Herbert J., ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York, 1962), p. 326Google Scholar.

7 New York, 1961.

8 Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F. and McPhee, William N., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

9 Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1956, p. 1.

10 This is not to deny that the Straussian position is more authoritarian and far less respectful of the right to radical dissent, as is to be expected when a corner on objective truth is being claimed. Cf. especially Strauss, Leo, What is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Glencoe, 1959)Google Scholar; and his “Epilogue” in Herbert J. Storing, ed., op. cit. See also Berns, Walter, “The Behavioral Sciences and the Study of Political Things: The Case of Christian Bay's The Structure of Freedom,” this Review, Vol. 55 (1961), pp. 550–59Google Scholar.

11 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, 1960), esp. pp. 403 and 415Google Scholar.

12 An interesting attempt to evaluate the 1952 Presidential election in terms of five criteria of democratic consent (as opposed to non-rational responses to manipulated processes) is reported in Janowitz, Morris and Marvick, Dwaine, Competitive Pressure and Democratic Consent (Ann Arbor, Bureau of Government, University of Michigan, 1956)Google Scholar. The five criteria are chosen somewhat haphazardly, but they are carefully and ingeniously operationalized and brought to bear on available data. The study shows what could just as well be done, in years to come, within a more carefully and systematically stated framework of political objectives and norms.

13 Though perhaps paradoxical, the statement is not self-contradictory. A democracy that guarantees many liberties to people of most persuasions, and in theory to everybody, may well be considered a liberal democracy. Freedom of speech and related freedoms have a strong appeal to most intellectuals, many of whom may become staunch conservatives because they believe in preserving their liberal democracy. Some, indeed, will become fixated on the need for defense of the social order to the point of ignoring the plight of poverty-stricken fellow-citizens whose formal liberty may seem worthless to themselves.

14 Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1962.

15 James M. Buchanan, “An Individualistic Theory of Political Process.” Paper prepared for delivery at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Commodore Hotel, New York City.

16 Some of the milestones in this literature are Almond, Gabriel A., “Comparative Political Systems,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 18 (1956), pp. 391–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Almond, and Coleman, James S., eds., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Almond, and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 For contrast, consider this statement on the ways of other behavioralists: “The focus of the political behaviorist, however, does not seem to be a result of the state of political theory. Elections have been intensively studied because they lend themselves to the methodology of empirical research into politics.” Janowitz, Morris, Wright, Deil, and Delany, William, Public Administration and the Public—Perspectives Toward Government in a Metropolitan Community (Ann Arbor, Bureau of Government, University of Michigan, 1958), p. 2Google Scholar.

18 Cf. Almond and Verba, op. cit., and Pye, Lucian W., Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma's Search for Identity (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

19 Concepts of modernization or development are discussed by James S. Coleman in Almond and Coleman, eds., op. cit., pp. 532–36; by Pye, Lucian W., ed., Communication and Political Development (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 14–20Google Scholar; and by La Palombara, Joseph in his (ed.) Bureaucracy and Political Development (Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chs. 1 and 2.

20 Political Man, op. cit., p. 115 and ch. 4.

21 Fidel Castro's wide following in Latin America can be plausibly explained in these terms.

22 Op. cit., p. 505 and ch. 15.

23 Ibid., pp. 478–79 and 440–41.

24 See especially Ward, Robert E. and Rustow, Dankwart A., The Political Modernization of Japan and Turkey (Princeton University Press, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 However, we should not assume without inquiry that all pseudopolitical behavior is dysfunctional for all high-priority human wants and needs; not, of course, that all varieties of political behavior are to be preferred to pseudopolitical self-seeking or neurotic striving.

26 Joseph Tussman also stresses the danger of destroying the integrity of political communication when the modern bargaining approach to politics enters the “forum or tribunal” that a democratic electorate ought to constitute, according to classical theories of democracy. “We teach men to compete and bargain. Are we to be surprised, then, at the corruption of the tribunal into its marketplace parody?” Obligation and the Body Politic (New York, Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 109 and pp. 104–21Google Scholar.

27 Maslow, Abraham H., “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, Vol. 50 (1943), p. 394CrossRefGoogle Scholar and pp. 370–96. See also his Motivation and Personality (New York, 1954)Google Scholar.

28 Human Nature in Politics (New York, 1963), p. 28Google Scholar. Davies does not refer to La Palombara.

29 Cf. his introduction to Almond and Coleman, eds., op. cit.

30 The Structure of Freedom (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1958, and New York, 1965)Google Scholar.

31 The term “normative research” may be puzzling to some, who think of research exclusively as systematically re(peated) search for empirical data, in the real world or in contrived experimental worlds. And “research” has been one of the empirical social scientist's proud banners in his uphill fight against the sometime supremacy of armchair speculators. In our time a less parochial use of “research” is called for, as a way of recognizing the close interplay between the empirical, normative and logical aspects of inquiry that, as the present paper argues, is necessary for the further development of our knowledge of political as of other human behavior.

32 Naess, Arne, “A systematization of Gandhian ethics of conflict resolution,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 2 (1958), pp. 140–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and also Galtung, Johan and Naess, Arne, Gandhis politiske etikk (Oslo, Tanum, 1955)Google Scholar.

33 Harrington, Michael, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1963; New York, 1962)Google Scholar.

34 Cf. my “A Social Theory of Intellectual Development,” in Sanford, Nevitt, ed., The American College (New York, 1961), pp. 972–1005Google Scholar, esp. pp. 978 and 1000–1005.

35 W. H. Ferry and 25 associates have recently issued a statement that received front-page attention in the New York Times and other newspapers, under the title “The Triple Revolution: An Appraisal of the Major U. S. Crises and Proposals for Action” (Washington: Maurer, Fleischer, Zon and Associates, 1120 Connecticut Ave., 1964)Google Scholar. Referring to the revolutions in cybernetics, in weaponry, and in human rights, but particularly to the first of the three, Ferry et al. argue that there “is an urgent need for a fundamental change in the mechanisms employed to insure consumer rights” (p. 9), now that the problem of production has been solved and the problem of full employment has become impossible to solve with our present system. “We urge, therefore, that society, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, undertake an unqualified commitment to provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right. This undertaking we consider to be essential to the emerging economic, social, and political order in this country” (p. 16).

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