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A Postscript to Professor Dahl's “Preface”1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
Extract
An exhilarating breath of fresh air has blown into the musty halls of political theory with the publication of Robert Dahl's Walgreen lectures, A Preface to Democratic Theory. We now know that discussion of minority rights and majority rule can be carried on with lucidity and serious attention to some of the intriguing intellectual puzzles which arise, as well as with reasonable rigor and a genuinely remarkable economy of expression.
For all his clarity and conciseness, however, Professor Dahl has paid a fourfold philosophical price:
1. His case against “Madisonian” democracy is procedural and perhaps more peripheral than profound.
2. The neo-Spinozistic endeavor to formalize political ideology appears premature.
3. His confessed epistemological perplexity over the ground of “intensity” judgments is peculiar.
4. His refusal to wrestle with ethical issues—a refusal he shares with most “empirically oriented” political scientists—leaves them not only open and unresolved, but even unexplored. Yet, in an important sense, these issues seem to be the central ones.
Following Dahl's example, I shall try to set forth these caveats as concisely as possible, leaving aside qualifications and positive theory construction.
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References
2 Chicago, 1956.
3 Ibid., p. 11, citing The Federalist, No. 47.
4 These three quotations are from p. 23.
5 Nor will it do to make publicity a condition of “operationalism,” for the empiricist does not avoid the appeal to the “just plain given” (or “self-evident”) by demanding any intersubjective consensus. When my head aches, all the contrary evidence in the world will not convince me that it does not ache. And (a Madisonian might claim) when I see wanton torture, no calculation of votes can convince me that I am mistaken in condemning it.
6 Field, G. C., in his recent Political Theory (London, 1956), p. xviiGoogle Scholar, calls politics “a mere hotch-potch of verbal analysis, historical information, psychological generalisations, and moral judgments.”
7 A Critique of Welfare Economics (Oxford, 1950)Google Scholar. Arrow's, Kenneth J.Social Choice and Individual Values (New York and London, 1951)Google Scholar, is an attempt to achieve the logicopolitical-economic end with rigor and elegance. But in his discussion, for all its excellence, Arrow must assume (inter alia) (a) that the social decision process itself is never enjoyable; (b) that everyone always honestly represents his choice (as in vote or purchase), even though it may be to his disadvantage to do so; (c) that the decision process itself never influences anybody's values; and (d) that all men are always “rational.” (See Ch. 1, sec. 2. For some philosophical observations, see ch. 7, sec. 3.) All of these assumptions are false, yet Arrow finds it necessary to make them, so that his deductions may be interpretable. This is sensible science, reminiscent of the often outlandish assumptions upon which some physical deductions are made to rest. But it is, at best, empirically dubious and, I think, premature in the social sciences.
8 See both early (Tractatus) and late (Philosophical Investigations) Wittenstein, as well as a good deal of the work of John Wisdom, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, as well as the earlier work of Broad, Lewis, Russell, Moore, and many others back at least as far as Hume.
9 In Politics, Economics and Welfare (New York, 1953)Google Scholar, which Dahl wrote in conjunction with Charles E. Lindblom, he made it plain that he is perfectly conscious of the importance of ethical analysis to political theory. But, just as these authors approach the point there, they back off and turn the question over to the philosophers.
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