A Feature of Western ideology, particularly its American variant, is consciousness of tension between ideals and reality. One source of this tension is a propensity to seek social goals by way of adventitious motives. Education seeks marks not knowledge; business seeks profits not products; politics seeks power not the good life. To protest this lack of what Max Weber called substantive rationality, and to demand that first things be put first is labelled “idealism,” while acceptance of the immediate incentive and disregard for the final end is labelled “realism.”

Thus in political science the name “realistic” has been largely applied to that tradition which concentrates on power relations and assumes that its subjects behave as “political men,” that is, that they strive to maximize power. The “realist” assumes that all men in politics share the same drive. So deeply ingrained is this identification of politics and power that it appears even in the unconscious where the state is a father symbol. It appears also in everyday idioms where to be in the government is “to be in power” and to go into politics means not to pave streets but to enter a game of hierarchical advancement. It appears also in scholarly thought. Unlike Aristotle, who defined the polis as that association formed for the highest good and which comprehends the rest, most modern scholars find in a monopoly of coercion the distinctive attribute of the state.

Back in 1927 Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote a little book entitled The Standardization of Error. In this essay he shows first of all that errors which fill social needs become standardized and, he suggests, it might be construed as antisocial to try to destroy them by raising points of fact. To this end, there is an advantage to knowledge by definition in contrast to knowledge by observation. This, as the writer points out, gives to arithmetic its finality. Two and two is by definition four. In the social sciences also, we have many ‘facts’ that are so by definition and so become immutable.