Political Science

Political Science. Like other social scientists, American political scientists have long questioned whether their field of study constitutes, or ought to constitute, a coherent discipline. The result has been a vibrant field, but one whose whole is less than the sum of its parts. Though lively and productive, it lacks even a wavering consensus about its proper methodology, theory, or subject matter. What is called “political science” in America is, in fact, an amalgam of philosophy, history, sociology, economics, law, psychology, systems theory, institutional analysis, quantitative analysis, and a dozen other perspectives, all with competing presuppositions and clashing raisons d’être.

The problem with defining political science begins with the term itself. In what sense can the study of politics be called a science? The discipline's lineage extends back to Aristotle's Politics which embedded a rich account of political life in a more general “scientific” perspective on the natural and human worlds. Yet Aristotle did not mean “science” in the modern sense, nor did he envision the study of politics as something independent of what one might call “moral philosophy.” Rejecting Aristotle's approach, the founders of modern political science sought to make the field more “scientific” precisely by distancing it from moral philosophy, focusing instead on the value‐neutral, quantitative study of human behavior. David Easton's 1953 definition of politics—“the behaviors or set of interactions through which authoritative allocations (or binding decisions) are made and implemented for a society”—sums up this view. Such behaviorist, realist, or structuralist‐fuctionalist approaches largely dominated much of twentieth century American political science—though outlines emerged as early as the 1780s, in James Madison's Federalist number 10.

Challenging this approach, conservative traditionalists and admirers of the German refugee scholars Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Hannah Arendt continued to insist that the study of politics is a fundamentally philosophical and moral undertaking. Marxist, feminist, socialist, and other “engaged” scholars meanwhile rejected the goal of scholarly detachment and value‐neutrality, espousing a political science openly committed to political goals. Both approaches were amply represented in the discipline at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, the tension between engagement and detachment lies at the very heart of political science and is unlikely ever to be finally resolved.

Views of political science's proper subject matter have shifted as well. American founders of the discipline, such as Columbia University's John W. Burgess (1844–1931), following their German mentors, focused on the state and other governmental institutions—a natural enough preoccupation for academics who had experienced the breakdown of the American nation‐state in the Civil War. But subsequent generations changed and expanded this focus. Scholars such as Charles A. Beard, Arthur Bentley, E. Pendleton Herring, V.O. Key Jr., and David Truman cast aside the legalism and formalism of Burgess's generation, substituting more pragmatic and experimental approaches to American politics, emphasizing extraconstitutional, extralegal, and extragovernmental groups. Writers such as Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, and Charles Merriam explored the influence of psychology, particularly mass psychology, upon modern politics.

Post–World War II social scientists, epitomized by Talcott Parsons, exuded confidence in the application of science to human affairs, yet they were leery of the notion that politics ought to involve public arguments over fundamental values, believing that fanaticism bred by political ideology had in part caused the war. Therefore they sought to manage social conflict through value‐neutral doctrines of functionalism and pluralism, pitting faction against faction in the neo‐Madisonian fashion to produce a social equilibrium. Their mantle continued to be carried in the late twentieth century by the advocates of “rational choice” theory. New Left scholars of the 1960s vehemently rejected this value‐neutrality as both an apology and a prop for the status quo; they sought instead to reinfuse political science with moral purpose. After the 1960s, the study of elections and political institutions had to compete with sympathetic interest in social movements, particularly those of minorities or “subaltern” groups, and in the nongovernmental institutions of “civil society.”

Noteworthy in this pattern was the steady retreat from the consideration of the “political” per se. Instead, twentieth‐century American political science, particularly after the postwar “behavioral revolution,” increasingly reduced politics to the social, the economic, the psychological, or the cultural. Arendt warned against this process, particularly the tendency to conflate the “social” and the “political.” Arendt's observations were perhaps borne out by the perceived erosion of the public realm in late twentieth‐century America. That problem could not be addressed without reviving an older tradition of reflection on politics, as a distinctive form of human activity involving public deliberation by citizens in public spaces. Try as it may, political science appears unable to escape its normative dimension, for that dimension is implicit in the very concept of politics.
See also Federalist Papers; Political Parties; Sixties, The; Social Science.

Bibliography

John W. Burgess , The Foundations of Political Science, 1933.
Leo Strauss , Natural Right and History, 1950.
Bernard Crick , The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions, 1953.
Albert Somit and and Joseph Tanenhaus , The Development of American Politic Science: From Burgess to Behavioralism, 1982.
James Ceaser , Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 1990.
Dorothy Ross , The Origins of American Social Science, 1992.

Wilfred M. McClay