IIVG Papers Veröffentlichungsreihe Des Internationalen Instituts Für

IIVG Papers Veröffentlichungsreihe Des Internationalen Instituts Für

IIVG Papers Veröffentlichungsreihe des Internationalen Instituts für Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung Wissenschaftszentruro Berlin PV/78-2 MAJOR CHANGES IN POLITICAL SCIENCE, 1952 - 1977 by Karl W. Deutsch Harvard University and Science Center Berlin Publication series of the International Institute for Comparative Social Research WissenschaftsZentrum Berlin A version of this paper was presented on October 20, 1977 at the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the International Social Science Council in Paris. I would like to thank Wayne Koonce for his valuable assistance in compiling the refer ences. Major Changes in Political Science, 1952-1977 1. Five Traditional Foci of Political Inquiry 1.1 Justice 1.2 Power 1.3 Legitimacy and Stability 1.4 Institutions and Procedures 1.5 Large-Scale Trends 2. Four New Centers of Attention: Cognition, Policy Research, System Performance, and the Interplay between Innovative System Transformation and Identity 2.1 Cognition 2.1.1 Hermeneutics 2.1.2 Critical Cognition of Reality 2.1.3 The Impact of Psychology, Psychiatry and Anthropolog 2.1.4 Logical and Empirical Approaches 2.1.4.1 Uses of Symbolic Logic 2.1.4.2 Empirical Evidence 2.1.4.3 The Behavioral Approach 2.1.5 Probabilistic and Mathematical Model Building 2.2 Policy Research 2.3 System Characteristics: Coherence, Governability, Legitimacy and Governing Capacity 2.3.1 Governmental Capabilities and Performance 2.3.2 Theory of Democracy 2.4 Innovation, Self-Transformation and Identity 3. Changes in Regard to Methods 3.1 Sampling and Survey Research 3.2 Content Analysis 3.3 Aggregate Data and Computer Analysis 4. Conclusions 4.1 New Foci of Interest 4.2 A New Normativism 4.3 A Large Expansion of Cognitive Tasks 4.4 A Challenge of Undercapacity and Overload 1 During the last quarter century, political science has grown a great deal, as have most of the social sciences. It has grown in its numbers of university chairs and- - professional personnel, full-time students and courses of study, learned journals and scholarly books, case studies and comparisons within and across nations. Its subject matter has increased. There are about three times as many legally sovereign states in the wold, and in most of them governments are trying to regulate and govern much larger sections of the lives of their inhabitants. There have been many changes of public policies, of governments, of political regimes, and in several countries of the entire social order. The overview that follows will be. tentative and in­ complete. It will be richer in references to American research and to a lesser extent to research in Germany, Britain, France and Scandanavia. Even though it is true that a large number of the world’s active political scientists are working in these countries, it seems almost certain that this account underrepresents the amount of research done in Japan, the Mediterranean countries, in the developing countries of the Third World of Latin America, Asia and Africa, and in the countries governed by regimes representing the various tendencies of contemporary Marxism and communism. It is to be hoped that in time a more complete and balanced account of the last twenty five years can be put together from the work of political scientists from these various parts of the world. What have we learned form this large expansion of our tasks and resources? Or at least, to what extent and in what directions have our preoccupations changed? The first answers to these questions may best be sought in the substance of our concerns, that is, in the main focus and key problems of our professional concerns. In 2 the work of actual political analysts, several of these concerns of course, will tend to overlap. In what follows, I can list each scholar only provisionally under that one of his several concerns which appears to me the strongest. 1. Five Traditional Foci of Political Enquiry 1.1 Justice. From the days of Solon, Plato and Aristotle through the times of St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and to the present-day concerns of John Rawls,political thinkers have tended to make rational justice the main target of their search. 1) By this they meant either distributive justice, that is giving to each person his or her due, or else what we may call "functional justice," that is allocating to each member of society whatever would be conducive to some commonly accepted overriding goal. What was to be a person's "due" might, of course, change from thinker to thinker and age to age - from the Aristotle's justification of inequality between "natural-born" freeman and "natural-born" slaves to the assertions of equal natural rights by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. Overriding goals proved no less changeable. For Plato's Republic, the goal was stability and the support of philosophic studies. For Rousseau, it was obedience to the enlightened general will in response to "the logic of things" - la logique des choses; for Lenin it was the pursuit of the revolutionary transformation of society in accordance with the way in which he had understood and developed the doctrines of Karl Marx. Despite the difference of these notions of justice, they were all intended to be rational. They were rational in a formal sense, in that the arguments by which they were proposed were meant to be retraceable, step by step, by every educated and capable reader, who thus should be able to check them for their logic and consistency. And they 3 were to be also substantively rational, in the sense that they were supposed to work when applied in practice under the conditions of time and place which their authors ob­ served or else imagined. 1.2 Power. Though justice has continued as a signifi­ cant concern of political science, it yielded pride of place to the concerns for power and interest, particularly from the 16th century onward, from Nicold:Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Alexander Hamilton to Frederick Schuman, Hans Morgenthau, Klaus Knorr, Hermann Kahn, Henry Kissinger, Bernard de Jouvenel, and Gerhart Ritter. These concerns 2) have played an important part in political thought. Power, more precisely defined as the weight of power, is the capacity of an actor, to shift the probability of outcomes in a predictable direction. Traditionally it has been assumed that this direction is predictable by the actor himself, and that it will coincide with what he conceives to be his interest, that is, some outcome he prefers. "Interest" usually means both a subjective concentration of attention and an objective probability of reward or value gain, - for the same actor. The two, attention and reward, are held to coincide normally by many power theorists, although they have often failed to coincide - the supposed "interests" often have turned out to be erroneous - from the days of Machiavelli to the rulers who started World War II. 3) 1.3 Legitimacy and Stability. The stability of a potential system means the probability that, after having been disturbed in some relevant characteristiöS- it will soon return to its state before the disturbance. Legitimacy means that its predominant values have been psychologically internalised by its citizens, and that they can be pursued without intolerable damage to other major values held by them. 4 A third traditional concern of political scientists has been with the legitimacy and stability of states and govern­ ments. Bodin's notion of France as a community of families pointed in this direction, and so did Edmund Burke's ' conservatism and, with a different approach, Friedrich Meineke's treatment of the "Reasons of State". 4) After 1952, some of the work of Seymour Martin Lipset and of Samuel P. Huntington continued and deepened this concern for the legitimacy and stability of governments and political regimes, and for the social conditions favoring these characteristics. 1.4 Institutions and Procedures. Related to this general interest in questions of political legitimacy and stability is the traditional interest of political scientists in the descriptive, historical and analytical study of particular institutions and procedures. From Edmund Burke, James Madison, John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson to the sophisticated reformulations of institutional approaches by Arnold Brecht, Carl J. Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington. 6) 1.5 Large-Scale Trends. A fifth traditional interest of political philosophy and political science has been the identification of large-scale trends in history and social development and the alignment of political action in accordance with them. History, in this view, has a re­ cognizable direction, and in the long run politics will have to move along with it. Forerunners of this tradition include Vico, Lessing, and Condorcet. Explicit formulations were developed by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung; All these writers believe that they have foreseen at least a part of mankind's future and that they know at least some of the political steps that are to lead to it. ' Other writers take their trends less from history than from what they believe to be biology - and what in fact turns out to be abstracted versions of much of nineteenth 5 century market competition, imperial power politics and arguments in favor of the ruthless exploitation of the weak and poor. Thus Darwin’s work was distorted into "Social Darwinism", and the pitiless nineteenth century tradition stretches from the competition of individuals and families in the thought of Herbert Spencer to the supposed competi­ tion of peoples and races in the murderous ideas and action 8) of Hitler and Mussolini. More complex and sophisticated images of historic trends, based on culture rather than on simplified biology, were developed in the first half of the twentieth century by Vilfredo Pareto, Oswald Spengler, and in a far richer and 9) more humane mood by Max Weber and Arnold Toynbee.

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