POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
CHAPTER : 1
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER : 1
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
To
PHILOSOPHIZE is natural to man. All humans of whom we know something, whether
primitive or technically advanced, try to spell out the meaning of their lives,
and look within themselves and to the farthest stars for a satisfying Word. The
frequent failure of such speculation in the past should not cause us to shun
its practice now nor even to dismiss its particular historical forms. Without
philosophy man would be a mere vocal beast.
However,
philosophy has many parts, not all of which are germane to our interests here.
There are schools of ethical philosophy. There are philosophies of scientific
method. There are philosophies that argue different views about other
philosophies. In every work there is philosophy behind the organizing of
materials, the stating of facts, and the evaluating of theories. Political
philosophy has all of these in its nature, but confines itself mostly to that
part of life which is political, or directly connected with politics. It seeks
laws of political behavior and government. It presents man with alternative
visions of the good life in the good community. It may also advocate its own
vision. It also criticizes the methods by which political scientists seek
truths, and proposes better methods of thought and study.
Not only the
present chapter, but the whole of this book, then, deals with political
philosophy. The peculiar trait of this chapter is its concern with the most
fundamental notions of politics and where they began. "Where they
began" means, in the language of political science, "the history of
political ideas." Often the phrase "political philosophy" is
used only in an historical sense, which, to our view, is incorrect and
regrettable. "Political philosophy" to us is broader and more
important than the history of political ideas. The latter helps political
science in several ways, but it remains an instrument of political science, not
the whole nor nearly the whole of political science.
If we must
know the political scientists of the past, we do so with several purposes in
mind besides satisfying our curiosity and quoting authoritative support of our
views. We know them in order to understand how ideas are born and grow, for, as
with human development, some significant elements in an idea can only be
discerned as they occur in the process of growth. We study older expressions of
political science, too, because in some cases they remain the most correct and
sharp expressions of political truths, try as we may to excel them.
For these
reasons, this study of political science may be initiated by tracing the
origins of the basic concepts of political philosophy. Later on, the same ideas
will come in for further definition and development.
By a basic
idea in political science is meant a concept or vision of something important
and universal in the political behavior of men. To state it positively, it is a
mental tool that allows man to understand and control the social universe of
politics. To put it negatively, it is an idea without which our understanding
and control of a host of human relations would suffer.
Behind each
basic idea is usually discoverable a man or group of men who developed it and
contributed it to the body of political philosophy. Naturally, there is no
fixed number of such ideas, yet students are in some agreement on which are the
more important ones. Scholars usually agree also in identifying the early
creative exponents of the ideas.
There need be
no further delay in listing the ideas, and discussing them in turn. Twenty-eight
in number, they are presented as they appeared forcefully on the stage of
history.
1. Authority (rewards and punishment)
2. The World as Mathematical Order (A quantitative approach)
3. Man as. the Measure
4. The Political Community (including nationalism)
5. The Division of Labor and Hierarchy
6. Democracy and the Social Compact
7. Constitutionalism
8. Empirical Method in Political Study
9. Pleasure-Pain and Politics 10. A World Order: Fraternity and Law
11. Existential Political Activism
12. Introspective Method
13. Theory of World History
14. Systematic Ethical-Political Theory
15. Representative Government (including pluralism)
16. Value-Free Political Science
17. Power Politics
18. Liberty and the Liberal State (including "individualism")
19. The New Science
20. Rationalistic Analysis of Law
21. Applied Social Science
22. Economic Determinism
23. Sociology of Class
24. Models of Society ("culture")
25. The Elite
26. Communications
27. Operational Inquiry
28. Unconscious Factors in Political Behavior
Man did not
create the world; it was created by some higher intelligence. So it has
appeared to mankind, and, to reinforce the thought, he has had the personal
experience of being created within a family. Therefore his mind has dwelt heavily
upon authority. Authority is legitimate power. Authority it is that controls
and comforts man. Its attention to him-personified in the gods that are said to
create the world for him-seems to deserve his worship. Authority is bifurcated
from the beginning-it is the original source of rewards and punishment, the
concern equally of the witch doctor, the priest, and the psychologist. Without
authority, the world tends to appear disorderly, ruleless, impersonal, and
frightening.
Here is a
concept man must deal with. He must merge it into his behavior. He must try to
understand it. For he cannot in his nature exempt himself from its influence.
Such is the testimony of a mountain of anthropological evidence.
Such also is
indicated by the revelations contained in the stories of the Bible. There men
come to grips with the authority of God and strive to make from it a scheme of
good and evil, of behaviors that are to be rewarded by God and society and of
those that are to be punished.
It is the dawn
of mankind, and already present is the immensely important concept of political
science-the ordering of the world by a great power possessed of ethical
justification. In a manner that is both astonishing and significant, the idea
of authority descends in recognizable form into the most modern and complex
laboratories of human science, furnishing them with problems eternally old and
perennially fresh: What is the psychological nature of authority? How do men
come to possess it? How are they deprived of it? How are their claims to
authority made legitimate? How does society organize and distribute authority?
What are the consequences of the universal presence of the authority problem in
political affairs?
G. B. Vico,
writing his New Science in eighteenth-century Italy, said that we move
from magic, through religion, to science. Actually the path is not nearly so
certain, and it is more a current than a path. That is, the witch doctor is not
nearly so unscientific and stupid as he is said to be. His advice has been shown
by anthropological studies to resemble the scientific counsel of psychiatry in
some analogous cases, and his masks and other trappings have a lesser but
nonetheless distinct parallel in the scientific trappings of modern healers. If
the Bible and the religion that succeeded it to the time of Vico are
considered, there too evidences of logical empiricism are abundant. The authors
of the Bible knew man in many ways. As scientists of man, they were certainly
as far advanced, say, as the chemists were as scientists of nature when
Lavoisier began to order the elements in the eighteenth century.
Besides, we
need not refer only to the Bible or to prehistory and non-Western history.
Plato (427-347 B.C.) and other Greeks were already precisely concerned with the
problem of authority. Plato created, for instance, a famous "myth of the
caves." In it man was shown to revere images, not reality. Those who could
know reality, the philosophers, should have authority over the others and, to
substantiate their rule, that is, to legitimize and enhance their power, should
let the mass of people understand that society is formed of men of gold,
silver, and brass; the men of gold are the philosopher kings. Thus Plato, in a
manner absolutely modern, tackled the problem of how to set up, in a
functioning,'rational society, a respect and regard for the authorities.
Vico was
statistically correct, but he vastly simplified history. The ancient has more
of the new science than is recognized. And ancient animism and religion
continue with their own functions and validity in the currents of today.
In connection
with authority, it is well to mention one of its descendents, sovereignty, this
being, according to its chief inventor, Bodin (1530-1596), the unlimited power
of the state to make laws. It is "perpetual, indivisible, and
complete." It is, he claims, the essential characteristic of the state,
placing it above all other forms of organization, spiritual ortemporal. In
modern language, we say that sovereignty is the belief that the state
has the power to make the ultimate decisions in human relations, not
necessarily the fact, or a virtue, of state authority.
The ancient
world was equally modern when it produced a second important concept, the quantitative
interpretation of the universe. Modern science, it is recognized, is
emphatically mathematical and quantitative in its view of the world. The
science of man-psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and truly
there are no exceptions-is similarly attempting to describe its world in a
series of compact statements that facilitate understanding and control.
Pythagoras,
too, at an early stage of Greek philosophy sought to unite speculation and
discoveries about the universe, about music, and about man and public affairs
into a single whole by means of mathematics. The conception, startling in his
day and for 2500 years to come, gave to the Pythagorean movement a semidivine
and mysterious character. It was a cult that played games and practical tricks,
somewhat like balloon and rocket societies a few years ago, because it could
not possibly carry out and develop the enormity of its basic ideas. Today we
begin to appreciate that Pythagoras (572497 B.C.) conceived of a universal set
of mathematical formulas which could tell the truth about man, the earth, the
stars, and the gods. He might be called the first inventor of quantitative
method in political science. We should be much richer if we might have had more
than fragments of Pythagorean theories and writings on political subjects. But
perhaps they were lost in such disasters as occurred when the early
Pythagoreans, who had commanded the politics of Croton, were overthrown and
destroyed by a rival faction. Political science, even then, was not an
infallible guide to political success.
The burdens of
ancient doctrines of authority sat upon restless shoulders, as the Greek cities
became busy and cosmopolitan. The abstractions of Pythagoreans seemed little
connected with the details of existence, especially since they were premised on
there being absolute measures of existence. A new philosophy of
relativism was called forth out of the pain and the inexplicability of older
doctrines, and it emerged from its natural soil, the wide-open, individualistic
Greek cities. "Man is the measure of all things," declared
Protagoras, the Sophist, and many a colleague said amen. Protagoras (481-411
B.C.) was a leading figure in a movement that carried the youth into successful
intellectual revolt against the older Greece. Why concede, save for expedience,
that we must go beyond the study of customs and behavior for an explanation and
control of mankind? The rules man lives by are clearly discernible in his
actions. The relativity of his rules are discoverable by a comparison of cities
and culture; Athenians behave one way, Spartans another; Greeks one way,
Egyptians another.
The Sophists
gave political science the greatly useful concepts of " cultural
relativism," of mundane rather than transcendental explanation of human
behavior, and of the applied science of politics, that is,
"manipulative" political science. Specialized in rhetoric and moral
philosophy, Protagoras would charge a student over $1,000 in tuition for a
course of study under him.
Of Protagoras
and the other Sophists, Professor Giorgio Santillana has this to say:
All that we call progressive, pragmatic, or
social-minded education, all that calls itself the constructive attitude, or
the positivistic theory of science as economy of thought, or the empirical
approach to a growing world, or education for life, or adjustment to a mature
outlook, or sociological anthropology or anthropological sociology and such
like double-ended catchwords-all are Sophistic?
We are still
with the Greeks, even if slightly later, and with Plato and Aristotle
particularly, as a third idea is expressed. We refer now to the concept of the
political community, whose descendents in social science are numerous-among
them the group, the state, patriotism, nationalism, communications, social
cohesion, collective psychology, and public opinion.
However it may
reflect upon the limits of human creativity, the fact remains that for two
thousand years political philosophers have gone back to Plato (427-347 B.C.)
and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) for inspiration and ideals. The two together
managed to cover most human problems, and they did the job well. More important
for later times, they did it in different ways. They had, we might say, two
different world views. Each saw society and nature differently. In consequence
of and in association with their different world views, they used different
methods of arriving at truth. Their similarities were great, enough so that
John Dewey, for example, discussing their methods and viewpoints in the
twentieth century, could say that there was a Greek way of looking at the
universe. On the other hand, the emphases brought about by their viewpoints and
methods were different enough to divide many other philosophers into Flatonists
and Aristotelians in their views both of nature and society.
Both differed
from their chief Sophist predecessors in regarding virtue as a universally
valid standard that could be known by the intellect. Both refused to
distinguish politics from ethics; they would claim that a lack of virtue was a
political handicap. Man is rational in the sense that he can really know the
world through his reason and produce therein the conditions that lead to
happiness. They were not pessimistic about the social sciences as the later Epicureans
and Stoics were, but rather shared the sentiments of Sophocles, who exclaimed
in his Antigone: "Against everything that confronts him, man
invents some resource-against death alone he has no recourse."
Now the state
was really a community so far as its ends were concerned. It was a political
order, a natural system linking all citizens together. The good state gave to
each his own, in Plato's words. No one was to be a "busybody," but
all were to apply their talents where they would do the most good. Men were not
self-sufficient without the community, said Aristotle, else they would be
either gods or beasts. To both Plato and Aristotle, the state was the means of
realizing the individual good of every member. They made relatively little use
of our distinction between "private" things and "public"
ones.
What the
Greeks did with the idea of community was to pull out of the "collective
unconscious," and to clarify, those bonds which knit men together and permitted
them to act in concert, as a society. Once exposed to light, these community
ties could be examined and their functions analysed. Allowances might thereupon
be made for them in any theories of how men behave as they do and of how they
might change their behavior. Plato's Republic then became a search for
"the good community," utopia; in Aristotle's famous words, that mark
the beginning of political science, of sociology, and of most general and
social theory, "Man is a political animal." He exists in and by
society. His individuality is social individuality. His psychology becomes
social psychology.
Before moving
to the next great idea, it may be well to pause on a politically energetic
descendent of the idea of community, nationalism. "Nationalism"
is one of the commonest words in the vocabulary of political science and
politics, but it is of modern origin. Medieval Europeans knew of different
peoples, of course. The European universities were sometimes organized
according to "nations," that is, schools of different nationalities.
The public feeling of nationalism, that strong emotion of patriotism for a
large area of land, its culture, and its people, grew slowly, with strong
forward movements wherever a king consolidated his rule over the nobility and
made a true realm, wherever the unifying force of the Catholic Papacy was
weakened, and wherever the populace took an active part in governing. Thus
English nationalism surged forward when the king's law was made enforceable
throughout England following the Norman conquest of 1066. Central European
nationalism became stronger when Martin Luther led a movement out of the
Catholic Church, and expressed the doctrine, a people's religion is that of its
rulers (cuius regio, eius religio). And the French Revolution inspired
the general population with allegiance to the nation, not to a ruling monarch
or nobility or church.
The resulting
phenomenon, nationalism, became an active ingredient in political discussions
and writing. It was, of course, a descendent of the notion of the political
community of former times, but tied to a particular kind of community, the
nation-state.
The
differences among men are not entirely subdued in the political community. As
the American political scientist James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers,
2200 years after Plato:
The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the
rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a
uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object
of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of
acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property
immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and
views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into
different interests and parties .
Plato early
perceived this complexity upon which the political community was based. His
organic theory of the psychological division of labor is exceedingly important
for the history of the social sciences. He described it and planned controls
for it in his Republic. The ideal state would be based clearly on class
lines. As the soul has three component partsthe intellectual, the passionate,
and the appetitive-so society is to be composed of three major classes,
containing in each case the members of society who have a preponderance of one
of the three parts of the soul. Society is the individual writ large. The task
of the state is to relegate to each person responsibility for those affairs
that he can competently undertake. Individual happiness consists of each person
performing his own functions well. The officers who delegate
responsibilities are chosen by merit, with freedom of opportunity for all.
Individuals
are relegated to their lot in life as they evidence capacity for one rather
than the other job. This process of elimination results in having
philosopher-kings at the top, who, being educated to justice, are incapable of
being unjust. The vast majority of individuals in the trades and on the farms
would hold property, but the possessions of the guardian class and the ruling
class would be held in common to prevent an individual taking his own interest
too seriously at the expense of the public good. There is no limit to the
regulation of life, customs, and property within the state save the limits of
justice itself. Manners, schools, religion, the arts-all must conform to public
policy. The ideal state is the veritable incarnation of justice.
The idea of
hierarchy is developed in order to unite a people split up by the functional
specialization of the division of labor. It is also fabricated to place more
important and superior values above less important and inferior ones. It refers
in general to the system of authority, responsibility, and accountability in
society, the "chain of command." A political science without the
notion of hierarchy is inconceivable and practically every scholar ever since
has had to concern himself with the problems engendered by the idea. That human
groups are stratified according to higher and lesser degrees of influence and
possession is both an outstanding fact and also a source of continuous
proposals for social reforms.
The Greeks
discovered democracy, if they did not invent it. It came to their keen eyes
that a certain kind of government had swept away many a tyranny in their cities
in Asia, the Greek peninsula, and Italy. The government was a people's
government, and occurred frequently and with moderate success, so that it was
credited with being a basic form, along with tyranny (rule by the one), and
aristocracy (rule by the few).
There was many
a struggle in the Roman republic over the degree to which the common people
might influence the government and hold office, but almost no theory of
politics grew out of the class and factional debates. Nor did the next thousand
years produce any democratic theory of consequence.
Finally, in
the late Middle Ages, there appeared Marsiglio di Padova (1270-1342), a man who
came within a stone's throw of accomplishing a fantastic scheme for the
coordination and democratizing of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic
Church. In his Defensor Pacis (Defender of the Peace) a radical
democratic theory was boldly expressed. The majority idea is stirring in his
mind although it does not have the numerical quality of the majority principle
today. But he definitely stipulated responsibility of the rulers, both temporal
and spiritual, to the people, and consigned active power to the mass of men. He
recommended government by means of elected councils in church and state.
In Marsiglio
are the beginnings of a great positivist reconstruction of law. For he says
that if enforceability is not present, there is no law. That which people may
wish were law, and what many called "the natural law," has no
validity as law except when enforced. The real law, he declared, comes from
"the will of the people," for only such consent permits law to be
enforced. (We notice how he exaggerates to make his point, thus falling into
his own trap of unrealism.) The people by active consent, especially by
elections, concedes powers to the government and may withdraw it. The people is
the legislator, the sovereign, the state. Forms of government - whether
monarchic or republican or theocratic - are immaterial, if the rule is by the
citizenry.
Following
these preliminary analyses, the idea of democracy as rule by the many was given
little critical development until the seventeenth century Leveller movement in
England. The Levellers, a radical soldier's movement in the Republican army of
Cromwell, proposed a number of devices for achieving democracy through
representative government. More important than the Levellers, because his
investigations were systematic, was John Locke (1632-1704). Locke exalted the
Parliament, which he regarded as the repository of the rights of liberty and
property that the people had assigned to the state for convenience of
management. His arguments were such as the victors of the Glorious
"Whig" Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776, and the
French Revolution of 1789 could claim as their own. His words were on the lips
of all but the most conservative and radical at the time of the American revolt
against England and in the Constitutional Period that followed.
We can
recognize them at first glance. Men are reasonable and social creatures. They
create society for their own good to avoid certain inconveniences of living in
a state of nature. This is the idea of the social compact, which Plato alluded
to long before, and which came into strong play in the seventeenth century
again. People mix their time and sweat to produce property, which becomes
almost part of their very personality. They elect representatives by a majority
vote to carry out their will. The representatives may not violate the majority
will or the social contract that lies beneath the expressed will of the
community. If such violations do occur and are beyond reasonable sufferance,
the people have the right to appeal to God, revolt, and establish a lawful
government, which will observe the constitution.
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-1778), following Locke by half a century, went beyond him in
several important ways. The disorders of a state of nature require the
formation of a community of citizens to which each person gives up his natural
rights. He is then stronger and more free in the group than as an isolated
individual living in a state of nature. The community is the state. Government
is all-powerful but not specialized into certain organs. Rather the
"general will" of the whole community acts directly to legislate and
regulate. The minority must always succumb to the will of the whole community,
which for practical purposes may be reduced to the majority. Life, liberty, and
property are at the beck and call of the general will. A kind of primitive
democracy, reminiscent of the Leveller ideas, is proposed. He is more explicit
than Locke in giving all power to the majority. The result of Rousseau's
democracy in later times was mixed: although his views numbered many adherents
of the Jeffersonian type, they also enlisted many totalitarians who, by making
identical the will of the community and the will of the state, could justify
governmental transgressions of individual liberties in the name of the
"general will" and the "true freedom" of the person.
Another
important invention of Plato and Aristotle was the idea of constitutionalism,
which, in their terms, relates not only to democracy but to all
"good" forms of government. This idea, as we shall show later on, is
connected closely to the idea of "rule of law," and "government
by laws, not men." Here was an abstract idea, buried in a welter of
political practices so that it was not at all apparent to the naked eye. Yet
Aristotle discovered its elements and fashioned it into a potent instrument of
thought and plan. His discovery was that from the mass of human institutions
there can be abstracted something of a structure, a pattern of rules and
conduct, which amounted to constitutions of the city-states. Men lived by these
rules; the rules lent character to the state; and the rules guided and educated
the men in turn. Men would know what to expect from the state; justice would be
defined for them.
Reliance upon
the gathering and analysis of facts in political study is nowhere better
exemplified in ancient thought than in Aristotle's use of many different
constitutions as evidence for his conclusions in the Politics. He cites widely
varying customs, laws, and views in arguing his points. He made, for instance,
a penetrating analysis of revolutions, classifying them by causes. He went on
then to prescribe their preventives-observance of the laws by rulers,
mindfulness of the general interest, a balanced government in which the several
social classes are represented, and limited tenure of office. He also wrote a
work on Rhetoric that is still useful in the study of opinion and
propaganda. Certainly, in this work, he was influenced by the Sophists, those
masters of persuasion, and in general his empiricism is probably derived from
the Sophist turn of mind towards "man as the measure." Still, in
Aristotle the new powerful weapon of systematic, logical, empirical method in
political science is made available for the first time. It is surprising to
learn that it is hardly practiced again until the sixteenth century brings the
Renaissance writers, and especially Machiavelli, upon the social scientific
scene.
Whereas one
side of Greek political philosophy preoccupied itself with the serious business
of governing, another disliked what it saw in the political process and
preferred to stand apart from it. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) might be said to have
made civic apathy a virtue. His logic was appealing: man is a creature whose
life is dictated by the desire to enjoy pleasure and avoid pain. Politics is
almost always a troublesome pursuit. Ergo, politics is to be shunned by the
wise man. The pleasure-pain principle was not to die with the end of the
Epicureans in the Roman Empire. Its descent goes down to Jeremy Bentham in the
nineteenth century, of whom more will be said below, and to modern political
psychology where it is variously experimented with in the study of political
motivations. Epicurean political attitudes may not please one, but they
certainly act as an antidote to the intoxication with politics that some people
have and presume everyone else must and should possess.
Quite in
contrast to Epicureanism stands Stoicism, its contemporary and competitor. The
Stoics, led by Zeno of Citium (335-265 B.C.), took a more sober view of man's
position in the cosmos, and, shunning the active search for pleasure, urged a
universal brotherhood of man. Tolerance, respect for the rights of others,
refusal to commit injustices, the endurance of injustices committed in
ignorance by others-these were their main attitudes.
The Stoics
were especially compatible to the Roman temperament and impressed Roman
jurisprudence with their idea of the universal empire and a law of nature
applicable to all times and manner of man. The ideas of fulfilling duty and
obligation, without joy and even without expectation of success-ideas
characterizing existentialism today-often characterized the Stoics. At the same
time, their charitable, antihedonistic, and humanistic attitudes were
remarkably similar to Christian ethics in the period after Christ.
Cicero, a
Stoic, and an apostle of republicanism previous to its collapse before
Caesarism, declared that there existed a natural law which all men and
governments must observe, and that the task of the state was to distribute
justice in accordance with the law of nature. The magistrates are under the law
and are trustees of the power of the people.
A thousand
years went by before something resembling a universal law of nations developed.
The first statement of principles of international law was, however, connected
with the old Stoic and Christian belief in a law of nature. In Bodin's terms,
the law of nature was those rational principles of justice which may be
abstracted from the infinite individual laws of men. Such a view could sponsor
the belief that states themselves ought to observe certain common principles in
their relation with one another. Grotius of Holland and Vittoria of Spain
formulated systems of international law founded partly on observed standards of
conduct which men everywhere seemed to agree to in principle.
A tendency
counter to the natural law school of international law was the "positivist
school." It divorced law from ethics and confined its consideration of
international law only to the facts of international relations. Law is
what people do, not what they preach. The positivist school originated a few
years before Grotius in the work of Alberico Gentili (1552-1608) . Gentili was
expelled from his Italian home for Protestantism and spent a long, influential
life in England, where his law of war was published in 1588.
The major
contributions of Stoicism were not exhausted. The principle of engaging in
political activity out of a sense of obligation, regardless of the pains and
failures suffered, was again a Stoic idea. It calls to mind the existentialist philosophy
of Sartre and Camus today.
Seneca the
Stoic, writing under the early Roman Empire, believed that before governments
existed, man lived in a state of nature where peace and bliss prevailed and men
followed just leaders. The problems induced by cupidity brought the necessity
for compulsion and the state. These penalties must be endured. The Emperor
Marcus Aurelius, another great Stoic, wrote his Meditations, in which he
endeavored to reconcile the arduous and depressing duties of statecraft with the
reasonable humanitarianism of his philosophy.
Meanwhile
Jesus Christ had lived and taught and been executed for alleged agitation and
sedition. His teachings were remarkably similar to those of the Stoics.
Equality, humility, service to God were especially emphasized. Rulers and ruled
were to be judged by the same moral canons. The dignity of men and women,
regardless of their station in life and even of their personal record, was to
be respected. Revolt against the state was not encouraged, for, in a sense, the
state with its terrors was a punishment of man for his original fall from grace
that the Bible had described. Furthermore, cultivating the virtues of the soul
was deemed to be preferable to a preoccupation with worldly success. We note
here the emphatic split, under the Roman Empire, between the
"private" and "public" spheres of life, so little
recognized by the ancient Greeks and republican Romans.
* * *
Spread everywhere
by Paul, Peter, and other apostles and disciples, the Christian gospel became
an influential force in the empire. All persecution failed to halt its
development until finally the emperor Constantine embraced Christianity. By
this time barbarian encroachments and domestic disorganization had so weakened
the empire that the Church became actually better organized than the state.
Especially in the Western Empire, the deterioration of the pax romana left
principally the Church to hold together some semblance of unity in the great
society. The proud imperium the vast powers of the Roman emperors, fell
to the Church.
In this chaos
of crumbling empire, Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wrote his Confessions. An
early manhood of recklessness and dissipation was followed by conversion to
Christianity and high rank as a Bishop of the Church. Augustine carried out
fully the injunction of Socrates to "Know thyself." In the first
highly revealing autobiography of history, he plumbed the depths to which man
can descend and the heights to which he may rise. Deeply influenced by Plato's
way of thought, he looked far into his own soul for knowledge and consolation.
His passionate
individualism and search for self-insight were emulated by the Protestant
reformers of the sixteenth century.
I will now call to mind my past foulness, and the
carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love
Thee, O my God . . . . To whom tell I this? not to Thee, my God; but before
Thee to mine own kind, even to that small portion of mankind as may light upon
these writings of mine. And to what purpose? that whosoever reads this, may
think out of what depths we are to cry unto Thee . . . . For these very sins,
as riper years succeed, these very sins are transferred from tutors and
masters, from nuts and balls and sparrows, to magistrates and kings, to gold
and manors and slaves, just as severer punishments displace the cane.
This may be
called the introspective method, especially where it is so effectively and
exhaustively employed. More science than we realize depends directly upon the
capacity for self-knowledge. This is particularly true where the social
sciences must be strongly psychological in character, as in the areas of
politics, public opinion, social classes, and international affairs.
Self-knowledge aids in self-control, objectivity, scholarly discipline, and
understanding much of other people's minds and action. The autobiography, the
case study, the journal and diary, and personal letters are among the most
valuable sources of political data.
Then also
Augustine's mind turned to practical affairs in The City of God. Here,
he examines the City of God and the City of Man. He leaped from introspection
onto the alps of history, propounding the first grand view of the rise and fall
of civilizations and the significance of historical tides. For similar
subsequent panoramas of history, we must wait for The Divine Comedy of
Dante (1265-1321), the Universal History of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the
Arab philosopher, G. B. Vico's New Science (1725), Oswald Spengler's Decline
of the West (1914), and Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History (1933
on).
Other
doctrines of Augustine were influential in history, if not important in the
development of political science. Too often were states without justice and
therefore only great robber-bands, he wrote; stability, respect for property
rights, and an end to plunder are needed. The state has no command over man's
soul, which belongs to God and the Heavenly City. Obedience in secular affairs
alone is owed the Earthly City, which stands as a monument to man's fall from
grace. This Augustinian division of "spiritual" and
"temporal" orders was used for centuries thereafter to justify Church
supremacy in matters of religion. Augustine's debt to Plato made medieval
Europe Platonist in philosophy, as evidenced in Scotus and Abelard, until
Aristotle was rediscovered and St. Thomas Aquinas systematized Catholic
philosophy along Aristotelian lines.
St. Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274), writing in the most creative century of the Middle Ages of
the West, covered the range of social science-psychology, economics, education,
ethics, law, and politics. His classifications of political phenomena are
exceedingly numerous and his multitude of distinctions brilliant. Although he
followed Aristotle closely, he added new doctrines to philosophy as well. In a
book addressed to princes, he declared that the object of government was the
good of the people. In another place, he defined law as an ordinance of reason
promulgated for the common good. These ideas were then of considerable force
and novelty, but they were less important than the intricate and vast structure
of ideas, facts, and moral choices of which they formed a part. Today St.
Thomas remains the greatest political philosopher for Catholic students and
various others.
Aquinas' major
contribution to political science, it appears, was his systematic
ethical-political theory. What is meant by these words? They mean that Aquinas
climaxed, perhaps for all history to the present moment, the striving of any
science towards the perfection of statement. His hierarchy of values is clear:
he makes known what are the ranking and subordinate goals of man and society.
His logic, by Aristotelian standards, is impeccable. His style is clear and
calm, without regard to the controversial ity of the matter under discussion.
With all this, two features assail the modern political scientist adversely.
His employment of Aristotelian, as opposed to modern operational and
quantitative logic, and his assuredness, which far exceeds the quality and
quantity of evidence available to him for building generalizations.
The idea of
representative government should be placed also in the European Middle Ages.
Despite the occurrence of certain representative devices in ancient times and
in other cultures, notably, government by consent of the governed and voting by
citizens for officials, additional major elements were needed for the more
complex development that has come to be the universal form of government in the
twentieth century. One of these new elements was territorial and functional
constituencies, that is, election of public officials by separate groups of
voters who lived in special areas or engaged in certain occupations. Overcoming
problems of distances was difficult in the Middle Ages; so instead of calling
all members of the group together, first the religious orders of the Church,
and then the secular authorities, began to call together delegates from various
areas to reflect the views of their groups. Such delegates came from the rural
communities, the towns, the nobility, and the clergy. The very numerous guilds
of artisans and merchants were powerful local influences but did not become
part of the larger representative governments. The latter were more
territorially than functionally representative. However, the idea of the guilds
having not only local powers but power in the central government sustained
itself as the theory of pluralism down to the present.
Once assembled
in parliament, the delegates were beset by the pressures that shaped their
function and role. Their constituencies expected obedience from them; yet the
king expected them to take his larger views. In the end they took neither
position, but became quasi-independent. Furthermore, borrowing from the theory
of medieval associations the idea of corporation, they formed a parliament that
possessed corporate integrity, that is, a single organism whose members might
act freely. Thus another important social invention of man, the corporation,
came into a new area of government, the legislature, where it remains today.
The several
stated conditions of representative government were satisfied in the thirteenth
century in Europe and England. After various ups and downs, the triumphant,
fully empowered parliament 'of the nineteenth century emerged. This story will
be dealt with later. It is important here to realize that political science had
now to deal with the complex social, psychological, and juridical relations met
within representative structures. The concepts of representation, delegation,
consent, leadership, conformity, cohesion, power, balance, autonomy, voting,
majority, and dozens of other important ideas useful in studying government and
politics probably were stimulated and refined in connection with the development
of representative government.
Representative
government apparently grew for centuries without much awareness of its nature
or importance. In England where it flourished, myriad struggles took place over
small pieces of the whole structure. The rebellious Levellers of the
seventeenth century seemed to know that a parliament might alone rule the land.
John Locke, a little later, and Edmund Burke, over a century later, and John
Stuart Mill, in the middle of the nineteenth century-the works of all three men
are benchmarks in the analysis of representative government.
We mentioned
in passing a less successful major category of political thoughts on
representative government, that of pluralism. It still merits attention in the
present discussion. Pluralism is the doctrine that the state is only one of a
number of important and equally valuable groups in society, all of which ought
to have various self-governing powers.
In its
reflection of the numerous interests of the society, the doctrine harks back to
the idea of the division of labor. The idea depends also upon the general idea
of representative government both in origin (feudalism and territorial
representation are kinds of pluralism) and in intent. In the ranks of pluralism
we find syndicalists, gild socialists, Fascist corporativists, Catholic social
theorists, and regionalists (including federalists). The syndicalists have been
mostly from the working-class movements and demanded autonomy of occupations
and industries. Instead of the centralized state, there were to be a number of
powerful, self-governing, workerdominated industrial groupings, with a weak
state or even none at all. Gild socialism, as exemplified recently in the
writings of G. D. H. Cole, was related to syndicalism. It harked back to the medieval
gilds of masters and workmen. It would have these economic interests help run
the government directly.
Mussolini,
originally somewhat of a syndicalist, abandoned his working-class socialist
viewpoint on the road to becoming dictator of Italy, but retained the idea that
autonomous associations of industrialists and workers should send their
representatives to the national parliament. This he called corporatism and
installed to a certain extent in Italy after 1937. The Catholic Church had a
long historical interest in functional, or occupational, groupings reaching
back to the gild system of the Middle Ages. Catholic social policy has urged
increasingly that healthy work conditions and good employeremployee relations
depended on some form of functional organization of society.
Finally,
federalism or geographic pluralism has had many advocates, especially in
Switzerland, Germany, the United States, and Soviet Russia. Regional
decentralization-granting large powers to smaller cultural, geographic units of
a nation-has excited much approval in recent times, especially in France. But
both federalism and regionalism have lacked recently the fires of a vital
political movement. All pluralist theory, in fact, has had to buck the tide of
nationalism, concentration of industrial controls, war, crisis, and other
centralizing forces.
* * *
Within a
century after 1400, life and thought in Italy had been radically transformed
and the effects of the Renaissance were spreading north and west. New concepts
of political science were part of the movement.
Out of the
many books that purported to tell princes how to behave, came in 1513 a daring
and startling little treatise by a Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli (1467-1527)
. What are the kinds of governments, he asked in The Prince? How may
they be conquered and held? The answers were brutally frank and gained for the
author an undeserved reputation for viciousness and immorality. Actually,
Machiavelli looked at the world, held his own preferences in check, and
declared: the chief and universal value in politics is power; getting and
holding power is the object of rulers; therefore the real, not the wished-for,
ways of doing this should be objectively related. He wrote vividly of
the historical errors of politicians. Force and cunning, as found in the lion
and the fox, were the principal instruments of power; to use them well usually
meant success; to use them not at all meant failure. Raison d'etat, the
reason of state, demanded many times that virtues be foregone. Man in politics
could not exhibit the same goodness as in private life. "A prince . . .
cannot observe all those things that are thought good in men, being often
obliged, in order to maintain the state, to act against faith, charity,
humanity, and religion." The appearance of virtue was more valuable in
politics than hidden but real virtue. This was all too bad, declared
Machiavelli, but it was the way the world functioned.
The Prince was a landmark in the history of political philosophy, comparable in
effect to the work of Plato and Aristotle, of Augustine, and of Aquinas. As we
have indicated, the scientific method was not foreign to scholarly writing
prior to Machiavelli. And every great writer knows how to deal with reality.
But Machiavelli, not without qualms and missteps, introduced the dominant idea
of all modern science, both natural and social: to know how the world works,
one's emotions have to be put aside. Moon-struck lovers cannot produce good
astronomy, and virtue-struck writers cannot describe politics. Nor can the
lovers provide instructions for space travel, nor such writers give
instructions in applied political science. This intellectual position of
Machiavelli may be called value-free political science.
Machiavelli's
leading contribution to scientific method did not end there. He is also the
formulator of power politics, again both in the pure sense and in the applied
sense. Power politics in the pure sense is the theory that all politics
can be clarified, and laws about political behavior can be stated, if a student
assumes power to be the paramount object of politicians. Then everything will
fall into place.
Thomas Hobbes
(1558-1679) enlarged the Machiavellian approach, both as to value-free science
and power politics. "All passions may be reduced to the Desire of
Power," he said in Leviathan. As Hobbes wrote on and on, much of
his work became diffuse and irrelevant, yet he sees the science of man as
science more clearly than Machiavelli or anyone else before him.
Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and
dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do,
we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time:
Because when we see how any thing comes about, upon what causes, and by what
manner; when the like causes come into our power, we see how to make it produce
the like effects.
Science
divides into natural philosophy "the Consequences from the Accidents of
Bodies Naturall," and "Politiques and Civill Philosophy, the
Consequences from the Accidents of Politique Bodies."
Most social
scientists today have accepted the value-free theory of social science. A
number of political scientists, such as Harold D. Lasswell, have focused their
theory upon the power-politics approach. "The study of Politics,"
wrote Lasswell in Politics, "is the study of influence and the
influential." No doubt, as the latter observes, the political world lends
itself to the model of power-seeking. The science of economics later came to be
brilliantly developed in a similar way, but around the concept of the gaining
of wealth. Such models simplify (and, of course, may oversimplify and exclude
other important models), but they are vastly useful to scientist and student
alike.
On the applied
side, the power-politics model is again useful because it lights up parts
of the political process otherwise rarely viewed and gives instructions that
are more effective than those commonly offered would-be politicians. Again the
danger is oversimplification and an undesirable morality, overbalanced in the
direction of an obsession with power as the only value (the same danger,
incidentally, as when business is taught as ruthless passion for profits
regardless of other values). Therefore, we say that Machiavelli made these
great contributions to the procedures of pure and applied science. But they
must be understood and restricted to their proper meanings and uses-not misunderstood
and misapplied, as often happens today and happened on occasion even in the
mind and life of their inventor.
Liberty has so
many meanings that a portion of a late chapter will be given over to it. The
concept of freedom from restraint, however, marks the end of the old order and
the beginning of modern society. That places its general climax about 1776, the
year of the American Declaration of Independence, Jeremy Bentham's Fragment
on Government, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Tom Paine's Common
Sense. It belongs alongside the idea of individualism, a word which also is
associated with the beginnings of modern democracy. If one asks why these two
words came about, the answer would be that both of them expressed a feeling
that persons did not often have in tighter societies of class and status, a
feeling that a good society was one that put no bounds upon a person. In
retrospect and objectively, it seems that "liberty" and
"individualism" existed in many societies other than the
"liberal" and "individualistic" ones of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
However that
may be, there came into being a new conception of a "liberal state"
and, in a few instances in Western Europe and America, actual attempts to bring
into being "liberal" societies. Ideas of individualism began to
appear frequently in political writings of mid-seventeenth-century England.
Equality and reason were considered more and more to be the innate attributes
of individuals. The Leveller movement in mid-seventeenth-century England,
referred to earlier as a source of democratic ideas, insisted that all men were
equal before God. It reduced all functions of government to the level of the
body of individuals. It began to talk of the "rights of man." The
Levellers failed to win over Cromwell and the Parliament, but their ideas were
exported to America and the Continent. And certainly among the
seventeenth-century inventors of "liberalism" must be listed John
Locke.
Locke was a
political consultant and a psychologist, as well as a political theorist. As
consultant, it is interesting to note, he drew up a plan for the government of
the American Carolinas that provided a feudal system pleasing to his noble
clients, if not at all like the true individualistic Locke. But, in his role as
psychologist, he asserted that individual experiences fully accounted for
individual personality and knowledge, a theory that was forcefully translatable
into individualistic politics. Locke the empiricist fathered Locke the exponent
of individual liberties. He proposed to protect such individual liberties,
furthermore, by a government that represented the express desires of elected
delegates of the people.
In 1776 came
the famous Wealth of Nations of Adam Smith. It presented a systematic
case for a severely restricted government operating with a
"let-business-alone," or "laissezfaire," policy. Economics
was to be divorced from politics and allowed to follow natural laws governing
demand and supply, production and consumption. For the best interests of
society in general, the functions of government were to be limited to the
protection of individuals from violence, to warding off injustice and
oppression among individuals and groups, and to building and maintaining a few
essential public works.
Smith's
examination of economic phenomena and recommendations for economic policy
played a large part in the limitation of the functions of the state, which
occupied so many political philosophers and economic theorists during the
nineteenth century. The utilitarian school of economics in England (Jeremy
Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, for example), Bastiat in France,
Herbert Spencer in England, William Graham Sumner in America, and many others
attacked, on principle, state intervention in economic affairs.
Thomas Paine's
Common Sense and Age of Reason were radical works of a different
sort than Smith's book. For we see in them, along with the same distrust of
government as appears in Smith, a profound faith in human nature. Man is a
reasonable being. All men are equal by birth and the laws should keep them
equal. Religion is an obstacle to progress. The government must be strictly
controlled. All should have the right to vote. So Paine sets the stage for a
sort of majoritarian democracy which reminds one strongly of the Levellers and
Rousseau. Although presenting himself almost as an anarchist in his hatred of
the state, Paine makes drastic recommendations for reform and revolution which,
to be carried out, demand a strong state. This was somewhat the predicament of
Marx at a later date when in order to carry out the vast proletarian
revolution, designed to destroy the state, Marx had to recommend a dictatorship
to do so, adding wistfully that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be a
temporary affair.
Perhaps in
connection with the liberal state a word should be said of anarchism.
Anarchists have uniformly believed that the primary condition for the
establishment of social harmony and the abolition of social injustices lay in
the abolition of the state entirely. There have been in general two types of
anarchists, the philosophical or peaceful anarchists and the revolutionary or
violent anarchists. Proudhon, Tucker, Tolstoi, and Kropotkin were cases of the
first type, Bakunin and Max Stirner of the second. Proudhon argued that private
property was ultimately a form of robbery. Tolstoi went back to early
Christianity and based his pacifism and communism of possessions on Jesus'
Sermon on the Mount. Kropotkin studied Darwinian theories of evolution; he came
to believe that cooperation, not conflict, was the chief factor in promoting
beneficial change for the species. Bakunin was the apostle of nihilism; he
called for total destruction of every form of social organization and advocated
terrorism, the destruction of the state by individual acts of violence. Stirner
called progress an illusion and declared that only the complete and violent
emancipation of the individual could achieve final and complete justice.
We have already
mentioned Jeremy Bentham as a liberal and shall meet him again as a father of
modern legal analysis. One of his most ardent disciples, John Stuart Mill
(18061873), amplified the work of the master generously. His interests were
similar-economics, logic, social reform, representative government-but his
approach was much softer and more understanding of opposing views. Little
wonder then that Mill could write a work on liberty with a depth of insight and
sympathy impossible for Bentham. He could furthermore allow debate and
discussion a more fundamental role in the discovery of truth. He was a defender
of absolute individual liberty: "The sole end for which mankind are
warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of
action of any of their number, is self-protection." Yet, he could see in
modified free enterprise and even socialism certain virtues denied to the
vision (or patience) of Bentham. Even a century later Mill's studies of liberty
and individualism indicate in a superior fashion the generally approved
consequences of a liberal regime, such as individual creativity and the
development of spontaneous and flexible character, that follow upon free
speech, free press, and free enterprise. Mill, like Bentham, also wrote extensively
on the methods of social science inquiry.
Again, as with
"representative government," the cluster of key ideas in the liberal
state have presented political science with a large budget of theories,
practices, data, and propositions. It is a truism, but a very important one,
that a science can only expand with the number of problems that it is given to
solve. To their everlasting credit, it must be said that the Greeks were as
busy developing science and method, as in the proliferation of issues and problems
of politics. For almost a thousand years, from Augustine to Aquinas, there was
almost no political analysis in Europe and little in the rest of the world.
Then for five hundred years, many more problems and doctrines were handed to
the field of political science than were dealt with by systematic knowledge and
scientific intelligence. The subsequent period, from about 1800 to the present,
has turned part way to redressing the balance. This has been the period of the
social sciences, and the liberals were their founder.
* * *
The new
science has tended towards a unity of method and substance. On the whole, it
has adopted the subjects of ancient, medieval, and early modern times as its
own. There are few new subjects in the new social sciences. Indeed, in one
large sense, there are no new major generalities, and no new major applied
forms of social relationships. Subatomic physics and microbiology, and nuclear
power and chemical control of plants and animals, are more radical departures
of subjectmatter from those of old physics and biology than any new social.
science subject from its ancestors. That is because man is naturally a social
scientist of sorts, and artificially a physicist. He has always known more in
general about men than about non-men, even when he could not control
himself or others. Now his main achievements must come in accenting the science
in social science-the method and system, as opposed to the general
content of behavior. Political science and social science have
not failed. They have just begun. And their development is obscured by the
circumstances of their new vigor. They grow in a time of great restlessness.
The great wars, revolutions, and crises of the twentieth century found their
roots not in a failure of science, but in the incapacity of modern society to
settle down to a common standard of values, beliefs, and political practices
and institutions.
A first great
idea of recent times broke into the last sacred precincts of the old society,
the courts and the law. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) can be given major credit
here. His philosophy, as we know, contained the essence of liberalism and a
great deal more as well, for he was a logician, a grand reformer, a moral
philosopher, and an economist. He owed something to Locke, but more to Hobbes,
to the English "New Radicals" such as Paine, to continental writers
such as G. B. Vico, who set out to organize a new science of man in his Scienza
Nuova (1725) , and Beccaria, the Italian social reformer (Crimes and
Punishments, 1764). He restated Adam Smith's position on behalf of free
enterprise. He sought direct democracy so far as possible in government.
Besides all
this, Bentham launched an attack against the traditional basis of English law
(the common law) and sought to substitute therefor a system of positive
legislation aimed at securing "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number" (Beccaria's phrase). His Commentaries on the "holy
book" of English and American law students, Blackstone, is one of the most
scathing critiques in English literature. He published works on logical
fallacies and on concepts as they occur in law and politics. Plunging into many
fields, wielding his scythe of pleasure-or-pain to distinguish good from bad,
Bentham was the archetype of the positive, rationalistic reformer.
As Bentham
wrote, a new kind of political sociology was rising in France. Henri
Saint-Simon (1760-1825) urged a reconstruction of society to provide a new
leadership class from among the intellectuals and engineers of the industrial
revolution. He would abolish the military, feudal, and religious leadership.
Society ought to aim directly at the moral and physical betterment of the poor.
All social resources are to be pooled in a single fund that is to be drawn upon
by producing associations. Women are to receive complete equality with men.
Saint-Simon and the cult that grew up around him were at once socialists,
radical Christians, technocrats, and social scientists. Saint-Simon's ideas
moved in many streams.
The passion of
Saint-Simon was for applied social science. Every human relation, the
Saint-Simonists believed, might be reorganized according to scientific
principles. They went so far as to take up a new positivist position-that in
science itself there could be discovered a new ethic and philosophy for
society. This high and mighty position proved, however, to be a Tower of Babel,
and the movement broke into hostile and mutually distrustful fragments. Yet no
one can deny that it imparted an important vision of a society where the
scientific approach in human affairs might bring extensive benefits.
The managerial
social science of Saint-Simon became the workers' socialism of Marx and Engels.
Several basic ideas characterized the thought of Karl Marx (1818-1883) , the
leading member of the famous pair. Two of them can be regarded as among the
great ideas of political science, and indeed of social science in general. One
was economic determinism, the other the sociology of class. There had been
predecessors of Marx in regard to both; the Greeks, of course, the Arab
philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) on economic determinism, Adolphe de
Cassagnac (1806-1880) on social class.
Marx and
Engels examined history from primitive man to their own times and concluded
that the search for subsistence was the dominant, even exclusive, theme of
man's existence. All man's culture and ideas ultimately stemmed from the ways
in which he coped with the struggle for property. Religion, politics,
government, family institutions, relations between the sexes-all reflected and
depended upon property. Strangely this theory, so common, too common, today,
was strikingly novel a little over a century ago. Even discounting the extreme
fashion in which it was presented and the other ideas of violence and class
struggle that went with it, the idea was new and represented an important
addition to political theory. No student of political affairs today fails to
take account of how ideas and practices are influenced by economic conditions.
The same
novelty was conceded the ideas of social class and the class struggle when Marx
and Engels proposed them in The Communist Manifesto of 1848. They
asserted that history represented the efforts of one class to dominate another,
first the feudal class over the middle class, then the middle class over the
working class; now the working class would abolish all classes and build a
classless society.
The strength
of a class depended on its control of the means of production. Therefore the
means of production had to be wrested from the hands of the bourgeoisie; this
meant destroying the state, which stands as guardian of the vested interests.
There would follow a temporary classless state, when the workers would own the
means of production in common, under the dictatorship of the proletariat. But
the dictatorship, temporarily established for the revolution, would wither away
and a stateless society would follow.
The various
ideas of social class have been incorporated into the important field of the
sociology of class, or social stratification. It must be admitted that the
Marxist theories of class-consciousness have made the world and even political
scientists, whether adverse or not, conscious of class.
The
interpretation of modern society as the unjust rule of middle class wealth over
the mass of people has characterized much of socialist thought as well, but the
socialists may be distinguished from the Marxists communists (including such
groups as the Trotskyites) in that they generally favored gradual, peaceful,
and constitutional means of changing the system of ownership of society;
usually they urged transferring machinery and large corporate agglomerations of
property from private hands to state ownership. The socialists may trace their
origins beyond Marx to writers like Fourier, the "scientific
socialist" of the early nineteenth century. The cooperative movement in
Scandinavia and other countries has many beliefs in common with the socialists,
for it fights the concentration of wealth in a few hands by arranging for joint
ownership and management of certain processes, goods, and operations by
producers and consumers thereof. The English Fabian Socialists, led by
intellectuals such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were the most successful of the
reform socialists; they influenced the Labour Party, which came, in time, to
govern England.
Marxism
plunged the world's intellectuals into a social maelstrom. Society was not only
becoming more complex as the industrial revolution proceeded, but
interpretations of society were also becoming exceedingly involved. All manner
of factors came to be taken into account in social science. Political science
in the universities resisted longer than any other discipline the enlargement
of its scope and method, but it too finally gave up in the last generation to
the new complexity. Like sociology it found it had to consider the economic
factor in politics, the religious factor, the pure power factor, the
intelligence factor (it did know something of this), the psychological factor,
and the ideological factor. Put them all together and one gets the
"culture," the sum of related practices and attitudes in the
political community.
The new idea
of culture was related to the old one of the political community but with the
large difference that the culture concept focused attention on the ways and
rules by which a community handles its problems. The culture scientist is
interested in the interrelations of all the behaviors and beliefs of a society.
The anthropologists helped develop the concept because they could see a
"culture" more distinctly and clearly in the small primitive
communities they were studying.
It is in this
larger context of culture that Max Weber, a German sociologist of the early
twentieth century (18641921), can be understood and presented. A prodigious
student of comparative cultures, he developed a method of social analysis that
is sometimes called the ideal-type method, or, as here, the method of models of
society. Weber wrote extensively in the fields of economic history and the
history of administrative organization, on the literati (the influential
intellectual officials of old China), the castes of India, the bureaucracy,
traditional systems, and economic systems. Generally he tended to draw first a
great and complete conception of how the society or institution tended to
operate"all things being equal"-that is, what its "natural"
functioning was like. Then as he described the myriad related details of
structure, beliefs, and operations of a kind of society, he would cite
exceptional or accidental or overlapping features of other kinds. His method
generally proved to be a powerful tool of analysis, profound, suggestive, and
possible to comprehend.
Since his work
was done, both the culture-concept and model-building have been sometimes used
in political writing, and more often in other social sciences. Especially for
the larger subjects of political science, which treat of whole periods of
civilization, whole institutions, complete political systems, and complete
publics, this mode of attack has great promise. Its use brings generally a
danger of some exaggeration (the exceptions may be left out) but more often a
total comprehension impossible to obtain otherwise, and an appreciation of the
meshing and interactive influence of a great many factors of all kinds in a
single setting-an office, a political party, a society, or a church.
The Greeks, it
was related, initiated the idea of democracy. Going further, they began the
whole notion of forms of government, which they considered to be
three-governments by the one, by the few, and by the many. The most abundant
discussion of the forms of government has, however, occurred in modern times,
concurrent with the entrance of people of all classes onto the political scene.
Of all the discussions, perhaps the most illuminating from the standpoint of
science has centered around government by the few - variously called
aristocracy, oligarchy, or the elite.
As might be
expected, elite theorists, as we shall call them, were many in number, ranging
from those who urged an elite of birth or intelligence, to those who simply
found the idea of an elite a useful tool in political analysis. We can begin
with a group of aristocratic and conservative writers who were prominent in the
nineteenth century. All of them were critical of important aspects of democracy
and most of them rather pessimistic about the prospects for democratic
survival. They harked back in many ways to Edmund Burke who had defended the
English oligarchy against the English Radicals and French Jacobins during the
revolutionary period of the eighteenth century. He had defended the class
system and the prerogatives of the nobility and wealthy groups, claiming that
their leadership and abilities provided peace, progress, and contentment for
the nation. Not reason, he claimed, but long tradition and usage made
government effective and good, and little could be expected of intemperate
reforms. Burke's views characterized a number of the historians of the
nineteenth century when they ventured into political writings. Taine, Guizot,
and Lecky are examples.
In England
also, Thomas Carlyle criticized the claim of the majority to rule and declared
history to be the workings of a few great leaders of men and thought. Faguet in
France denounced what he called the democratic "Cult of
Incompetence." And Gaetano Mosca in Italy declared that forms of
government such as democracy or monarchy are meaningless in the face of an
invariable "ruling class" which directs the course of events. Ortega
y Gasset summarized the aristocratic forebodings about the eventual fate of
mass democracies, which one found a century earlier in de Tocqueville, by
predicting the rise of dictatorships in his Revolt of the Masses. Walter
Lippmann in America doubted the very existence of a majority on most questions
and sought effective government by a small skilled group of statesmen cognizant
of the public interest. James Burnham predicted, in line of descent from
Saint-Simon and Mosca, a new ruling class of managers following upon a
peaceable or violent Managerial Revolution
Drawing
sustenance from Hegel, a number of organic idealists wrote in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Hegel saw the gigantic movements of history as the
products of the human will and adulated the Prussian state as the embodiment of
the highest form of will, completely dominant over the individuals of the
society. For the state led the people just as the brain guides the human
organism. United with the doctrines of the value of force and violence, the
ethics of the national will may be found in forerunners of Fascism such as
Treitschke, or in the philosophers of Fascism such as Gentile or Nazism such as
Schmidt.
The defense of
violence as a political instrument did not characterize the pre-Fascists alone.
Nietzsche praised force and other techniques for the seizure of power that the
nineteenth-century democracies had for the most part rejected. Like Carlyle, he
regarded important historical events as the accomplishment of great men. He
rejected Christianity and democracy as contemptibly mediocre and weak. The
philosophical adoration of naked strength with a morality of its own reached
its peak of frenzy with Nietzsche.
The scientific
notion of the elite as a tool of analysis is to be found particularly in the
works of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). Pareto wrote voluminously and
systematically, with a thorough command of engineering, mathematics, economics,
history, and sociology. He insisted upon viewing society as a natural scientist
would, without fear or favor, as a working out of laws of human behavior that
could form the basis for prediction and a limited degree of control. Not since
Pythagoras was anyone so completely taken with the idea of a mathematical
description of society.
He criticized
Marx's economic determinism, showing that what was economic behavior in Marxist
eyes could be ideological behavior in a sociologist's eyes. The structure of
men's thoughts determine their economic behavior and economic institutions.
Politics are run by a few men everywhere. This elite, more often than not, has
a military or power-hungry cast of mind, of temperament, and of habit, rather
than being business-minded. So the state, far from being the superstructure
resting on the dominance of the bourgeoisie, as the communists believed,
was usually the master of the business classes. At the least, the government
was an important independent factor in the determination of public policies,
including business policy.
Roberto
Michels integrated the work of Pareto and Weber in a number of minor studies
and contributed perhaps the greatest case study of political institutions ever
written, Political Parties (1915) . In this work, which dealt with the
ideology, structure, and functioning of the democratic parties of early
twentieth-century Europe, he propounded his Iron Law of Oligarchy. There he
revealed the apparently irresistible tendencies of groups, organized in
democratic ways for democratic aims, to develop into groups run by a few men
mostly for their own goals.
John Dewey (1859-1962)
, a prolific writer and long-lived sage of American instrumentalism
(pragmatism), was outside the immediate intellectual and moral circles of the
Europeans just discussed. Despite his knowledge of the Greek classics, his
study of German idealist philosophy, and his sojourn in the Orient, he was
imbued with American culture and problems. His original and important theories
grew out of American educational philosophy and psychology. Beneath all of
Dewey's production was the driving desire to make Jeffersonian and Lincolnian
democracy work, from the nursery to the grave.
He developed a
new logic that wedded wants and thought. Man thinks because he must solve
problems. Logic as a tool of inquiry must be made part of the process of
living, individual or mass. Political activity should be regarded as a simple
extension of other forms of activity: it is made "political" because
it has indirect consequences for a great many people. The great problem of
democracy, he declared in The Public and Its Problems (1927), is to
assure among the vast public the fullest communication of goals, needs,
policies, and consequences of actions. Elections, laws, rules, and all other
devices and institutions have to be judged good or bad as they contributed to
the citizens' mutual understanding. The final values of man emerge from the
process of solving life's problems in a socially compatible way.
It is the wise
man, said Aristotle, who will be as precise as his material permits. One
trouble of older forms of expression was this indefinite quality. This took two
forms, multiple meanings and not referring to real events. Take the sentence:
"Behind the defeat of the Persians lay the genius of the Greeks." The
sentence is too broad. It says little, although it is stirring to all who are
siding with the Greeks and love what they believe to be genius. Actually it
indicates only the statement " Something some Greeks had, had something to
do with some defeat some Persians had. " That is, the story begins, not
concludes with the sentence. "Genius" and other words in the sentence
mean only vaguely the same thing to all readers. The musician is likely to
think of genius as peculiarly aesthetic; a soldier thinks of Greek military
formations. But worst of all, the sentence does not refer to any observable
connection between the genius and defeat. Moreover one is entitled to suspect
that no such operational contact exists.
It would be
foolish to say that such "operational" thoughts did not occur to many
men who never heard of the term "operationalism." What the term
"operational inquiry" denotes is that a statement about observed
events can be tested, and besides is phrased in language concrete enough to let
everyone talk intelligibly about the events. The philosophy of operational
inquiry holds that a great improvement in social science will occur as
scientists insist upon the language and events-oriented approach of
operationalism. Noticeably, since Machiavelli's value-free mode of inquiry, and
through one line of descent from Max Planck, Einstein, and other natural
scientists to Bridgman and Eddington, and through a second line of descent from
Hobbes, Bentham, Durkheim, Max Weber, Pareto, and other social scientists to
Dewey, the line of descent is growing stronger, the descendents more numerous.
The language and meaning of words in political and social science are ever more
distinct from their classical ancestors.
To summarize,
operationalism in political science begins with realism (Machiavelli). It takes
a value-free position (Machiavelli). It holds that reality has infinite
complexity (a political party can be described by millions of words and from
innumerable points of view). It aims at using some portion of this complexity
to solve a problem (such as, what happens to the number of members in a party
when dues are charged). It uses words to get this reality into a position where
we can work with it to suit our needs. (We define terms such as party,
member, dues, and charged in a tight empirically testable way.) Once
it thus comes to grip with its created reality, it can experiment with and test
that reality (as for instance by varying the dues and watching for a decline in
numbers). What is really known then is a set of operations that we can
confidently say will have certain consequences if they are performed. These,
then, are the working parts of one of the greatest instruments ever devised by
man to deal with his environment, whether human or natural. As Dewey wrote in
his Quest for Certainty, "A genuine idealism and one compatible
with science will emerge as soon as philosophy accepts the teaching of science
that ideas are statements not of what is or has been but of acts to be
performed."
One more idea
arrests our attention in this chapter, the concept of an unconscious part of
man's personality that works continuously to shape and influence his behavior.
Hints of this notion come from all over the world and from antiquity, but
Sigmund Freud is unchallenged as discoverer of the phenomenon and developer of
its implications. Harold D. Lasswell (1902- ) has in turn established the idea
in the body of political science. Exploitation of the "unconscious"
has rapidly opened up the field of political psychology, including factors that
enter into public opinion, leadership, policy decisions, motives, ideologies,
and organizational behavior. No subject of political science, and no
applications of political science, are untouched by the new knowledge that has
flowed from the realization that political man can be only understood and acted
upon through his hidden and concealed drives, feelings, and predispositions.
Lasswell's
career has been constructed of all modern intellectual forces, in a unique
fashion. The European masters of political sociology and the American
pragmatists coalesce with the psychoanalytic movement in his intellect.
Consequently, in his numerous works, one discovers a language, logic, concepts,
principles, and emphases formed out of a profound appreciation of these
differing minds, and combined in style and language that can only be called
Lasswellian. His Psychopathology and Politics and Power and Society are
of paramount importance to modern political theory. Even though he is a
theorist of general social science, he is an inventor and developer of research
techniques in the areas of content analysis, political psychology, law, and the
sociology of leadership. There is scarcely a field of social science that he
has not touched upon and improved.
Like his
contemporary peers, Lasswell is first a scientist, which means methodologist
and validator of propositions about man-as-he-is, rather than a moralist. Yet
as the sum of his writings mount, he approaches the condition of Dewey, whose
total creation had a heavy impact on moral thought. Lasswell approaches
morality gently, coaxing it out of natural social behavior, so to speak. He
concludes with less of a triumphant new statement of ethics than with a
clarification of how human dignity and welfare can be served by the logic and
empirical methods of the policy sciences.
* * *
The list of
basic ideas has served to give preliminary shape to the study of political
science. It has also indicated something of the role that individual political
scientists play, and a few more words to this point may be said by way of
concluding.
A suspicious
reader may perceive in the story of basic ideas presented in these pages a bias
toward Western political science. Averroes, the Muslim Aristotelian, is not
ranked with Aquinas, the Christian Aristotelian. Ibn Khaldun is not credited
with the basic development of the idea of world history over Augustine. Aristotle
and Plato, not Kautilya of India, are credited with perceiving political
science as a body of instructions. Machiavelli, not Kautilya of India, is
called the founder of the idea of power politics. (In Kautilya's Arthasastra
[about 321-300 B.C.] is found an encyclopedia of rules for administering a
government. The science of governing, Dandaniti, is the queen of
sciences. It applies the triple Vedas (knowledge of righteous and unrighteous
acts), and the Varta (knowledge of agriculture and trade), by means of its own
sciences of the expedient and inexpedient [Nayanayan] and power and impotency
[Balabale]). Nor are the great ideas traced into Sumeria, Egypt, the Sudan,
Persia, or China, where undoubtedly some or all of them have occurred to men.
The imperial administration of China was independent of the great Roman
development. The organization and philosophy of the social division of labor
was well developed in India two thousand years ago.
It would be
dishonorable and incorrect, by way of self-justification, to hide behind the
historical and philosophical authorities who have not only dominated Western
minds but trained the Eastern minds as well. The correct explanations are
simple enough. By historical interpenetration, the Near East, the Middle East,
and Africa are involved. The American Indian civilizations have given us no
political literature to speak of and the line of descent of their ideas is
still working below the surface of the Western Hemisphere countries. Chinese
and Indian literature has been more exclusively didactic, moralistic,
intuitive, and fragmentary than the Western literature. Western man has been
more vocal, more socially self-conscious, more possessed of glimmerings of the
methods and principles of pure science from the beginning. Even so, in the life
of man, these 2500 years and few ideas must appear a small matter. There were
500,000 years before and there are more millenia to come, and many more ideas
came before and many more will come after. Hence, although reasonable disputation
may be in order, there should be little place for partisan or ethnic quarrels
in a tentative history of ideas.
Great ideas -
whether moral or scientific - cannot come from one man, either. He represents
his teachers. Plato bespoke the Sophists. Aristotle repeated Plato. Bentham
reflected the Levellers, English revolutionaries of a century earlier. Pareto
reflected Comte, the "Father of Sociology." In turn, those that
follow modify; sometimes they improve, sometimes they destroy. The Roman
jurists who worked on the Great Code of Justinian systematized some views of
Cicero. Referring to his disciples, Marx once said in disgust: "I am not a
Marxist." Moreover, political philosophers draw from other fields some of
their greatest ideas. Smith was primarily an economist and psychologist. Mill
was an economist and logician. Marx was trained in the idealistic philosophy
of, Hegel.
Also a
movement may bring forth great ideas that can hardly be ascribed to a single
man. An example is the Bible, that treasure of moral rules and observations
about man's soul. There is much of politics there, and many authors. The
Sophists were many in number. It is difficult to say who was the most original
Stoic, even though we have chosen Zeno. The pragmatists Charles Pierce and
William James lent much to Dewey. Furthermore, ideas that are in the air can be
independently invented. Gaetano Mosca developed a theory of rule by the few at
about the same time as Pareto. Should Gentili or Hugo Grotius, who wrote a
grand treatise a few years after him, be credited as the inventor of
international law? The limits of individual responsibility are manifest.
Moreover, it
is important to note our emphasis finally upon great philosophers and
scientists, instead of great men who are incidentally philosophers, or powerful
men whose ideas have influenced the course of history. That is why, for
example, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic, who wrote a beautiful little
book of Meditations in the Stoic vein, is not emphasized; nor Jefferson
(who wrote voluminously but unsystematically) or Woodrow Wilson (even though
Wilson was a fine political scientist); nor Napoleon or Mussolini, both of whom
had original ideas about the structure of the modern state and human motivation.
Then many
leaders, such as Akhnaton, Moses, Augustus Caesar, Louis XIV, King George 111,
Hitler, Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt, have had important effects upon their
age, but their ideas have been incoherent, or unsystematic, or imitative, or
undeveloped. Therefore they are excluded here. But how they behave and think is
information upon which political science depends greatly for its theories.
A final point
needs to be made. A glance at the luxuriant growth of political values and
studies in history shows that society is misunderstood when it is
oversimplified. The world of ideas is not divided into two-totalitarian and
democratic. Reality is much more complicated. It is also more durable. No
sweeping doctrine of history-nor even a great war-can wipe the slate of history
clean and start humanity along a common path. The ghosts of history haunt
banquets that toast the future.
The
proliferation of major values imposes burdens upon political science. There is
a multiplicity of frames of reference for viewing society. There are many
objectives. There exist many methods of seeking truth. There is a grand
confusion of findings, because the seemingly most innocent statement of a
political fact often turns out to be based on controversial premises about what
is good or bad, or about what is the nature of man. The achievement of common
goals promises to be a lengthy and painful process, the outlines and limits of
which cannot be now foreseen. Even the desirability of agreement on ends is in
question.
Thus a great
waste of time and effort is unavoidable in reaching agreement on matters to be
studied, on methods of studying them, and on criteria for establishing the
validity of findings. Political science has been called the Queen of Sciences.
The name perhaps fits her lofty concerns and goals. But her subjects are unruly
and the boundaries of her kingdom unmarked.
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