The alienation of political theory (1986) | 11 | John G. Gunnell

ABSTRACT

More than thirty years ago, Alfred Cobban (1953) charged that the Western tradition of political theory, a tradition concernedwith ethical issues, had ceased to develop and had entered a period of decline. Cobban’s argument was only one of many claims about the decline of political theory that appeared in the 1950s, and the idea of political theory as it is understood today was in large measure invented during the course of these discussions. Cobban, like many of the period, argued that the immediate cause of the retreat from questions of what “ought to be” was the impact of the “modes of thought” characteristic of science and history, that is, value freedom and relativism, but he believed that the underlying source of the problem was the circumstance in which political theory had become “disengaged from political facts” and “practice” and had “become instead an academic discipline” (rep. 1969: 298-99). Cobban’s analysis of political theory was perceptive, but it also involved a

fundamental mistake that was made by almost all those engaged in these debates about the decline of political theory. It was the assumption that the canon of classic texts that had become part of the curriculum of political studies in the university represented an actual historical tradition whose latest phase was academic political theory, including the study of those texts. Arguments about decline begged the fundamental issue. There was no doubt that there was an academic tradition of political theory, but the notion that it was the decline of a greater tradition reaching from Plato to recent years was a pervasive myth. It is diﬃcult to be sure just how literally someone like Cobban intended this connection, but it is clear that the idea of the historical integrity of the tradition gained increasing importance during the next decade. Although Cobban did not correctly understand the genesis of the situation,

he recognized the dilemma of political theory as an academic discipline. And, even as an academic discipline, it was by the 1950s becoming increasingly alienated from direct engagement with issues in political practice and from contact with political facts. The question of the extent to which political theory had concerned itself with ethical issues was more moot, for many during this period would claim that it was precisely an excessive emphasis on such matters that was the problem. The behavioralist account of the decline of political theory also recognized a detachment of political theory from

political reality. This account, which began to develop during this period, was also historically questionable, and its diagnosis and recommendations were signiﬁcantly diﬀerent from those of individuals such as Cobban. It claimed that science oﬀered a way of re-engaging political facts and creating an identity for political theory. Even if the self-image of political theory in the past had, in retrospect, not

always been very plausible, its failure, beginning in the 1950s, to face up to what it was and might be was nothing short of prodigious. And in seeking an identity it increasingly lost its intellectual autonomy. Although certain elements, under siege within the discipline of political science, would by the 1970s achieve a large measure of professional independence as an interdisciplinary ﬁeld, political theory increasingly became little more than variations on metatheoretical themes in philosophy and philosophical history. By the 1980s, not only was political theory thoroughly estranged from its object, politics, but its components, both inside and outside political science, had become dispersed and even incapable of meaningful debate. The alienation of political theory had its immediate origins in the con-

troversy that arose in the midst of the behavioral revolution in political science. Although it is diﬃcult, and artiﬁcial, to make a sharp distinction between the pre-and post-1950 eras, the division is a somewhat indigenous one, and the continuities as well as the transformations are worth noting. It is most important to understand the nature of the behavioral revolution and its relationship to the earlier history of political science, because this information is not readily accessible in the rhetoric of either the revolutionaries or the counterrevolutionaries. It would be a mistake to impose too programmatic and schematic an image

on these events associated with the behavioral revolution. The participants were far from fully able to articulate the circumstances in which they were involved, and the various positions were more diverse and complex than they often seem in retrospect. But, despite many appearances to the contrary, the behavioral revolution was a conservative revolution. This is not to say that it did not fundamentally change the character of political science or that it did not institute new research programs, but it was fought in defense of old ideals and traditional, if unrealized, goals in both politics and social science. As in many conservative revolutions, however, the enemy was not accurately speciﬁed, but revolution required something deﬁnite to be overthrown. If one is familiar with the history of American political science prior to

1940 (see Ricci, 1984; Seidelman, 1985), the behavioral attack on historical or “traditional” political theory is not comprehensible on its face. It might be suggested that, because the revolutionaries needed something to revolt against, the history of political theory seemed most alien to the scientiﬁc goals of behavioralism. There is also the less cynical and more historically sensitive thesis that change within the discipline had always been advanced in the name of theory. Because the history of political theory largely occupied the subﬁeld and held the title, it became the focus of criticism. And matters

like the typical postwar emphasis on science and the need to demonstrate “scientiﬁcness” in order to secure research funding, the failure of previous phases of the discipline to achieve its scientiﬁc vision, the dominance of positivism and scientism in the other social sciences and in philosophy, and the retreat from practical concerns in favor of pure science are all relevant. Yet even the composite of all these factors does not provide an adequate explanation for exactly what happened in political theory. The fact that most of the pivotal ﬁgures in the behavioral movement had

been trained as traditional political theorists might be taken as an anomaly, but it is part of the explanation and touches a matter that goes deeper than their conventional occupation with theoretical issues. Prior to 1940 there is very little to indicate any tension between science and history in American political science. Political theory had characteristically been understood as including the history of political theory, which was in turn represented largely as the progressive history of political science and democratic values. And, despite some variation in the terms employed, political science and political theory were assumed to consist of both empirical and normative propositions about politics and government. From the paradigm-setting texts of William Dunning (1902-20) to the

protobehavioral arguments of Charles Merriam (1925) to George Sabine’s inﬂuential history of political theory (1937), the scientiﬁc and political ideology of the discipline had remained remarkably uniform. Despite some exceptions, the discipline was generally politically conservative although maybe at times intellectually radical in its dreams of an instrumental social science allied with a national state for the solution of social and political problems. Its propensities were distinctly pragmatic and grounded in a belief in the complementarity, if not outright identity, of scientiﬁc and liberal democratic values, along with a constant aversion to the taint of what it took to be speculative philosophy and metaphysics and their political and ideological counterparts. The history of political theory was understood as demonstrating all this and, particularly in the 1930s, oﬀered a vehicle for democratic self-consciousness in the face of alien political challenges from both the left and right. From 1900 to 1945 there was hardly a major ﬁgure in political theory, or

political science, who was not involved in both the history of political theory and the advancement of political science as a science, and one would look in vain for any signiﬁcant tension between these notions of theory. This was in part because “theory,” “theorist,” and “theorizing” were concepts that had been consistently understood in a rather functional manner. Political theories, in both political science and political life, were ideas about the state, whether descriptive, causal, or prescriptive and evaluative, as opposed to facts and institutions. They were, particularly as an aspect of political science, mental constructs for organizing and manipulating, both intellectually and practically, the mass of data that social scientists and statesmen confronted in the social and political world. There are a variety of historical reasons why the profession of political sci-

ence was born with a subﬁeld called “political theory,” but it was not because

“theory” and its cognates had any very deﬁnite or speciﬁc meaning when the American Political Science Association was founded (1903). In some respects the history of the subﬁeld is the history of the attempt to give “theory” meaning. It is the history of its reiﬁcation. Even through the 1940s the term was largely used in a functional or categorical sense. Its reiﬁcation was basically a product of the debates about theory that began in the 1950s. But the fundamental interpretative question remains – what was the root of the conﬂict within political theory and between political theory and political science? The problem stemmed from the intrusion of ideas promulgated by the

German émigrés of the 1930s. These individuals included Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Eric Voegelin, Franz Neuman, Arnold Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer. Although often not yet in published form, these ideas had begun, during the 1940s, to have a signiﬁcant impact on the profession and discipline of political science and particularly on the discourse of political theory. These thinkers appeared, at least from the American perspective, to be

political theorists, but their ideas had been formed in the context of German philosophy and the practical experience of totalitarianism. Whether left or right in their ideological leanings, many of these individuals represented a position and orientation that threatened some of the basic premises of American political science and political theory. American political science had been heavily inﬂuenced by German thought

during its formative period in the late 1800s as well as during the ﬁrst two decades of the twentieth century, and political science (and political theory) was in many respects Hegelian and Comtean in its early years. However, the general reaction against “speculative” philosophy that characterized the early 1900s had succeeded in thoroughly “Americanizing” these ideas both politically and philosophically. The world-historical visions of the third great wave of German inﬂuence were not easily assimilated in either style or substance. Although there were many speciﬁc problems stemming from the attachment of these thinkers to Marxism, certain theological doctrines, and other alien perspectives, a more basic and general diﬃculty was their historical pessimism and their depreciation of both liberalism and science. The perspective introduced by Voegelin, Strauss, Arendt, and Marcuse

entailed the idea that the history of politics and political theory in the West, at least in recent times, was one of decline. This notion was tied to a critique of both liberalism and science. Liberalism was construed in one way or another as decadent, as the historical threshold of fascism and nazism, and the facade of socially repressive forces. Science, scientiﬁc philosophy, and technology were conceived in similar manner, and social science was often understood as their most heinous manifestation. Science was the instrument of political oppression and the enemy of humanism. There were numerous other antithetical elements in these new themes in

political theory, but maybe most important was the resurgence of what in the earlier years would have been called “speculative” political philosophy.

Although it might not be diﬃcult to perceive the cosmos of normative givens inherent in American pragmatism and realism, American political scientists believed not only in separating facts and values but in the relativity of values and the danger in transcendental claims. The new wave of thought, however, maintained that value relativism and the separation of fact and value were both causes and symptoms of a crisis of modernity. Almost without exception, these thinkers sought, either in history or outside it, a source of transcendental judgment for the critique of politics. Other matters of dissonance might be detailed, but this should be suﬃcient

to indicate that the European infusion of ideas in political theory, which began to take eﬀect in the 1940s and was more fully visible by the 1950s, precipitated a crucial moment for the self-image of American political science. The idea of political theory as part of an empirical science of politics integrally related to the evolution of liberal thought and practice, an idea that had been at the core of American political science from its earliest beginnings, was in jeopardy. The consequence would be the end of the alliance between, if not the identity of, theory as history and theory as science and a proliferation of metatheoretical arguments in defense of each. One would be forced to search very hard for any sophisticated and philo-

sophically informed source of or reﬂection on notions about political theory as part of empirical political science before the 1950s. The basic claims about theory and science, even the language and phrasing of those claims, changed very little in the forty years from Merriam’s announcement of, or call for, the creation of a systematic interdisciplinary causal “science of human behavior” (1925: 11) to Easton’s statement of the “behavioral credo” and the commitment to develop “a science of politics modeled after the methodological assumptions of the natural sciences” (1965a: 8). What, increasingly, did change, however, was the relationship between philosophy and political science or between metatheoretical rhetoric and scientiﬁc practice. It was a long time, not until well into the 1970s, before political scientists of

the behavioral persuasion became fully aware of either the philosophical sources of their scientiﬁc identity or the existence of alternative images of science and social scientiﬁc explanation. But as early as 1950 Harold Lasswell, in one of the ﬁrst attempts of the behavioral, or proto-behavioral, era to provide a theoretical “framework for political science,” indicated that his eﬀorts were informed by a “thorough-going empiricist philosophy of the sciences” based on “logical positivism, operationalism, and instrumentalism” (Lasswell and Kaplan, 1950: xiii, xiv). Even his collaboration on this work with the philosopher Abraham Kaplan indicated a new dimension or threshold in the relationship between political science and philosophy. There is little evidence that would suggest that in the previous twenty years

Lasswell had any very deep involvement with the philosophy of science. And his case was typical of the advocates of scientism. From the beginning, natural science had been a model, or contrast model, for the social sciences, and nowhere was this more true than in political science. What was also the case,

however, was that social scientists, almost without exception and without regard to whether they wished to identify themselves with it or disassociate themselves from it, had no signiﬁcant contact with or knowledge of the practices of natural science. Natural science was basically either a legitimating or a critical symbol mediated through various philosophical images. It would require a detailed historical examination of particular cases to

determine the extent to which the social sciences were inﬂuenced by philosophical accounts of science and the extent to which they employed such accounts rhetorically, either reﬂectively or unreﬂectively, for justiﬁcation and criticism. The relationship was, however, an integral and complex one, and it is safe to say that eventually a change in the philosophical image of science would produce an identity crisis in the social sciences. In the history of American political science, the balance between inﬂuence and legitimation, to the extent that they can be analytically disentangled, has diﬀered at various points. Through 1950 there was little defection from the principle that natural sci-

ence was a positive model. And, from the beginning of the discipline to the end of the behavioral era, the basic assumptions, on the part of both proponents and opponents of scientism, about the nature and demands of scientiﬁc method and explanation changed very little. Even the transition from Comtean and Spencerian images of science, dominant in the ﬁrst two decades of the century, to those of logical positivism, beginning in the 1940s, did not signiﬁcantly alter the basic ideas about the character of scientiﬁc inquiry. What did shift, overall, was the valence between inﬂuence and legitimation. It is necessary to exercise care in making this distinction, because even the rationalizing uses of the symbol of natural science indicate a form of inﬂuence to the degree that individuals are constrained and directed by the symbols available. But by the 1960s political scientists had become signiﬁcantly more the instruments of their symbolism than in Merriam’s era, despite the growth in their reﬂectiveness about the source. For both internal and external reasons and audiences, Merriam had evoked

and invoked the image of science for his enterprise. This was also largely true for the political scientists of the 1950s, but although Merriam, despite his lack of success in many respects, had little focused internal opposition to his program apart from critics who believed he was either too much or too little committed to practical goals, his successors believed that the survival of the traditional scientiﬁc image of political theory, as well as the basic goals of the discipline, was at risk. The symbol of science, by the 1950s, no longer commanded immediate and general respect. The historical situation seemed to signal increasing urgency about the need to realize the scientiﬁc potential of the discipline, but there was at the same time a challenge to the authority of both the general symbol of science and the speciﬁc image that had characterized political science. It was in this context that political scientists entered into a critique of the

study of the history of political theory and sought to develop a more

articulate vision of their scientiﬁc commitments. Although numerous factors contributed to the resurgence of scientism that characterized the behavioral revolution, what has been neglected, and misunderstood, is the extent to which that recommitment was a reaction to the subversion of political science’s scientiﬁc and political identity that was being mounted not only within the discipline but within what had traditionally been understood as its intellectual core – political theory. It was also in this context, in part in response to the behavioral attack and

in part simply because of the ideas represented in that movement, that the study of the history of political theory was transformed into a vehicle for the critique of what, by the 1960s, was becoming mainstream political science. Among the authors of this critique were both those, such as Strauss, who had begun to challenge the basic vision of liberal scientiﬁc progress and some of those more anomalously positioned individuals who had been simply “doing” the history of political theory in the usual American way. They found themselves, somewhat inexplicably, the target of their peers, with whom they thought they shared basic premises about the compatibility of history and science. The dialogue between these protagonists, which lasted well into the 1970s, and the waves of philosophical reﬂection about political theory which that dialogue in part engendered were the basic cause of the contemporary alienation of political theory. And it was not merely an alienation of the spirit. Both sides began to practice what they preached. This was not the ﬁrst time in the social sciences that a Methodenstreit had

profound disciplinary and professional eﬀects, but this conﬂict largely absorbed theoretical discussion in political science for a quarter of a century. It not only fundamentally shaped signiﬁcant portions of political science, especially the subﬁeld of political theory, but signiﬁcantly contributed to the emergence of the wider ﬁeld of political theory and philosophy which, despite later assumptions about its perennial character, was hardly diﬀerentiated and identiﬁable prior to the 1960s. At its core, behavioralism or the behavioral movement, as something other

than simply what political scientists did and came to do, was an amalgam of quasi-philosophical ideas about scientiﬁc explanation. Whether or not these ideas were reﬂectively instrumental, they served an ideological function within the discipline and produced a unifying force that had not been sustained in earlier years. The atmosphere of enthusiasm and the commitment to challenging what behavioralists characterized as the orthodoxy of historical and institutional analysis may have led some truly to believe in their extravagant claims about such matters as emulating the laws of physics. There is, however, reason to suggest that professional and disciplinary identity was the most signiﬁcant goal. Political science, more so than the other social sciences, was from its

beginning, more a holding company for some loosely related ﬁelds of inquiry and research programs than a discipline with a theoretical core. The behavioral “revolution” and the behavioral “mood” were in part manifestations of

a continuing attempt to establish a scientiﬁc and disciplinary identity. One of the factors that contributed to the success of behavioralism was the sense of urgency created by both the real and perceived external context and the sense of lagging behind other ﬁelds in scientiﬁc accomplishment, but there were also important internal factors. One of the forces that animated political theory, particularly the history of

political theory, in the 1930s was the belief in the need to construct or, more accurately, make explicit and coherent a liberal democratic ideology that would be comparable to and confront the foreign ideologies on the left and right that threatened both political mind and space. Behavioralism was doing something on this order with regard to the discipline’s scientiﬁc image, but the similarity is more than analogous. The 1950s were also a period of ideological consolidation. The extent to which the creation of a value theory that would be equal to the times was part of the behavioral program is often forgotten in view of its dominant and subsequent emphasis on scientiﬁc method, but more important was the persistence of the faith in the complementarity of democracy and science that permeated the behavioral literature. In the controversies of the 1960s over the political, and apolitical, role of

the discipline, critics pointed to the extent to which behavioralism, in theory and practice, reﬂected and legitimated dominant liberal values. Doing science, and the particular kind of science that characterized behavioralism, was a kind of value theory. The doctrines of the priority of pure science and the separation of facts and values only appeared to be a contradiction of the professed concern with liberal democracy. The behavioral revolution was, then, a conservative one in several respects. Its basic goals and notions of science had deﬁned the discipline from its inception, and in varying degrees of explicitness it was a defense of traditional liberalism and American institutions. In many respects the behavioral revolution was a theoretical one – apart

from the fact that, with regard to its scientiﬁc goals, it did not accomplish in practice what it claimed in theory. Not only were most of the major spokesmen by training political theorists, but the subﬁeld of political theory was where the revolutionary and antirevolutionary debates largely took place. A transformation in theory and its uses was also to be the fulcrum for disciplinary change. But most important for the argument here is the fact that the behavioral movement, by the time this self-ascribed persuasion had become a disciplinary orthodoxy in the 1960s, produced an unprecedented metatheoretical self-consciousness that had a far-reaching impact on the practice of research as well as the evolution of images of political theory. No matter what innovations behavioralism introduced into the research

programs of political science, or what changes it eﬀected in the orientation of the discipline toward politics, it persisted in legitimating political inquiry in terms of the authority of its scientiﬁcness. And, as in previous periods (e.g., Merriam, 1925), the history of the discipline was represented as the story of the progress of science as conceived in the present and, particularly, as the growth of theory (e.g., Almond, 1966; Truman, 1965). Theory was understood as the hallmark of

science. Although it would be appropriate to write the history of many ﬁelds of knowledge as the history of the evolution of theories about their object of research, it might be more reasonable to write the history of political science from the perspective of its theory of theory. What came to characterize the behavioral era, however, was the fact that these images of theory became less and less merely legitimating myths as scientiﬁc practice became increasingly an attempt to legitimate epistemological and methodological commitments. David Easton’s claim about the “decline” of political theory and the need

for its reconstitution (1951; 1953) was characteristic (although maybe the paradigm case) of a number of attacks on what came to be understood by both its critics and its defenders as “traditional theory.” This meant in eﬀect the study of what had come to be understood as the “great tradition” from Plato to the present and the normative concerns that supposedly characterized that putative tradition. The terms of this critique had, in fact, been developing steadily during the past decade as both the new European inﬂuences on the subﬁeld of political theory were felt and the various postwar factors pointing to a need to reassert and revise the scientiﬁc image of political science took shape. Easton’s argument, and it is important to note exactly what the argument

claimed, was that the tradition that had begun with the Greeks had undergone “impoverishment” in the hands of historically oriented scholars such as George Sabine who had transformed it into a history of political ideas that both lacked relevance to contemporary values and contributed little to the task of developing “a generalized theory about the relations of facts” that could serve as the “theoretical organ” of a truly scientiﬁc study of politics. What was required was a “theoretical revolution” that both released political theory from parasitic historicism and transcended the “hyperfactualism” and “crude empiricism” of previous years. The account provided by individuals such as Easton was in many respects

quite accurate with regard to its description of the character and condition of political theory and political science, but it misrepresented the intentions, motives, and work of those, such as Sabine, whom it overtly criticized. Sabine’s analysis of political theory (1939), for example, was not signiﬁcantly diﬀerent from Easton’s. Although he wrote about the history of political theory, he did not depreciate the scientiﬁc study of politics or see anything but the compatibility, even identity, of the two enterprises. The criticism was directed at a genre that harbored the incipient critics of political science but in which they were still not highly visible. Although the historians of political theory – Strauss, Arendt, and Voegelin, for example – who came into prominence in the postwar years were in fact already antagonistic toward the values of American political science, the behavioral critique crystallized and galvanized hostile attitudes and precipitated a fundamental split within the ﬁeld. It would be an exaggeration to say that the arguments that emerged from the literature of the history of political theory in the succeeding years were simply a response to that critique, but they were certainly in large measure shaped by it.