Abstract
I am writing neither to condemn behavioralism in political science, nor to praise or bury it. Advocates and practitioners of behavioralism are in the habit of blowing their own horn so loudly, that the addition of laudatory sounds from an outsider inclined to intone them would make for cacophony. Burial, too, seems inappropriate, since reports of the death of behavioralism1 are, in Mark Twain’s words, greatly exaggerated. A critique is an expression of reasoned judgment upon a matter, and it may involve a judgment on the matter’s “value, truth, or righteousness or an appreciation of its beauty or technique”. In this sense of the word, many critiques of behavioralism in political science have been offered during the past. Most if not all express judgments about the righteousness of behavioral political studies. Some view righteousness from the right, others from the left. The former have, on occasion, chided behavioralists for pretending to know more than anyone can know, and to want to do more than anyone should do, about political behavior.3 The latter, on the other hand, have more often complained that behavioralists seek to explain phenomena that are poorly if not malignantly selected, and that their work has served apolitical, antipolitical, or at best uncritical purposes.4
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References
Robert A. Dahl, “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest,” American Political Science Review, LV, December 1961, pp. 763–72.
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 5th ed., Springfield, Mass., 1942, p. 241.
Often from a ius-naturalist position; see, e.g., Herbert J. Storing, ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, New York, 1962.
E.g., Charles A. McCoy and John Playford, eds., Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism, New York, 1967.
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1,2; also Spiro, Politics as the Master Science, New York, 1970, passim and ch. 1.
See my Responsibility in Government: Theory and Practice, New York, 1969, p. vii and passim.
New York, 1963.
See also Austin Ranney, ed., Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics, Urbana, 1962.
E.g., Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald Stokes, The American Voter, New York, 1960;
Glendon Schubert, Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior, New York, 1959.
The date of his presidential address to the American Political Science Association, ’The Post-Behavioral Revolution in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, LXIII, December 1969.
“Furthermore, some time ago, the strength of feeling of the adherents was sufficiently strong to stimulate discussion of separatist institutions, such as a special journal. But, unlike the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and other sciences where splinter associations have emerged, in spite of some talk at one time, a special subdivision of the American Political Science Association providing institutional expression for the new approach never did hive off. The Association has proved sufficiently flexible to adopt with the necessary speed to the changing character of the field. Footnote: This in itself has a history which it would be interesting to explore if we are to understand the way in which a discipline successfully copes with changes in its intellectual objectives and methods, an adaptation that cannot by any means be taken for granted. In this history the roles of Evron M. Kirkpatrick, executive director of the American Political Science Association, and of Pendleton Herring, through his leadership as President of the Social Science Research Council, would loom very large.” David Easton, “The Current Meaning of ‘Behavioralism’ “, Contemporary Political Analysis, James C. Charlesworth, ed., New York, 1967. p. 14.
Ibid., pp. I2f.
See also the extremely eclectic list of Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell: “Our contribution to these themes is an eclectic one — it draws heavily on the work of Aristotle and others of the classic tradition of political theory, on Max Weber, Carl Fried-rich, S. N. Eisenstadt, Robert Dahl, Edward Shils, David Easton, James Coleman, David Apter, and Seymour M. Lipset, as well as many others. It also draws on contemporary sociological and systems theory, on Talcott Parsons, Marion Levy, Jr., and Karl Deutsch.” Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach, Boston, 1966, p. 215. See also my review of this book, Journal of Politics, IXXX, 1967, pp. 903–905.
Bernard Berelson, “Behavioral Sciences,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, II, pp. 41–45. The remark about coinage and minting calls to mind the late Karl Llewelyn’s equally facetious paraphrase of Lord Acton’s famous dictum on power: “All money tends to corrupt; foundation money corrupts absolutely.” See also Bernard Berelson, ed., The Behavioral Sciences Today, New York, 1963.
See footnote 11 above. Easton mentions Dahl, Alfred de Grazia, editor of the American Behavioral Scientist, Richard Snyder, Morton Kaplan, Arthur L. Burns, R. E. Quandt; Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee; S. M. Lipset and L. Lowenthal; David Truman; Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman; Karl W. Deutsch. Heinz Eulau, in “Segments of Political Science Most Susceptible to Behavioristic Treatment,” op. cit., pp. 32–50, mentions Charles E. Merriam; Samuel J. Eldersveld and Morris Janowitz; Dahl; Herbert A. Simon and James G. March; Glendon A. Schubert; Harold D. Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan; Almond; Stuart A. Rice; Truman, Easton, Lipset; James N. Rosenau, Klaus Knorr and Sidney Verba; Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes; Berelson et al.; Dwaine Marvick and Janowitz; John C. Wahlke, Eulau, William Buchanan and LeRoy C. Ferguson; Herbert Tingsten; Duncan MacRae, Jr.; Robert E. Lane; Edward C. Banfield; and several others. See also Mulford Q. Sibley, “The Limitations of Behavioralism,” op. cit., pp. 51–71, for an excellent critique.
See footnote 13 above.
Boston, 1967, 3rd ed.
Samuel H. Beer and Adam B. Ulam, eds., New York, 1962, 2nd ed.
See the title of Eulau’s essay cited in footnote 15 above.
Footnote 12 above. “3. Techniques: Means for acquiring and interpreting data cannot be taken for granted. They are problematic and need to be examined self-consciously, refined, and validated so that rigorous means can be found for observing, recording, and analyzing behavior.”
See ch. 3, “The Importance of Method: Aristotle,” in Spiro, Politics as the Master Science, op. cit.
See, e.g., William Flanagan and Edwin Fogelman, “Functional Analysis,” Contemporary Political Analysis, Charlesworth, ed., pp. 72–85; and Robert T. Holt, “A Proposed Functional-Structural Framework,” ibid., pp. 86–107.
Footnote 12 above. “5. Values: Ethical evaluation and empirical explanation involve two different kinds of propositions that, for the sake of clarity, should be kept analytically distinct. However, a student of political behavior is not prohibited from asserting propositions of either kind separately or in combination as long as he does not mistake one for the other.”
Footnote 12 above. “4. Quantification; Precision in the recording of data and the statement of findings requires measurement and quantification, not for their own sake, but only where possible, relevant, and meaningful in the light of other objectives.” See also the discussion of quantity and quality in Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control, New York, 1963, pp. 86–88.
“We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premises of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 3.
See Spiro, Responsibility in Government, op. cit., pp. 59–62.
See Spiro, Politics as the Master Science, op. cit., ch. 7, “Politics and Consciousness.”
See, e.g., Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture, Princeton, 1963.
Thomas Hobbes was obviously very much aware of the constant changeability of human goals, as revealed by his definition of power: “The power of a man, to take it universally, is his present means, to obtain some future apparent good.” Leviathan, ch. 10. Italics supplied; italics from original omitted.
See “Vulgar Teleologism” and “Vulgar Realism,” in Spiro, Politics as the Master Science, op. cit., pp. 149–151.
See Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe and America, rev. ed., Boston, 1950, pp. 8–10.
Carl J. Friedrich, “The Continental Tradition of Training Administrators in Law and Jurisprudence,” Journal of Modern History, XI, June 1939.
Talcott Parsons, tr., New York, 1958.
Hans Kelsen, Society and Nature: A Sociological Inquiry, Chicago, 1943.
Plato, Republic, IL See also Spiro, Politics as the Master Science: From Plato to Mao, ch. 2, “The Problem of Analogy: Plato.”
Op. cit., footnote i above, p. 770.
“Political systems are brought into being as direct or indirect results of more or less deliberate human actions upon nonpolitical reality (which may, in its various aspects, be conceived of for analytical purposes as composed of systems). Political systems reflect man’s consciousness of the possible…” Spiro, “An Evaluation of Systems Theory,” in Charlesworth, ed., op. cit., footnote 11 above, p. 174.
Henry S. Kariel arrives at a similar conclusion from a different angle: “A less orthodox test of such a political science is the extent of its impact on those it presumes to understand. It succeeds to the extent that it enables them to recognize more of themselves than they ordinarily recognize, that it raises their expectations, that it expands their consciousness, freeing them to be more playful and political, more active and alive.” “Expanding the Political Present,” American Political Science Review, LXIII, September 1969, p. 774. See also the critical views of Gunnar Myrdal: “The great tradition in social science and, particularly, in economics has been for the social scientists to take a direct as well as an indirect responsibility for popular education. There is a recent trend, with which I muct register my dissatisfaction, to abandon this great tradition. Through generations even the greatest scholars — and they especially — managed to spare the time from their scientific work to speak to the people in simple terms that laymen could understand. Yet too many social scientists today are increasingly addressing only each other. This trend to false scientism, this foregoing of our responsibility for the formation of public opinion, is apt to decrease the importance of our work for making people more rational. “Another trend works in the same direction. While a great tradition in social science was to express reasoning as clearly and succinctly as possible, the tendency in recent decades has been for social scientists to close themselves off by means of unnecessarily elaborate and strange terminology, often to the point of impairing their ability to understand one another — and perhaps occasionally even themselves.” Objectivity in Social Research, New York, 1969.
For a critique of the boundary concept, see David Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1965, pp. 29, 63–65, and passim; also Spiro, “An Evaluation of Systems Theory,” cited in footnote 37 above.
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, New York, 1966.
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Spiro, H.J. (1971). Critique of Behavioralism in Political Science. In: von Beyme, K. (eds) Theory and Politics / Theorie und Politik. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-1063-9_16
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