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Expanding the Political Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Henry S. Kariel
Henry S. Kariel*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii
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Extract

“Nothing we have created, in politics or literature, is necessary….”

—Richard Poirier

Theory expressing new dimensions of man's political predicaments has rarely emerged from well-accredited academic quarters. Yet political scientists have come to hope that their own discipline, imaginatively pursued, might nevertheless yield comprehensive theories for coming to terms with man's present and prospective situations. To cope with emergencies—if not those of the year 1984 then those of the now more fashionable year 2000—they have proceeded to delineate possible futures. It is hardly necessary to document how industriously they have been extrapolating from the present, becoming interested in simulating, linear programming, gaming, and projecting into the future. With methodological ingenuity and resourcefulness, practitioners of futuristics have provided a new literature which is unconventional, exciting, and at times intriguingly surrealistic. Like Bentham's and Saint-Simon's more buoyant pieces, it has all the trappings of authentic radical thought: it appears to challenge the prevailing intellectual and institutional boundaries.

Yet in view of the ideological constraints inherent in every professional discipline, it would be surprising if the new blueprints and scenarios were to inspire men to transcend the present political order, if the new Utopians (to use Robert Boguslaw's apt label) acknowledged something other than the prevailing system of psychological, economic, and industrial norms as their point of departure. They understandably begin with the present, that which is.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , November 1969 , pp. 768 - 776
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1969

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References

1 See especially Boguslaw, Robert, The New Utopians (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965)Google Scholar; de Jouvenel, Bertrand (ed.), Futuribles (Geneva: Droz, 1963), Vols. I and II Google Scholar; Helmer, Olaf, Social Technology (New York: Basic Books, 1966)Google Scholar; Bell, Daniel (ed.), Toward the Year 2000 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968)Google Scholar; Kopkind, Andrew, “The Future-Planners,” The New Republic (02 25, 1967), 19–23 Google Scholar; Ewald, William Jr., (ed.), Environment for Man: The Next 50 Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Office for Industrial Associates, The Next Ninety Years (Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1967)Google Scholar; Prehoda, Robert, Designing the Future (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1967)Google Scholar; Kahn, Herman and Wiener, Anthony J., The Year 2000 (New York: Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar; Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “America in the Technetronic Age,” Encounter, 30 (01, 1968), 16–26 Google Scholar; Anderson, Stanford (ed.), Planning for Diversity and Choice (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 Critiques of an arrested, excessively narrow empiricism may be found in two collections of readings: McCoy, Charles A. and Playford, John (eds.), Apolitical Politics (New York: Crowell, 1967)Google Scholar; and Kariel, Henry S. (ed.), Frontiers of Democratic Theory (New York: Random House, 1969)Google Scholar.

3 The best example is the work by Kahn and Wiener, The Year 2000.

4 Wendell Bell and James A. Mau, “Images of the Future and Research Strategies,” manuscript prepared for McKinney, J. and Tiryakian, E. (eds.), Theoretical Sociology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, forthcoming), p. 7 Google Scholar. The major premise of this essay is that “modern sociologists have so reified [technologies and organizational settings] that they have neglected the study of the processes involved in social development and change resulting from the actions of men themselves” (p. 34).

5 Indictments of closure are legion. The charge is committing the fallacies of reductionism, misplaced concreteness, hypostatization, historicism, and essentialism. The record shows how readily science is converted into scientism, an analytical construct into an absolute, a useful tool into a fetish, or a contingency into a certainty.

6 See Young, Oran R., Systems of Political Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968)Google Scholar.

7 Buckley, Walter, “Society as a Complex Adaptive System,” in Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), p. 493 Google Scholar.

8 Mace, C. A., “Homeostasis, Needs and Values,” British Journal of Psychology, 44 (1953), 204–205 Google ScholarPubMed, as quoted ibid.

9 See de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1954), Vol. II, pp. 42–49 Google Scholar; Veblen, Thorstein, The Higher Learning in America (New York: Huebsch, 1918)Google Scholar; Mills, C. Wright, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 129–136 Google Scholar. See also Baritz, Loren, Servants of Power (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Polak, Frederik L., The Image of the Future (New York: Oceana, 1961), Vol. II, pp. 169–200 Google Scholar; Stein, Sol, “The Defense Intellectuals,” Ramparts (02, 1967)Google Scholar; Nieburg, H. L., In the Name of Science (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, “The Cultural Cold War,” in Bernstein, Barton J. (ed.), Towards a New Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968), pp. 322–359 Google Scholar; Ridgway, James, The Closed Corporatoin (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar; and Chomsky, Noam, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969)Google Scholar.

10 See Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar; Paul, and Goodman, Percival, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947)Google Scholar; Reich, Wilhelm, Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahey, 1960)Google Scholar; Francis, and Golffing, Barbara, “An Essay on Utopian Possibility,” Centennial Review, 7 (Fall, 1963), 470–480 Google Scholar; Fromm, Erich, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart, 1955)Google Scholar; Laing, R. D., The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967)Google Scholar; Burke, Kenneth, “Dramatism,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), Vol. VII, pp. 445–452 Google Scholar. See also Kateb, George, “Utopia and the Good Life,” Daedalus, 94 (Spring, 1965), 454–473 Google Scholar; Goulet, Denis A., “Development for What?” Comparative Political Studies, 1 (07, 1968), 295–312 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kariel, Henry S., Open Systems: Arenas for Political Action (Itasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock, 1969)Google Scholar.

11 This paragraph draws on “Society as Crucible,” in Schoeck, Helmut and Wiggins, James W. (eds.), Psychiatry and Responsibility (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1962), pp. 135–156 Google Scholar.

12 Artaud, Antonin, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 70 Google Scholar. See also Peacock, James L., Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Duncan, Hugh D., Communication and Social Order (Totawa, N.J.: Bedminster, 1962)Google Scholar. Reuel Denney has pointed out to me the relevance of Artaud's conceptions.

13 For examples of ambivalent concerns about the decline of good form, see Rieff, Philip, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)Google Scholar; Howe, Irving, “The Idea of the Modern,” in Literary Modernism (New York: Fawcet, 1967)Google Scholar; and Shils, Edward, “Plenitude and Scarcity: The Anatomy of an International Crisis,” Encounter, 32 (05, 1969), 37–57 Google Scholar. For an approach recognizing the form of seemingly formless behavior, see Edelman, Murray, “Public Policy and Political Violence,” mimeographed discussion paper, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, 1968 Google Scholar.

14 See Talmon, J. L., Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1952)Google Scholar; Gasset, José Ortega y, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940)Google Scholar; and Nisbet, Robert A., The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953)Google Scholar. The classic statement is Tocqueville's. For an incisive criticism, see Rogin, Michael, The Intellectuals and McCarthy (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

15 See among innumerable others McConnell, Grant, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966)Google Scholar.

16 See the selections in Kariel (ed.), op. cit.

17 Marx, of course, posed this question, but his idiom has been more difficult to Americanize.

18 For early examples, see Whitehead, T. N., The Industrial Worker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938)Google Scholar; Leighton, Alexander H., The Governing of Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoslett, Schuyler Dean (ed.), Human Factors in Management (New York: Harper, 1946)Google Scholar.

19 Lasswell, Harold D., “Current Studies of the Decision Process: Automation versus Creativity,” Western Political Quarterly, 8 (09, 1955), 385–386 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See especially Rubenstein, Robert and Lasswell, Harold D., The Sharing of Power in a Psychiatric Hospital (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; and the research strategy advocated by Bell and Mau, op. cit.

21 Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, Zohn, Harry, tr. (New York: Haroourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 78 Google Scholar; italics supplied.

22 Gunnell, John G., “Social Science and Political Reality: The Problem of Explanation,” Social Research, 35 (Spring, 1968), 159–201, 173–174 Google Scholar.

23 Tumin, Melvin, “On Inequality,” American Sociological Review, 28 (02, 1963), 19–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also how role differentiation, social stratification, and status inequality are avoided in kibbutzim: Schwartz, Richard D., “Functional Alternatives to Inequality,” American Sociological Review, 20 (08, 1955), 424–430 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gehlen's, Arnold work shows that no specific social order is prescribed by nature: Der Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Bonn: Athenäum Verlag, 1950)Google Scholar; Urmensch und Spätkultur (Bonn: Athenäum Verlag, 1956)Google Scholar.

24 See Lewis, R. W. B., The Picaresque Saint (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959)Google Scholar; Turner, Ralph H., “Role-Taking: Process versus Conformity,” in Rose, Arnold M. (ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), pp. 20–38 Google Scholar; and Lifton, Robert Jay, “Protean Man,” Partisan Review, 35 (Winter, 1968), 13–27 Google Scholar.

25 Bendix, Reinhard, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964), pp. 13–14 Google Scholar.

26 Argyris, Chris, Personality and Organization (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar. See also Bennis, Warren G., Changing Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966)Google Scholar.

27 See Gouldner's, Alvin criticism of sociologists as condescending patrons of outsiders: “The Sociologist as Partisan,” American Sociologist, 3 (05, 1968), 103–116 Google Scholar.

28 See ibid. and works cited in note 18, supra.

29 For a lucid discussion of gaining knowledge through empathic activity, see Burtt, Edwin A., In Search of Philosophic Understanding (New York: New American Library, 1965), Ch. 9Google Scholar.

30 To recognize this may reveal the pathos in efforts to make public administration cases yield general propositions: Mosher, Frederick C. (ed.), Governmental Reorganizations: Cases and Commentaries (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967)Google Scholar. Of course, cases may make the student sensitive to the complexity of administrative processes; to claim more, however, is to succumb to scientism.

31 Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 202 Google Scholar.

32 Robert Jay Lifton has suggested that the mass of men lack tolerance of a variegated present and consequently crave connections with the future because of a pervasive fear of death, and that this in turn generates an interest in progeny, an obsession with durable achievements, and a devotion to undying causes and death-defying leaders: Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar.

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