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On the Nature of Political Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
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Political activity is dangerous. Arising inevitably out of men's ability to influence each other, conferring upon them the benefits of joint endeavour, an indispensable source of social boons, it is also capable of doing great harm. Men can be moved to injure others or to ruin themselves. The very process of moving implies a risk of debasement for the moved and for the mover. Even the fairest vision of a good to be sought offers no moral guarantee, since it may poison hearts with hatred against those who are deemed an obstacle to its achievement.
No apology is required for stressing a subjective dread of political activity: the chemist is not disqualified as a scientist because he is aware that explosives are dangerous: indeed that chemist is dangerous who lacks such awareness.
This feeling of danger is widespread in human society and has ever haunted all but the more superficial authors. Although, to be sure, few have, like Hobbes, brought it out into the open, it has hovered in the background, exerting an invisible but effective influence upon their treatment of the subject; it may be, to a significant degree, responsible for the strange and unique texture of political science.
There are no objects to which our attention is so naturally drawn as to our own fellows. It takes a conscious purpose to watch birds or ants, but we can not fail to watch other men, with whom we are inevitably associated, whose behaviour is so important to us that we need to foresee it, and who are sufficiently like us to facilitate our understanding of their actions. Being a man, which involves living with men, therefore involves observing men. And the knowledge of men could be called the most fairly distributed of all kinds of knowledge since each one of us may acquire it according to his willingness and capacity.
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1961
References
1 “Tel se croit le maître des autres qui ne laisse pas d'être plus esclave qu'eux,” says Rousseau in the first lines of the Social Contract. He elucidates in Emile: “Domination itself is servile when beholden to opinion: for you depend upon the prejudices of those you govern by means of their prejudices.”
2 It is a sobering exercize to count the expressions of anger (as against those of good will) which occur in the speeches or writings of political champions of this or that moral cause.
3 Different voices denounce the encroaching State, overbearing Lords, an established Church, or tentacular unions, or the dominant party: yet such voices, however discordant, all express distrust of some form of established power. In the same manner, emergent power is deemed frightening by some when an agitator musters a mob, by others in the case of a rising dictator—though one may turn into the other. The same feeling crystallizes on different stems.
4 Discussed in Brecht, Arnold, Political Theory (Princeton, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Weil, Eric, “Philosophie politique, Théorie politique,” Revue française de Science politique, Vol. 11, No. 2 Google Scholar.
5 Cf. Polanyi, Michael, Science, Faith and Society (London 1946)Google Scholar.
6 Nor was this language so natural to a more theological age: it sits specially well with Deism.
7 Cf. Singer, , Holmyard, and Hall, , A History of Technology (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1954 et seq.)Google Scholar.
8 Science now “changes the world”: not so in Chinese civilization. Cf. Needham, , Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, 1954 et seq.)Google Scholar. Question: if science does so, is it not because of an urge which arose outside the scientific community and challenged it?
9 Hobbes' view: “The end of knowledge is power … the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done.” Opening of De Corpore.
10 This choice of ground is the more remarkable in that Voltaire, who originally subscribed to Leibnizian optimism, was shaken out of it, so the scholars tell us, by a natural event, the disaster of Lisbon. Yet he chose the ground of human affairs for his attack. Note that even on this ground, Voltaire had previously illustrated Leibnizianism (in Zadig, as stressed by Hazard). But in so doing he must have felt the difficulty and thus when he declared war upon the system this was the battlefield he elected.
11 This theme appears in John Stuart Mill and in our day has been fully developed by Maurice Allais.
12 These have been less discussed than one would wish. See, however, Stark, W., The Ideal Foundations of Economic Thought (London, 1943)Google Scholar; Myrdal, G., The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (English ed., London, 1953)Google Scholar; Frazer, Lindely M., Economic Thought and Language (London, 1947)Google Scholar; and Schumpeter, J. A., History of Economic Analysis (London, 1954)Google Scholar; but above all, Pareto, Vilfredo, Manuel d'Economie Politique (Paris, 1909)Google Scholar.
13 Openly stated by Adam Smith, and underlying Pareto's great work.
14 This is most clearly recounted in Dahl, Robert A., “The Behavioral Approach in Political Science,” in this issue of this Review, above, pp. 763–772 Google Scholar.
15 The most authoritative attack is that of Strauss, Leo: “What Is Political Philosophy?” Journal of Politics (Aug. 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Kristol, Irving, “The Profanation of Politics” in The Logic of Personal Knowledge, Essays presented to Michael Polanyi (London, 1961)Google Scholar.
16 I allude to the frontispiece of Dupont de Nemours' pamphlet of 1788: Réponse aux Observations de la Chambre de Commerce de Normandie.
17 It takes an observer foreign to Britain and the United States to note the extreme formality attending the least political move (e.g., the decorous conduct of even the most insignificant meetings) and to notice the fundamental orthodoxy which underlies all political differences.
18 Ecclesiastes, 8, 14.
19 This seems to be the main lesson which Necker has drawn from the great events he was so well placed to witness. It impregnates the two main works he wrote in his years of retreat: Du Pouvoir Exécutif dans les Grands Etats, 2 vols. (1792, no place of publication)Google Scholar; and De la Revolution Française, 4 vols. (1797)Google Scholar. Strangely enough, in view of the very important political role their author played, these works enjoy a very limited reputation. But a preoccupation which imbues the whole work of Necker is sharply brought into view in these two vivid paragraphs written by his famous daughter, which are here quoted.
20 de Staël, Baronne: Considérations sur les Principaux Evénements de la Révolution Française, 3 vols. (Paris, 1818), I, 416 Google Scholar.
21 Op. cit., II, 240–41.
22 E.g., militantism in its moderate and extreme forms (conspiracy, terrorism).
23 The two sciences are of equal antiquity. Hippocrates was born in 460 B.C., between Socrates (469) and Plato (427).
24 “For the worshippers of Hygeia, health is the natural order of things, a positive attribute to which men are entitled if they govern their lives wisely. According to them, the most important function of medicine is to discover and teach the natural laws which will ensure a man a healthy mind in a healthy body.” Dubos, René, Mirage of Health (London, 1960), p. 113 Google Scholar.
25 Galen said that the duty of the doctor is to conserve the natural condition, to reestablish it when perturbed, and to restore what is lacking as far as feasible. From Broussais, F. J. V., Histoire des Doctrines Médicales et des Systèmes de Nosologie, 4 vols. (Paris, 1829.), I, 200 Google Scholar.
26 Ibid., I, 107 ff.
27 Dubos stresses that the broad point of view of orthobiosis leads to “the danger of substituting meaningless generalities and weak philosophy for the concreteness of exact knowledge.” Op. cit., p. 137.
28 The word “microbe,” now a popular term abandoned by scientists, was introduced by them as late as 1878.
29 Claude Bernard wrote: “Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and as it is not enough to know a country's topography for the understanding of its history, it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs for the understanding of their functions. An old surgeon, Méry, compared anatomists to those messengers who are to be found in great cities, and who know the layout of the streets, and the numbering of buildings but do not know what goes on inside. Indeed, in tissues, in organs, vital physicochemical phenomena occur which mere anatomy can not reveal.” Leçons sur les Phénomènes de la Vie Commune aux Anitnaux et aux Végétaux, 2 vols. (Paris, 1878), I, 6–7 Google Scholar.
30 This complacency is a most uncommon attitude.
31 Again, when one takes Athens as a model, one forgets that in its age of extreme democracy (which did not exclude slavery) the notion that “aliens” could not become part of the body politic was so fundamentally embedded that Pericles himself was the author of a law which struck from the registers a large fraction of the citizenry who could not prove that they were descended from both an Athenian father and an Athenian mother.
32 Though why the Roman Empire should have been looked back upon as a healthy political body is beyond my understanding.
33 For instance, the transposition of the U. S. constitution in Latin America, or, for that matter, the transposition of the Westminster model in Continental Europe.
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