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The State of American Political Science: Professor Lowi's View of Our Discipline

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert A. Simon
Herbert A. Simon*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
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Extract

This note questions both some of the premises and some of the conclusions of Theodore J. Lowi's diagnosis, in the March 1992 American Political Science Review, of the state of the political science discipline. Since I am given a prominent, if undeserved role, in his analysis of historical trends, perhaps I may be pardoned if it begins by refuting that part of his argument.

Surely one should feel great (and devilish) delight at learning that one has exercised diabolical influence over the shaping of political science. Alas, I am wholly lacking in the power that Professor Lowi attributes to me in his paper. Alas also, if I were armed, my gun was not aimed in the direction he supposes it was. I am not at all in sympathy with the Third American Government whose (confused) economics-based ideology he presumes I created, as anyone will recognize who has read the foreword to the recent re-issue of the Simon-Smithburg-Thompson textbook, Public Administration, or the earlier work, Administrative Behavior (AB), or the more recent Reason in Human Affairs. Are these books written so obscurely that Professor Lowi could not see that the rationality celebrated in them (if any rationality is celebrated at all) is a weak, muddled, bounded rationality that is rejected out of hand by the economists who espouse public choice and neoclassical laissez-faire theory?

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 1993 , pp. 49 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1993

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References

Notes

1. It is a little boorish of me to complain about Professor Lowi's treatment of me in an issue of the Review where on pages 196-98, in a review of my autobiography, my views are treated accurately, and even quoted at length. But some readers may not persist from page 4 to page 198. Professor Wahlke, in his generous review, does make one mistake. He erroneously states that I have retired. No way.

2. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, (1950) 1991.

3. New York: The Free Press, 3rd edition, 1976.

4. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983.

5. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

6. A review of the articles in the March 1992 issue (other than two essays on the history of theory) shows those by Warren, Swank, Huckfeldt and Sprague, Mouw and Mackuen, and Weatherford to be behavioral, while those by Lake, Abramson, et al., and Green belong to the public choice stream. To quantify, the score is 5 to 3.

7. “Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science,” APSR, 79: 293–305 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.