The last but one sentence of this piece from Voegelinview warrants posting it here even as it might not appeal to every reader!
As an academic discipline, political science is relatively new, with departments and degrees dedicated to the scientific study of politics emerging only in the preceding century. However, this does not mean that the study of politics is newfangled, since Ancient Greek times scholars have dedicated significant energy to understanding the nature of the polis. What is different in the contemporary era, even compared to the academic disciplines’ early origins, is that the study of politics aims at markedly different ends than it once did. From Aristotle to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, political scientists understood themselves not only as explaining political phenomena but also as diagnosing the problems of the regime to inform political actors. This noble mission has all but been lost in the academic field of political science today. Almost only political theorists work to understand the problems of their polity and provide solutions, whereas most of the “social scientists” of the field have committed themselves to increasing myopia. In short, as the study of politics has become more scientific it has also become less political, and in the end, less useful to society. To serve its original purpose – its better purpose – political science must reconstitute itself.
The late Prof Billy Dudley, the permanent doyen of Political Science in Nigeria
What Is Traditional Political Science?
For most of human history, the study of politics had an activist quality to it. By activist I do not mean to invoke the image of a teeming horde of protestors with signs, but instead, a quality of public spiritedness that seeks to improve the world into which we are all born. Since Plato’s Academy in Athens, thinkers such as Cicero, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville have sought not just to understand politics but to provide solutions for what they viewed as the major political crisis of their day. For example, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America spends much of its time explaining the nature of the political and social states in America. But it also dedicates an equal amount of time to describing the various problems that could arise through these states and how these difficulties can be resolved.
As James Ceaser has argued, historically to be a political scientist meant “to apply oneself to the study of certain basic questions that derive almost naturally, from an encounter with political life. Political science takes its bearings from what is recognized in developed societies as the most important politically: the character or quality of political systems.” At its most practical this meant discovering “the factors that maintain and destroy different regimes and international orders.” In other words, political science has historically derived its research questions from the problems it sees as endemic to the current political moment in an attempt to both understand the times and help improve society.
At the heart of Ceaser’s account of traditional political science is the regime. Though often used incorrectly, the term regime refers simply to the social and political system that follows from who rules a territory and what values govern those rulers. All humans, whether willingly or not, live under some sort of regime. Some regimes – such as liberal democracy or constitutional monarchy – are on the whole good. While other regimes – such as democratic despotism or dictatorship – are living nightmares. The job of traditional political science is both to study the nature of regimes and to gradually promote improvement to the regime under which they live.
This means that traditional political science will look different in different places. In a communist tyranny, the job of a political scientist is to gradually nudge his nation closer to a better – freer – regime. This is not to say that political scientists must lead a populist revolution, but they should at the very least promote institutional and public policy reforms that improve the general quality of their nation. For someone inhabiting a liberal democracy, the role of political science becomes almost medical – to diagnose sicknesses that live untreated in the regime and provide cures. Put simply, a political scientist should be something akin to the doctor of a regime.
Traditional Political Science as an Academic Discipline
A key space of Political Science
Though traditional political science has flourished for centuries, it was not made a formal academic discipline taught to university students until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Founders of the academic discipline, such as Woodrow Wilson and Edwin Corwin, were truly dedicated to the idea that the study of politics could, and should, inform those who work in the political world. These early professors of political science remain fairly instructive in the work an average political scientist can accomplish – for those of us who cannot reasonably be expected to regularly produce works that are on the theoretical and intellectual level of Aristotle or Montesquieu.
In his own presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Woodrow Wilson argued that the social state that underlies politics is constantly evolving. The goal then of political science is the accurate observation of these changes “by which the lessons of experience are brought into the field of consciousness, transmuted into active purposes, put under the scrutiny of discussion, sifted, and at last given determinate form in law.” Put simply, in Wilson’s view political science is meant to take the lessons of history and philosophy and use them to update a nation’s political solutions as the culture shifts.
The early founders of political science believed that this overtly political goal of the discipline was a vital part of cultivating sound governance in a nation. Though committed democrats, the early political scientists believed that the people could not possibly be trusted with fully understanding the complexity of politics and that the academic study of politics could help keep elected officials and appointed bureaucrats knowledgeable of the larger trends of the political world. In essence, the field of political science was intended to be the self-aware thinking organ of the rapidly expanding state. As Charles Zug has cogently summarized, early political scientists believed in a diagnostic field of study “capable of uncovering the deep structure or regime of a nation, discerning what it needs for healthy operation, and diagnosing pathologies.” Without such work being done the “illnesses” of the regime would be left unchecked and spread like a dangerous cancer.
This understanding of what political science ought to be was not just theoretical. Before becoming president, Woodrow Wilson made a serious study of American institutions in his work Constitutional Government in the United States. In this book, he argues that America has changed since its founding and because of the increasing complexity of government requires a re-arrangement of its institutional structure. He then thoroughly examined the major American institutions and how they function before making his recommendations. As a prominent public intellectual and later elected official, Wilson worked hard to make his ideas about the American regime a reality. Whatever we may think of Wilson’s many deeply flawed solutions, he serves as a shining example of exactly how the field of political science should be practiced.
The work of Robert McCloskey represents a more achievable – but just as important – example of traditional political science at work in the preceding century. McCloskey’s seminal work The American Supreme Court, gives a detailed history of the nation’s highest court but also provides a strong normative argument that the Supreme Court flourishes best when it restrains and moderately maintains the delicate balance between democracy and constitutionalism. As our current Supreme Court faces record low approval ratings, this kind of scholarship can be incredibly instructive in helping us understand what has gone wrong and where we can go from here.
Hegemonic peace making!
Contemporary Political Science
Though much of the early work on institutions performed by scholars such as Woodrow Wilson has major flaws, it preserves the traditional aims of the science of politics – aims that for so long deemed a worthy matter of concern for great minds. What then happened to so radically transform political science from its original purpose? While the discipline of political science was being founded, positivism was on the rise, preparing itself to brutally eliminate traditional political science.
Positivism is a school of thought dedicated to two principles: that, like the natural sciences, social science should be based on empirically observable facts, and that there should be a sharp distinction between the objective and subjective. As Milton Freidman has cogently summarized: “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgements … Its task is to provide a system of generalizations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change in circumstances. Its performance is to be judged by precision.” Positivist political science differs drastically from its traditional counterpart in that it has no normative activist mission. Instead, it merely seeks to explain how politics works, rather like a field biologist may seek to explain the social structure of baboons.
The first major principle of positivism, that social science must be based on empirically observable facts like the natural sciences, is a response to the rationalist approach to social science research that was embraced by traditional social scientists. The rationalist approach understands social phenomena through universal laws that then shed light on the particulars of the world. Positivists inherently reject this broad-brushed approach to understanding the world.
Like the argument against rationalism, the belief in making a clear divide between subjective and objective research was designed to make social science more strictly scientific. In the eyes of the positivist, values are matters of opinion and essentially contested, and this means that it is impossible to arrive at a consensus on such issues since these are not issues that can be truly known. Because debates over values cannot be resolved, positivists believe that grounding social research in normative opinion damages its ability to explain social phenomena. The importance of this principle is such that Max Weber, the chief theorist behind positivism, stated that it was the essential contribution of the positivist project.
By making social science objective and less general positivists hope to give it greater explanative power. In most cases, this has been conceived of as “predictive power.” By prediction positivists do not fully mean the power to predict how social phenomena will pan out in the future (though this is certainly part of prediction), but rather the ability to accurately depict how events have transpired. In practice, this emphasis on prediction has led to a modern obsession with causality among political scientists. In the realm of positivist social science, causality means deciphering the series of events that will lead, or have led, to a particular outcome.
The general effect of positivism in political science has been the gradual erosion of historical, theoretical, and ethnographic research in favor of cold statistical analysis. Positivists tend to believe that the older, more humanist, methods of social science are less empirical and thus less accurate. They argue that by their very nature history and theory rely on value judgments that fly in the face of the key principles of positivists. Thus, for a positivist, the methods deployed by a political scientist need not look different from economics or sociology, but they must depart starkly from the traditional liberal arts.
How do we know who did it? Political Science has no answer to that yet because positivism can’t answer it
The Problem of Positivism
At this point, a reasonable person may ask: but what is wrong with facts and precision? In theory nothing but when these principles are transformed into an unthinking doctrinaire method there begin to be problems. Positivism’s desire to distinguish harshly between facts and values gradually erodes a social scientist’s ability to provide almost any meaningful analysis. To examine one’s political situation and offer a diagnosis of it is an innately value-laden act. By condemning all such use of normative arguments as antithetical to true social science, positivism destroys all chance of traditional political science. To borrow the example from above: Woodrow Wilson could never recommend that the presidency and the party system be made the central American institution based on empirical facts alone. Yet such recommendations should form an important aspect of a serious study of politics.
Likewise, the positivist emphasis on prediction is both damaging and fallacious. To decide whether a particular theory is predictive — whether or not it is valuable by positivist standards — is an innately normative choice. All people, social scientists included, will judge a theory by how well it fits their general understanding of events. In fact, the idea that a concept’s predictive power is the standard by which we should judge things is itself a value statement — and not a very good one.
A recent article published in the premier political science journal helps to prove the stale weakness of a political science without values. In the article, Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves seek to show presidents are strongly motivated to pay particular attention to certain portions of the country that benefit them and ignore the rest of the general population. They do this by tracking where presidents send grant money and find that presidents do send more grants to the portions of the country that support them, over other geographic areas. Having proved their interesting hypothesis Kriner and Reeves proceed to do nothing with it. Should we be concerned by presidential particularism? If not, why? If so, then what can we do about it? Leaving these questions for the reader to decide is perhaps not the worst thing in the world, but it does seem a sad waste that the two leading scholars of this subject should be barred from offering an opinion on it by the rules of positivist political science.
Even if the positivist fondness for some kinds of research over another was not an irreparable paradox, it still ignores important research that must be done to understand politics in our time. For positivism not only prevents political scientists from making their own normative claims but also from trying to understand the normative claims made in the political realm by everyday citizens and political actors. This kind of research is vital to fully comprehending the motivations of political actors.
The scholarly malpractice of such research is well captured by Jeffery R. Lax and Kelly Rader in their article “Bargaining Power in the Supreme Court: Evidence from Opinion Assignment and Vote Switching.” Lax and Rader are attempting to discover how Justices on the United States Supreme Court use their votes to bargain with one another. They discover that the most powerful bargainer on the Supreme Court is the Justice closest to the center, by comparing who writes what opinions with a statistical score assigned to each Justice based on ideology.
Once again this is an interesting tidbit of information and in many ways it’s perfectly intuitive. Yet Lax and Rader are left unable to answer any of the larger questions that arise from such a study – how does each faction of the Supreme Court prefer to compromise? Does it matter if the centrist judge is more conservative or liberal? Does this hold equally true for more controversial issues? Lax and Rader are left completely unable to answer such questions. Because the writings and ideas of the court are not expressed in numbers – you must actually read and think about values to understand justices. But it is just this sort of thinking that positivism forbids on principle.
Resurrecting Traditional Political Science
If positivism is the disease that plagues political science, the next logical question is what remedy can be provided and what particularly should replace the academic hole its removal would leave behind. This does not mean that positivism must be done away with, whatever the personal objections of many more traditional students of politics it is a view with widespread support and in the interest of free thought should be allowed a continued existence. Instead, the discipline of political science must be forced to make room for the traditional methods of political science.
The first question – what can be done to resurrect traditional Political science – does not necessarily have a scholarly answer but a more political one. For the most part, positivism has sustained itself not on the strength of its theoretical position or by regularly proving itself superior on the plane of intellectual debate. Rather positivism survives because it has itself become an engrained cultural institution. The social theorist Paul Pierson has described an institutional phenomenon called path dependence which argues that the longer an institution, cultural value, or idea exists the more it becomes entrenched in the human mind and world around us. This is exactly what positivism has done to survive. It is taught to young social scientists from the moment they begin their academic careers and almost all the research funding, department committees, and major journals are controlled by ardent positivists. Ironically, the idea of positivism sustains itself as the very kind of subjective cultural value that it theoretically despises.
This means that to make room for a non-positivist political science the work that must be done is not intellectual but political. Put differently, the continuous publishing of articles about the wrongness of positivism will not loosen its stranglehold on the field — it has not done so up to this point and there is little reason to think that this should change in the future. Instead, the institutions that work to sustain this dangerous worldview must be systematically invaded by non-positivists who can then themselves fight to make sure that traditional political science once again has a place in the field.
The second question, what should replace positivism, is a far easier one. Though traditional political science has been stigmatized and maligned in the positivist regime, it has persisted. Not only has it persisted but notable political scientists and theorists have worked to articulate improvements in how it can be approached by the researcher. In particular, Alexander Wendt, James Ceaser, and Charles Taylor have offered widely praised views of the problems with the research currently dominating the field and have provided legitimate alternatives.
Prof Alexander Wendt, most likely to still be the most popular political scientist in the world today. He was a few years ago in spite of his problematic strain of constructivism before moving to quantum IRs
Alexander Wendt does not himself break from positivism, instead just arguing against the discipline’s obsession with causality. However, his alternative method offers a serious approach that can help to point scholars in the right direction. Wendt rejects the typical division between descriptive and explanative research instead arguing that the field should be divided into causal and constitutive research. Causal explanations are the ones that seek to understand what chain of events caused something to happen by asking why and how questions – this is the approach that currently dominates the academic discipline of political science. On the other hand, a constitutive explanation “seeks to account for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist.” The goal of this kind of research “is to show how the properties of a system are constituted.” This kind of research opens the door to a fuller and more expansive view of a subject than casual inference positivism usually allows. However, because of his overall adherence to positivism Wendt’s constitutive analysis does not offer a drastic improvement it merely points in the right direction. To understand how something is situated in the fullest sense requires the abandonment of positivism, something Wendt refuses to concede.
A far better alternative to the entire positivist project is offered by the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor argues in favor of what he calls a political science of hermeneutical interpretation defined by “an attempt to make clear, to make sense of, an object of study” that is “in some way confused, incomplete, cloudy, seemingly contradictory – in one way or another unclear.” Taylor’s interpretivism is an attempt to make something legible that otherwise would not be. Like a theologian interpreting a holy text or a literary scholar interpreting a great work of fiction, he is calling upon the political scientist to examine human activity and interpret what it means.
Taylor argues that such a method is preferable for two primary reasons. The first is his rejection of positivism’s fact-value distinction which he believes is both artificial and damaging to true political inquiry. His second reason that interpretivism must be a major part of the field is that it truly reflects the nature of humans and their interactions with the political world in a way that positivism simply does not. For Taylor human behavior is “done out of a background of desire, feeling, emotion” and when being studied must be “characterized in terms of meaning.” To understand this meaning, we must understand the subjects of study as they understand themselves, something that can only be done by fitting ourselves “into their way of life” if needed by the use of our imagination. Put another way, no matter how much the positivists have tried, no formula has proved able to unlock the complicated web of passions, prejudice, and longings that shape the world around us – trying to read the heart of humanity is not all that different from reading Plato’s Meno. A rejuvenated political science would thus follow Taylor’s lead.
Taylor’s interpretivist method of studying politics gets us partially to the resurrection of traditional political science but it is missing the important diagnostic element. Taylor provides a framework through which a scholar can understand political phenomena but not a framework that overtly encourages them to use this method to diagnose the problems of their current politics. This is corrected by American political scientist James Ceaser. Ceaser largely agrees with Taylor’s view of how political science should be performed, though he uses different language. The major difference is that he makes it clear that political science should be dedicated to aiding the political actors of a regime in understanding its problems. Ceaser makes clear that not just any political science can do this, to merely interpret a political phenomenon is not enough. It must be a political science that “is conscious of the intellectual niche potentially open to it in modern society and that is willing to engage in a constructive enterprise on behalf” of the regime. In other words, political science must be open and honest about its activist mission when conducting its scholarly research inquiries.
How a political scientist should be open and honest about their mission depends on the political scientist in question. For some taking an active role in the political process as a civil servant or statesman is key, while others stick to the realm of ideas. After all, it is hard to challenge anyone for following in the footsteps of either Cicero or Socrates. But in both cases, the political scientist acquires their knowledge of politics not simply for its own sake but to try and shape the regime in which they live.
Just as there are different ways a political scientist can go about promoting their goals for a regime, there are also many different parts of a regime a political scientist can focus on. Some, like John Maynard Keynes, prefer to study the relationship between economics and the regime. This stands in stark contrast to Alexis De Tocqueville who begins his study of democracy by concentrating on the culture of America. Others prefer to specialize in the interaction between law and a regime or governing institutions and a regime, and still, others like to deliberate on the question of the best regime simply. Each of these gives rise to the various subfields of traditional political science: political economy, political sociology, public law, political institutions, and political philosophy. Though less formal and divided than modern political science subfields, each of these has its own robust tradition, and reviving each as a serious field of political inquiry, driven by the methods of traditional political science, is a major step towards reviving the academic discipline.
Like the traditional study of politics, Ceaser and Taylor do not offer a perfect science. The project is in fact far more political than it is scientific. When two political scientists offer competing interpretations and diagnoses, determining which is correct is largely a matter of which seems the most convincing and well-argued. This is by its nature a normative activity, but positivism is only so much better at rising above normativity, and its attempt to do so sacrifices a genuinely useful discipline that studies topics that matter.
Conclusion
In its original inception political science was designed not just for the banal study of political minutia, but to study and contend with events of great import. It was meant to not only understand politics but also to be part of the political project itself. Purposefully activist it sought to study the major political problems of the day, trace their historical roots, and offer recommendations about what could be done to fix them. For millennia this version of the study of politics flourished. But just as this view was given its own academic discipline, positivism undermined its major principles. Since then, positivism has sustained itself as a cultural value that aims to vanquish all scholarly views that strike them as unscientific. This change in the field has forced political science to dedicate itself to studies that offer little genuine insight into politics. Meanwhile, those who practice true political science have been vanquished to the fringes of the various subfields or confined to political theory. The friends of true political science must therefore aim to make this reemergence not a hopeful wish but a reality by breaking positivism’s stranglehold over the field and replacing it with diagnostic interpretivist work. If this is done perhaps once again political science can regain its former glory.
