Political Science and Political Philosophy: An Uneasy Relation

Steven B. Smith

PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 33, No. 2. (Jun., 2000), pp. 189-191.

Stable URL:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1049-0965%28200006%2933%3A2%3C189%3APSAPPA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I

PS: Political Science and Politics is currently published by American Political Science Association.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/apsa.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.orgMon Nov 5 04:47:58 2007

Political Science and Political Philosophy: An Uneasy Relation Steven B. Smith, Yale University

From its very beginnings political science has been a complex disci-

pline torn in conflicting directions. Consider Aristotle's Politics, the first book that looks like a contemporary political science monograph. In the book, Aristotle presented two op- posing strands of argument that he managed with tolerable success to hold together. On the one hand, Aristotle treated the study of politics as a branch of practical knowledge, its aim being action (praxis), not the- ory. Political action is always contex- tual or circumstantial, the action of particular agents faced with a partic- ular set of circumstances. Therefore, the student of politics needs to be concerned above all with learning the art of political judgment, with how to think and deliberate well under specific circumstances. Aristo- tle wrote the Politics for men situ- ated in popular assemblies, courts of law, and councils of war. He pre- sented politics as inseparable from rhetoric, the art of public persua- sion. Aristotle believed that the per- spective of the political theorist should not depart too far from that of the citizen or statesman.

Yet, at the same time, Aristotle acknowledged that politics is a form of knowledge with its own distinctive subject matter and set of truth claims. Good student of Plato's that he was, Aristotle saw himself as turning the study of politics into a science (epistcmc) inasmuch as it constituted the search for a compre- hensive or general explanation of some particular branch of knowl- edge. His regime typology, his ac-

Steven 6. Smith is rofessor of political P science and Colle at Yale University. Ws Spinoia, ~iberJirrn, and the Question of Jewish Identity (Yale universipress, I 997, was the of the Ralp X Waldo Emerson Prize awarded by Phi 'Beta Kappa.

count of the causes of political con- flict, and his attention to the details of constitution making were all driven by a desire to generalize and order the apparently chaotic events and institutions of political life into some systematic form. He famously distinguished the practical sciences-which in his view included political science, economics, and an- thropology-from both the theoreti- cal and the productive sciences. De- spite making a strong case for the autonomy of politics, his architec- tonic ambition led Aristotle to re- flect on the place of political science within the encyclopedia of human knowledge.

This distinction between what present-day scholars could call the practical and the systematic aspects of political science has been drawn repeatedly throughout the history of the discipline. Machiavelli's Pritice and Di.sco~~ccesurge an appreciation of history, the study and emulation of exarnplary leaders or great founders, and a recognition o l the role chance (fortuna) can play in frustrating even the best-laid plans. In contrast to these books. Hohbes's Leviatlza~i,at least officially, repudi- ates historical inquiry as a form of hearsay, posits a series of simple and parsimonious assumptions about hu- man motivation, and offers a single and universal formula for the cre- ation of an "immortal common- wealth" immune to the vagaries of chance. Leviatlzan offers, in short, a kind of ahistorical political physics that will probably look very familiar, if not in detail at least in broad out- line, to contemporary political scien- tists.

Today, the conflicting tendencies within political science have come very much into the open. Academics have followed the architectonic path of turning the study of politics into a

Political Science and Political Philosophy: A Symposium The following articles were

adapted from papers presented Oc- tober 1, 1999, as part of Yale Uni- versity's de artment of political sci- ence works L' op series, 'What's Worth Doing and Why." The authors thank the audience at the collo- quium, especially Alan Gerber, Michael Mosher, Eric Patashnik, Ian Sha~iro, and Rogers Smith, as well as wch other, for comments and criticisms.

theoretical pursuit unconcerned with the needs of and far removed from the understanding of the ordinary citizen or political leader. No one reading the last dozen issues of the American Pol~trtul Sczence Review would find much that would provide an answer to the most fundamental of all political questions: "What is to be done?" In part as a response to the increased scientization of the discipline, policy scholars now pro- duce little more than studies of cur- rent events almost completely de- void of historical perspective or theoretical underpinning. The politi- cal science section of the Yale Book Store, as in most university book stores I have visited, is full of books that will have no conceivable shelf life beyond the current political season.

Currently, political scientists are forced to choose between one of two identities: laboratory workers dedicated to model building and hy- -pothesis testing or policy analysts whose work is governed by only the narrowest presentism and concern for the needs of the moment. This division affects the kinds of students who opt to major in political science and end up entering the profession.

They are divided between the "nerds" who increasingly regard po- litical science, like economics, as a branch of applied mathematics and the "wonks" who are often driven by an idealistic desire to make the world better but whose sense of "the world" only extends as far as the head-

of constraints, and the "theologico- political" dilemma-are useful inso- far as they add depth to the investi- gation of, say, authoritarian regimes, the modernization of political and economic institutions. and the chal- lenge to secular authority posed by

the rise of funda- mentalist religious

minous with political life and will continue to be so as long as people remain social and political animals.

I am not suggesting for a moment that the study of political philosophy can serve as a substitute for empiri- cal studies of political problems. I am suggesting that without being anchored in the history of political theory empirical studies are likely to be cast adrift without a map and with no sense of destination. That written, I believe that work in three important areas of contemporary political research could be improved if researchers took the approach I have tried to outline.

The Civil Society Debate The debate about civil society and

"social capital" was sparked largely by Robert Putnam's Making Democ- racy Work (1993) and his now- famous "Bowling Alone" article (1995). Although this literature of- ten makes a perfunctory nod in the direction of Tocqueville's account of civic associations in Democracy in Americu, the whole history of the concept of civil society is left virtu- ally untouched. The current discus- sion over the reemergence of civil society in the former Soviet Union as well as the alleged decline of civic associations in America would be immensely enriched by a consider- ation of Locke's Civil Government, Montesquieu's account of the medi- ating role of institutions in L'Esprit dc~s lois, or Hegel's theory of civil society as a training ground of the modern virtues. Even the realization that the term "civil society" was coined by Adam Ferguson in his Es~ayon the Histoty of Civil Society (1767) frequently goes unacknowl- edged.

Cultura ConflictEthnici7and Recent work on ethnic and cul-

tural conflict both within and be- tween cultures has been given pow- erful empirical expression in Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civiliza- tions (1996). The empirical investiga- tions of the causes of such conflicts could be immeasurably strengthened

lines of vesterdav's Academics have movements. With- newspaper. In what followed the archi- out a sense of the follows I propose a history of these way out of this de- tectonic path of problems, one can- plorable state of turning the study of not develop an ap- affairs. preciation of their

Political science politics into a the@ continual resurfac- has within it the re-

Aretical un- ing or the limited sources to move be- ingenuity of tradi- vond the current im- concerned with the ti&] sdlutions to passe and this is them.needs of and far where political phi- The best political losophi comes h. removed from the science is, then, a Political scientists, political science unlike economists, understanding of deeply informed by sociologists. and psy- the citizen thehistory of polifi- chologists, have J cal philosophy. The never completely 01: political leader. advantage of ap-abandoned the his- tory of their discipline. Whatever some may think, political science is not a field like microeconomics or computer science for which the past is studied as simply a prolegomenon to the present. The history of politi- cal thought is not an antiquarian appendage to the real business of research. Rather, it is a repository and a resource of the fundamental problems of political research. Polit- ical philosophy is not a methodol- ogy, a doctrine, or a world view, but an assemblage of problems that can help to deepen, enliven, and guide our investigations.

The study of the history of politi- cal thought alone cannot provide answers to today's questions, but it can lead one to the necessary start- ing points from which investigations should begin. These starting points present themselves as a set of ques- tions or problems that are important because they have stood the test of time, because they have been treated by different political thinkers writing in different contexts at differ- ent times. The study of the history of these problems-problems like the relation between liberty and au- thority, the struggle between the need for justice and the recognition

proaching problems in political science from chis per- spective is twofold. First, it can deepen the work of current investi- gators by bringing it into conversa- tion with that of the best theoretical and political minds of the past. And second, such an approach should help to induce in researchers a use- ful skepticism regarding the unique- ness of the problems of their age since they will have ample evidence that contemporary problems are not unlike those confronted by thought- ful observers in previous times and places. On the negative side, study- ing the history of political thought may lead one to conclude that many of the deepest and most intractable political problems may simply not have solutions. Karl Marx once wrote that every age poses itself only the problems that it can solve ([I8591 1973, 504). This has always seemed to me to represent the high- point of Enlightenment optimism. While Marx's assessment may be true of a limited range of technical or scientific problems, it is almost completely false about politics. Re- garding social phenomena, human beings typically pose for themselves only the questions they cannot solve. Certain problems are simply coter-

190 PS June 2000

by reference to Isaiah Berlin's ([I9581 1969) or Stuart Hampshire's (2000) theories of moral pluralism and the necessary, if tragic, clash of competing goods and values. The view that different cultures foster the expression of competing and even contradictory claims about jus- tice and the human good has found powerful theoretical support in works from Vico's New Science to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. In fact, one could do no better than to return to Herodotus's History, the first and, in many respects, still the best account of the "clash of civiliza- tions" ever written.

Democratic Peace The democratic peace literature

characteristically invokes the name of Immanuel Kant as the godfather of the belief that democratic nations do not fight with one another. That a republican constitution under cos- mopolitan law will secure peace is the premise of Bruce Russett's ex- cellent Grasping the Democratic Peace (1993). But the relation be- tween democracy and peace-a long-standing issue among political theorists-tends mainly to be ex- plored only in the most recent con- texts and often with only the most selective definitions of what marks a country as a democracy. Theorists like Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, who all thought deeply about the relation between institu- tional design and the propensity for

References

Berlin, Isaiah. [I9581 1969. "Two Concepts of Liberty." Four Essays on Libery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hampshire, Stuart. 2000. Justice Is Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

war, could all be referenced produc- is about ideas. No one will ever be tively in the current able to understand debates about con- fundamental political flkt resolution and philosophy ohenomena like war attaining a just and is not a methodol- br revolution without lasting peace first understanding among nations. Ogy7 a doctrine, Or the ideas that moti- -

a world view, but vate the central polit- Concluding an assemblage of ical actors. I do not believe Thoughts problems that can that the current

The history of - A breach between polit- political philbsophy help to deepen, ical philosophy and deserves to stand at enliven, and guide the rest of the politi- the center, rather cal science discipline than the periphery, OUT iIl~eStigati0nS. will be easily re: of its parent disci- pline. In my department, all gradu- ate students take a required course in statistics. They are not required to take a course that would provide them with a common vocabulary or set of concepts that would enable them to make sense of and interpret politics. Perhaps this is because sta- tistics and other methodologies are now regarded as the common lan- guage of political scientists every- where. An advanced course in meth- odology now satisfies my department's "foreign language" re- quirement. The fact that facility with regression analysis is consid- ered equally as valuable as and sub- stitutable for fluency in French or Greek or German is an indication of just how parochial individual po- litical scientists have become. Have two countries ever gone to war be- cause of their conflicting views on methods of data gathering? Politics

Marx, Karl. [I8591 1973. "Preface to the 'Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy."' Selected Works. Vol. 1. Mos- cow: Progress Publishers.

Putnam, Robert. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modem Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

paired. The forces of academic specialization and the divi- sion of labor are simply too en- trenched to overcome or resist. The sense of historically-minded skepti- cism I am advocating is too far re- moved from the confident certainties peddled by today's political econo- mists to appeal to many. Further alienating the formal theorists and their acolytes from philosophy are political theorists who produce ei- ther antiquarian studies of little con- ceivable interest to anyone but themselves or who embrace a post- modernist, feminist, and multicul- tural agenda that compels and justi- fies their isolation in self-sustaining academic ghettos. If the political science of the future is able to adopt the approach to fundamental prob- lems I have been suggesting here, it may yet succeed in restoring coher- ence to a ruptured field. May this come quickly and in our time.

--. 1995. "Bowling Alone: America's Declin- ing Social Capital" The Journal of Democ- racy 6(January): 65-78.

Russett, Bruce. 1993. Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.