Systematic Politics

Elementa Politica et Sociologica

George E. Gordon Catlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000349283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1962, Systematic Politics presents Catlin's political theories and reviews the work of contemporaries within the field.

Divided into two parts, Part One is focused on political science and explores areas such as definitions and functions, the theory of politics as hypothesis, freedom and authority, and different forms of government. Part Two centres on political philosophy, discussing topics such as community, society and the individual, and law and sovereignty.

Systematic Politics will appeal to those with an interest in the history of political thought, political theory, and political philosophy.

PART I: POLITICAL SCIENCE

1. Introduction on Method

§i. What is Science?

"The proper study of mankind is man." So wrote Alexander Pope. Socrates, against the too dominant prestige of the physicists of his day, had thought the same. It is today's issue also. The study of institutions is derivative from this study of the nature of man, unless—like Marx—one would make man to be flotsam on the material stream and the creative spirit epiphenomenal or, as would perhaps be countenanced by Hume, one would make institutions and social habits or conventions some kind of causeless, arbitrary factor and unmoulded moulder.¹

¹"Habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded." (Essay on the Origin of Government) However, (a) Hume admits "other principles"; (b) provides a psychological analysis of habit in terms of association; and (c) rests all these principles upon a postulated 'human nature.' "Politics admit of general truths." (That Politics may he Reduced to a Science) It is a central theme for Hume that there is "a science of man.'

The present unbalance of culture and material civilization—an inversion and perversion of the concerns of Socrates which makes physics the prime study, which indeed increases the powers of the human race —has not had uniformly fortunate results. Especially is this true where the disposition of the fruits of physical research often remains a matter of political decision, concerning which physicists have neither professional competence nor, in this alien field, better common judgement than other men. We need to have recalled to us the judgement of Plato, from which substantially Aristotle does not dissent, that Politics is architectonic, not only (as The Statesman indicates) in its art but in its professional study. The practical importance to humanity of Pure Politics, which we shall explain later, is not less than that of Pure Physics.

Mr. John Plamenatz has recently argued (in his German Marxism and Russian Communism, 1954; hereafter cited as German Marxism) that "the proper study of politics is not man but institutions." This dictum, rightly calling attention to the need for the objective, quantitative, and comparative study of institutions, is probably no more than reaction against profitless speculations by academic theorists about dead philosophers with dead theories of social contract and the state of nature. The tradition of Mill, Sidgwick, Bryce, and Wallas (as will be shown) is yet different in emphasis from the quoted remark. We must beware of what A. F. Bentley calls "evading the very central structure of [the] study." The downright statement of Professor Wright Mills is valid and should be digested: "the facts . . . are . . . about the success and the failure of individual men and women" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 3). However, we can cast the judgement in more social terms. No one denies that a vast subject has to be subdivided for pedagogical purposes, if there is to be any mastery of it. It may well be professionally desirable to specialize in Municipal Government, Trade Union structure, or the constitutional structure as interpreted by the Supreme Court. But, on principle and scientifically—and this is the condition for vital advance—we must agree with Professor Martin Lipset that "the independent study of the state and other political institutions does not make theoretical sense" (Political Man, 1960, p. 23). This has been one key theme of the present writer for these last three or four decades, although for traditional reasons it has not commended itself to political students in some countries until recently. It is a pleasure to cite Professor Lipset's quite remarkable and outstanding recent book in support. The tide is turning.

The demand is incessant in the popular press, and indeed among responsible writers, that "man's political and social genius should catch up with his scientific genius." But the complaint has been the same for thirty years. Little indeed, either by way of expenditure of money or of concentrated thought upon scientific method, is done about the matter, since in politics every man regards himself as an adequate authority. On the other hand, as Lord Attlee, sometime Prime Minister of Britain, has remarked, eminent physical scientists on the matter of politics display less judgement than that usual with the ordinary voter. It is not who manufactures the hydrogen bomb but who decides to throw it and why, that we have to consider.

The rewards of the Nobel Committees go to physicists and chemists for exact research but, where peace is the concern, they go traditionally to those responsible for good works or to practical statesmen. Were the concern in social and political research as serious and hopeful as in physical and chemical research, the reward could be directed into comparable channels. It is a matter for satisfaction that the 1959 award was made to Mr. Philip Noel-Baker, for a very fine technical study. The incessant identification, alike in the press and among politicians, of all science with physical science does harm at all levels, including that of the financing of research, and bastardizes the social sciences.

In considering Political Science, the first question that arises is whether or not it exists. The reply depends upon what is meant. Some may prefer to call it Political Sociology; and then add that Sociology is a science, in a specific sense. But 'Politico-Sociological Science' is a cumbersome form of words. Can there be a 'new science,' nuova scienza, born from political theory? Should it fight its way against the ever-conservative scholasticism of the 'establishment' of the universities? 'Science' may, as a term, be used so widely that, like the German Wissenschaft, it becomes a word describing any body of logically systematic knowledge, such as is philosophy. In this sense we can (as it has been called) 'scientize'—this being just an obstinate and consistent method of thinking—about anything at all. But such scientizing will be devoid of predictive value.

Duns Scotus writes: "Scientia est de mutabile, secundum quod est immutabile" (Quaest. in Post. An. I). "And so from necessary and appropriate principles it proceeds to necessary conclusions, and thus in this respect is science." (Quaest. super Univ. Prophyrii) It is the element of constancy which is of the essence. Both Windelband and Rickert use 'science' in an extended fashion, to which reference is made above, on the supposition that 'events' can profitably be described as able to be ordered into a 'science' (Ereigniswissenschaft), although it yields no 'immutable' laws, but is only subject matter for a discipline. So the crafts of palaeography and heraldry are called 'sciences,' not to speak of pugilism and law. So also we may speak of a Geisteswissenschaft of art or history or of culture; and even a Literaturwissenschaft is discussed. This view, common in German Sociology, is here challenged. The late Professor Karl Mannheim (in Ideology and Utopia, 1929, ed. and trans. L. Wirth and E. A. Shils, 1954, p. 146) asserts that "a political science is possible and can be taught"; but he did not mean by it what we mean here. According to the perhaps excessively severe judgement of Professor Arnold Brecht (Political Theory, 1959, pp. 10 ff.), the chief offenders here are "the professional escapists," who either "ignore the problem" or who refer the whole matter to the historians, or for original thought substitute—what, of course, is of indisputable importance in its different sphere, as this writer has elsewhere asserted—studies in the history of other people's ideas. It is with some slight surprise that the writer finds himself listed by Professor Brecht in the brief category 'Machiavellian.'

The term "science' may also be used, as it frequently is in the English-speaking world, to mean a connected body of knowledge or the knowledge of a system of relations based upon observation and, as Lord Kelvin said, preferably upon quantitative measurement. These, together with exactitude and an agreed language of definition, are the requirements. Lord Kelvin's preference here is as old, in the history of thought, as Pythagoras. In this context such a phrase as 'Moral Sciences,' like 'Experimental Philosophy,' is to be regarded as an archaic oddity. 'Science' is, moreover, here thought of as yielding through its studies empirically testable laws,' or conclusions about constants, which give to man, or to the professors of these matters, some hope of powers of prediction and control. These are much needed if indeed man's intelligence in the ordering of his own society is to keep pace with his dangerously "uncontrolled control" of the physical world. When we refer to a law' we refer to a formula which, like Solomon's signet ring, gives the secret of useful control. We are not committing ourselves either to a Kantian view of laws, or to a Hegelian or realist view of the nature of this law as immanent. To this topic, however, we shall return. Patently those who have this knowledge will concretely modify their own future conduct (as they also modify nature) in the light of what most surely would have happened if they had not possessed it. (This, for example, is a commonplace of economics.) Their science must, hence, be prepositional, hypothetical, abstract, and a matter of als ob, 'as if.'

Dr. James B. Conant, sometime President of Harvard, in his Modern Science and Modern Man (1952, Anchor ed., pp. 106-7) writes: "Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations." He adds, in agreement with Professor M. Polanyi (quoted infra, p. 387) and in a sentence relevant to certain false distinctions often drawn between the natural and the social sciences, "the activities of scientists in their laboratories are shot through with value judgements." "These conceptual schemes have been essential for the advancement of science." (p. 120)

In his excellent booklet The Present State of American Sociology (1948), Professor Edward A. Shils—of Chicago and Cambridge universities, and himself an excellent example of the international quality of this whole scientific movement-writes of the specialized studies of Professor R. E. Park that "they were however still not science. They might have become such had [Park] seen the need to relate concrete indices to general abstract definitions, and the indispensability of general and not just particular explanations." (p. 11) This comment applies to many British 'mass observation' and detailed "area' surveys, illuminating although they may be. (Conversely, it may be added, a concrete social problem often has to be broken up into components, each subject to its own generalizations, which component factors are not perceived by an enthusiastic or alarmed public opinion. Cf. the present writer's analysis in Liquor Control, 1931.) "Sociologists have lacked the concepts, the first-hand knowledge and the observational techniques and even more important they have not been able thus far to isolate the problem which should be studied. . . . Certain basically important problems and hypotheses which should have been common to all [sociology, economics, law and political science] were neglected by all." (The Present State of American Sociology, p. 22. Vide also p. 55.)

It is important in regard to predictive utility in the social sciences that all students, including critics, should note the importance of the conditional 'if,' and the 'as if' of the schematic models, as distinct from dogmatic prediction or prophecy about historic facts of a time and place. As Professor Joseph A, Schumpeter says (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed., Harpers, 1950, p. 416): "Any prediction is extra-scientific prophecy that attempts to do more than to diagnose observable tendencies and to state what results would be, if these tendencies should work themselves out according to their logic." This warning is peculiarly important when we come to the alleged sciences of History, on which vide Professor Karl R. Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (1957).

It is noteworthy that, as shown by recent scholarship, Herodotus was concerned, not with literary talks, but with the illumination of cause and consequence, even if the beginning of the wars which Herodotus records was no more than a riot about women. Herodotus, if unscientific, was here as right in supposing an order as the astrologers, in their unscientific way, were right in supposing that the heavenly bodies influenced the tides. Science begins this way, with conversion of unscientific thesis into critical hypothesis. The Father of History is here followed, in very significant words, by Thucydides, who writes that his object as an historian was "to give a true picture of the events which have happened and which, human nature [τό a̓θνρώπϵιον] being what it is, are likely to be repeated at some further time with more or less exactness." His History of the Peloponnesian War finds that the major source of the trouble was "the pursuit of power, animated by covetousness and ambition." Elsewhere (i, 23), he ascribes the cause of the Peloponnesian War to fear by Sparta of the growing power of Athens. Those who, on the contrary, for a variety of causes arising in the mental climate of certain periods and connected with scepticism about the powers of the analytic reason, doubt whether politics or economics can achieve any degree of exactitude have preferred to use some such non-committal, tepid, or ambiguous phrase as 'social studies.' We must, of course, anyhow only expect, as Aristotle warns us, from any science such exactitude as is apt to the subject matter. The issue is: how much?

Thus, the Professor of Political Science in the University of Cambridge, Dr. Denis Brogan, despite the title of his chair, said in his Inaugural Address (1946): "We may doubt today whether any such academic discipline as political science exists, a doubt practically unknown to earlier ages . . . Politics may have all the potentialities of the atomic bomb, but those potentialities are not [pace Marx] the result of the activities of political scientists . . . This university has wisely provided for the case of any professor holding this chair who might be tempted to deny the historical character of the studies by attaching him to the History Board." It is doubtful indeed if one can sit in a chair if it does not exist. There is irony in the fact that Principal John Caird (University Addresses, 1898), in an address given to the University of Glasgow in 1884, inquired whether History ought to be permitted to rank as a fit academic discipline, and commented that the expediency of putting it into the curriculum "turns upon the question whether history is capable of scientific treatment . . . submitting itself to the grasp of principles." How different was then the mental climate—and doubtless it will be again. In a somewhat different sense to Principal Caird, it may be pointed out that, in the most recent historical work, statistical analysis, for example of electoral rolls, has been introduced to check the too rash generalizations of earlier historians.

Professor H. D. Lasswell, indeed, and the present writer have been selected and coupled by Professor T. I. Cook, of Johns Hopkins University, as two children pursuing a road that must lead to a "dead end" (although he also has referred to these children as "founding fathers"); and this writer alone has been isolated into pre-eminence by Mr. William Esslinger in his Politics and Science (1955) as having this undue faith in a science. (The different view of Professor David Easton, in his full discussion in The Political System, 1953, is cited later.) Indeed, in the present tractate, the writer is not saying new things but reiterating old things said thirty years ago and re-emphasizing them. Esslinger does, however, attribute to the school of thought, here defended, and specifically to the present writer, the position of being "one of the first in our time to treat systematically the question of linking theory with practice in politics"—so the science is not too impractical. Those engaged upon this work can say, as did Machiavelli in his Introduction to the Discorsi: "I have resolved to open a new route." Perhaps it is only fitting to add the warning context which Machiavelli supplies to this remark: "The envious nature of man, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents."

It will be noted that, some time ago in his Human Nature in Politics (1908), that great and inadequately honoured man, Graham Wallas, wrote: "We must aim at finding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature as possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in political reasoning." However, although the attention of the student, when discussing such heady abstractions as 'socialism,' 'capitalism,' 'sovereignty,' should always be directed to 'what actually does happen' and to the objective, nevertheless let us always remember that no amount of discourse on facts as such about political institutions will per se answer any theoretical questions or practical ones either. In this sense alone we can say that it is a learned frivolity and exclaim with Rousseau against its professors, "Ecartons les faits."

It is of secondary importance (and not essential) that experiment shall be possible of a precise kind, although this experiment is indeed only possible in a limited fashion in not only Politics and Economics, but also Astronomy and Geology. Whereas experiment is important, what enters into the definition of 'science' in that more precise sense in which we shall here use it is the possibility of empiric verification of general statements. Frequently this can involve the possibility of prediction, certainly not in the sense that, like crystal-gazers, we can prophesy in detail what is going to happen, but in the sense that we may predict what will happen upon the contingent hypothesis of certain circumstances recurring, and 'as if' they recurred. This recurrence may be sufficiently close to give practical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part I: POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Part II: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• Index