2004 real revolution

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The Real Revolution in Political Science

Author(s): John G. GunnellSource: PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 47-50Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488761

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T h e R e a l Revolution i n Political Science

byJohn G. Gunnell,SUNY,Albany

T he Centennial of the American PoliticalScience Association is a propitious point atwhich to reflect on the manner in which thepast of the discipline has been imaged--orimagined. Gabriel Almond's Orwellian dictumthat "whoever controls the interpretationofthe past in our professional history writinghas gone a long way toward controlling thefuture" (1988, 835) may be a bit over the top,but telling the story of political science hasalways been a crucial element in both the dis-cipline's internal rhetoric of inquiry and itssearch for identity. And it has been temptingto apply Thomas Kuhn's imagery regardingscientific revolutions (1970 [1962]) to an in-terpretation of the history of the field and to adescription of the conduct of inquiry. Duringthe 1960s, APSA presidential addresses byDavid Truman

(1965) and Almond(1966), as well asvarious other dimen-sions of the lan-guage of politicalscience, began toemploy Kuhn's con-cept of a paradigmin speaking broadlyabout the development of the discipline andabout the advent of behavioralism. This useof Kuhn can now be construed as somewhatironic in that these individuals had not yetgrasped the extent to which his account of theepistemology and logic of science tended to

undermine fundamental tenets of the positivistinspired behavioral image of scientific inquiryand the attending conception of the history ofscience as linear and cumulative. Moreover,there remains a question of whether the be-havioral revolution was, in Kuhn's terms, arevolution as well as the question of whetherhis concept is applicable to the history ofpolitical science or the social sciences ingeneral.Kuhn found, in his experience, that naturalscience communities were less contentiousthan social science communities regardingwhat constitutes significant problems and theproper methods of inquiry; it was an attemptto explain this difference that led him to hisimage of a paradigm and his argument aboutrevolutionary scientific change. But although,he concluded, social science was not prone tosuch hegemonic dogmas, he noted that "bothhistory and acquaintance made me doubt thatpractitioners of the natural sciences possessfirmer or more permanent answers to suchquestions then their colleagues in social sci-ence" (1970, viii). Thus it was, in his view,more the sociology of the natural sciencesthan their subject matter that rendered themparadigmatic, but the issue of whether or notthere were comparable structures and transfor-

mations in the social sciences remained unre-solved.Truman ultimately concluded that despitecertain periods of "consensus," such as thatrepresented in the revolt against "formalism"and the move toward "realism" between 1890and 1930, that the field had not achieved para-digmatic status. Even though, Truman argued,the contemporary study of politics had over-come the prior "unconcern with the system assuch" and produced a "new disciplinary con-sensus" that promised a recommitment to sci-ence broadly construed, he was skeptical aboutthe discipline achieving the form of normalscience described by Kuhn (Truman 1965,866). A year later, Almond argued that therehad, in fact, been a "coherent theoretical for-mulation in the American political theory ofthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" andthat this paradigm had persisted into the 1950sdespite the anomalies that had "shook its va-lidity" after the turn of the century. This para-digm, he claimed, was based on the conceptsof the "separation of powers, checks and bal-ances, and the mixed constitution" and, al-though characterized by a "rank, non-theoretical empiricism," it constituted an "em-pirical and normative theory of politics"which, however, by the 1960s, was finally re-placed by a new paradigm based on the con-cept of the "political system" (Almond 1966).I will not attempt to document the subsequentuse, and abuse, of Kuhn's formulation in dis-cussions of the state of political science, sinceit is only one manifestation of the complicatedrelationship between the philosophy of scienceand the theory and practice of social science(Gunnell 1998), but I will argue that Trumanwas incorrect in his assessment that politicalscience was nonparadigmatic and that Almondwas mistaken about the logical and historicalloci of paradigmatic concepts.Despite the continuing controversy aboutexactly what Kuhn initially meant by the term"paradigm," whether it referred to a generalform of scientific theory and practice or con-crete "exemplars," as well as his more recentemendations (Horwich 1993; Kuhn 2000), hewas a theoretical realist. Paradigms, accordingto Kuhn, are not only "constitutive" of thepractice of science but of "nature as well,since when paradigms change, the world itselfchanges with them" (Kuhn 1970, 110-111). Heclaimed that there was no essential differencebetween theories and facts and that scientifictheories, and the concepts they embodied,were fundamental claims about what existedand the manner of its existence. The unfortu-nate term "theory-laden" does not convey hisposition. In this category of theoretic claims,we could place, as a recent example, the trans-formation in geological theory represented byplate tectonics and the jettisoning of the belief,

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which still dominated into the 1950s, that the continents werefixed on the earth's crust. In the case of geology as well asthe study of politics, new theories entail new histories of boththe subject matter and the discipline, since, as Kuhn noted,"each scientific revolution alters the historical perspective ofthe community" (1970, ix).What have been, and are, commonly called theories in po-litical science (systems analysis, rational choice, decision the-ory, institutionalism, realism, and the like) are not construc-tions of the kind Kuhn posited. These conceptual schemes ofpolitical science are more properly described as analyticalframeworks, approaches, or models. They are not basic realityclaims that could ultimately be judged untrue in the manner inwhich, for example, the theory of phlogiston was discarded.Such schemes are predicated on the assumption that "facts"are in some way given to experience and that "theories" aretools or instruments for ordering and explaining data. We canassume, however, that there are theories and paradigmatic con-cepts conforming to Kuhn's characterization which are implic-itly embedded in the "facts" that political scientists adduceand which form part of their "tacit knowledge." The questionI am posing is whether there have been paradigmatic shifts inpolitical science that are logically comparable to what Kuhntook to be represented in the history of natural science, that is,fundamental theoretical revolutions that constitute new para-digms and incommensurable domains of facticity, as well as,in the case of political science, a new normative vision of itssubject matter. My answer is that in addition to various inno-vations and continuities in the "disciplinary matrix," there hasbeen one such "revolution" in the roughly 150-year career ofpolitical science as a distinct discourse and discipline. Thislimited degree of paradigmatic change should not seem un-usual, since most scientific theories have had a longer life than75 years. This revolution involved a basic transformation inwhat was considered to be the very "stuff' of politics and,consequently, a transformation in the methods of studying it,and it entailed a normative reconstitution of the idea ofdemocracy and the criteria for assessing the United States as ademocractic polity-a congenital and defining concern of polit-ical science from its inception and conception (Gunnell 2004).The transition that I am referring to is that between the nine-teenth-century theory of the state, initiated by Francis Lieberand more fully elaborated by John W. Burgess and a range ofother political scientists in the last half of the nineteenth cen-tury, and the theory of democratic pluralism which succeededit and which was fully articulated by the late 1920s and early1930s and which persisted through the twentieth century.Caught, as many reflections on the past of political sciencehave been, in the spell of work such as Morton White's ac-count of the "revolt against formalism" (1957), it is commonto characterize the theory of the state as an obsolete archaiclegalistic formulation. But while we may today find that the-ory as implausible as the idea of static continents, there are noindependent or external "factual" or philosophical grounds thatcan be advanced to falsify it and no terms in which we canspeak of its successor as representing "progress." It was a the-ory of both politics and democracy that constituted the factsof American politics and accounted, structurally and tempo-rally, for the United States as a democratic regime. In this pe-riod, what the term "state" referred to was not the institutionsof government but the concept of an organic people or com-munity that preceded both the constitution and governmentand that gave meaning to the ideas of popular sovereignty anddemocracy. This public, this people, was, to be sure,invisible-as in the case of many theoretical entities, but itwas the basis of a vision and explanation of American historyas well as of the particularities and character of politics. It

provided the framework of values for the practice of politicalscience, and it governed the conduct of empirical inquiry.Between the late 1890s and early 1920s, the theory of thestate was severely strained and finally, in the face of growinganomalies or incipient theoretical challenges, put into crisis.There is a persistent and prevailing belief that it was supplantecby Progressive political science as defined by individuals suchas Charles Merriam, but this assumption requires considerablequalification. There is no doubt that the new generation of political scientists who succeeded theorists such as Burgess at Co-lumbia and Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins, and whowere, as in the case of Merriam and Woodrow Wilson, oftentheir students, embraced a different ideology and championednew methodologies, but there was often an essential continuityin theoretical commitments. As Kuhn claimed, "novelty onlyemerges with difficulty" and against the background of deeplysedimented beliefs (1970, 64). Some Progressives maintainedthat the American people were merely dormant and needed tobe awakened, while others, such as Merriam and public intellectuals such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, took the po-sition that if a democratic public did not exist, the task was tocreate it or its functional equivalent. They came to accept theidea that the state was the government, but they retained theimage of an objective public interest if not a public. Whatslowly evolved alongside the Progressive vision, however, andin response to the crisis precipitated by the demise of the theorof the state, was a new empirical account of American societyas pluralistic and lacking any general communal existence. Themethodological "revolution" often associated with this period,and sometimes viewed as a proto-behavioral movement, was entailed by this new vision of political reality. Through the 1920s,Progressives, such as John Dewey, and conservatives, such asWilliam Yandell Elliott, clung to the remnants of the old theory,but by the mid-1930s the revolution was complete within thetheory and practice of political science (Gunnell 2004). AsKuhn indicated, a theory becomes invalid only when there isanother to take its place, and what transpires is more a "conver-sion" and "agreement"and the "assent of the relevant commu-nity" than a "discovery" (1970, 94). The change involved thecreation of a new "language community" as the word "state"came, in the work of individuals such as W. W. Willoughby, torefer no longer to the concept of the people but to the institu-tions of government as surely as the term "continent" came torefer to a different kind of thing than it did before the theory ocontinental drift-and the word "democracy" meant somethingas different as the term "motion" after Newton.Although a pluralist description of politics and a nascentimage of how pluralism might add up to democracy was be-ginning to appear as early as 1914, a full-blown normativeand empirical account of democratic pluralism did not emergein coherent form until the late 1920s. The empirical work ofPendelton Herring and the conceptual innovations of ArthurBentley were important contributions, but the actual principal

authors of pluralism as a coherent and integrated theory, suchas John Dickinson and Walter Shepard, are now largely forgotten. And the manner in which they built upon the work ofEnglish pluralists such as Harold Laski, and students ofGraham Wallas such as G. E. G. Catlin, has been obscured.Their formulation, and their rejection of what they came tocall the "democratic dogma," became, however, the basis ofthe image of liberal democracy that informed mainstreampolitical science during the 1930s and that was recapitulatedbefore World War II by Herring (1940) and once again afterthe War by individuals such as David Truman (1951) andRobert Dahl (1956).The behavioral revolution in political science, despitethe claims of its self-ascribed participants, was far from a48 PS January2004


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revolution in the Kuhnian sense. It was actually more a refor-mation that vouchsafed normative principles and empiricalmethods that had defined American political science for a gen-eration but which, by the 1950s, had been frontally challengedby a new generation of scholars who had emigrated to theUnited States from Europe and who, adopting and adapting tothe subfield of political theory, had called into question boththe commitment to science and the facts and norms of demo-cratic pluralism (Gunnell 1993). The behavioral "revolution"was, in many respects, a conservative movement, a rear guardaction, in defense of the reigning theory of democratic poli-tics, and the historical and philosophical vision attending it,that had become deeply embedded in the language and percep-tions of the discipline. It was an example of "normal science"solidifying itself under the pressure of challenges rather than afrontal rejection of a previous theory of political reality anddemocratic norm. What it rejected, if anything, from the pastof the discipline, was still an echo of the old paradigm. Thereis, for example, no theoretical element of Dahl's formulationof pluralism in the 1950s and 1960s that had not been articu-lated by the early 1930s, and de-spite the embrace of new philosoph-ical grounds for the idea of science,there was little change in the basicimage and goals of science. The in-troduction of the concept of systemby David Easton (1953) and therecommitment to quantitative meth-ods may have, in several senses,revolutionized the practice of politi-cal science, but it was not a para-digmatic revolution. It changed nei-ther the basic conception ofdemocracy nor the dominant imageof what constituted scientific inquiryand its purpose as articulated byMerriam, Catlin (1927), HaroldLasswell (1950), and others. Thereaffirmation of empiricism was inpart a defense against the new andunprecedented attack on the idea ofa science of politics, but it was alsoa response to a context that val-orized pure science and fundedquantitative research. What in parthad been involved in the pluralistrevolution was a rejection of thenotion that there was a substantivedomain, such as the state, that constituted the subject matterof political inquiry. Politics was ever after to be defined ana-lytically by formulations that would be termed "theories" butwhich would bear little resemblance to theories in natural sci-ence and which would be still tied to the practical motivesand motifs of the discipline (Gunnell 1997). There were alsomany reasons for the recodification of pluralist theory after thewar: sedimented as it was in the practice of political science,it was not immediately visible; it was challenged by claimssuch as that of C. W. Mills and various Marxists; and therewas again, as in the early 1930s, a need to distinguish democ-racy, and American democracy, from foreign regimes. But,above all, an attack on liberal pluralism, and the science ofpolitics which was grounded upon it, was mounted within po-litical science itself by the new generation of 6migr6 politicaltheorists such as Leo Strauss and their progeny, as well as bycertain indigenous thinkers, such as Theodore Lowi (1969),who still subscribed to the remnants of the Progressive vision.It was this confrontation with the basic values of American

political science that served to precipitate and galvanize thebehavioral movement.The behavorial era was admittedly marked by methodologi-cal innovation and refinement, but it largely advanced whatwas the "normal" science of politics, and, above all, it waspredicated on the pluralist theory of democracy which it inturn sought to validate. The estrangement between mainstreampolitical science and the subfield of political theory, which wa,rooted in debates that began to appear in the 1950s, was re-ally a function of a fundamental disagreement about demo-cratic theory and political reality. The post-behavioral era wasnot characterized by any final resolution of the basic issue butrather by two academic communities going their separateways. The theory of democratic pluralism remained the foun-dation of mainstream political science, while much of the con-versation of political theory, from the 1960s through most ofthe 1980s, was dominated, and defined, by a persistent rejec-tion of the empirical and normative dimensions of that theory.Where are we today? I would suggest that political theory,as the "vocation" conceived by individuals such as SheldonWolin (1969), was, in many ways,an attempt to return to vestiges ofthe old paradigm as a way of deal-ing with the anomalies that increas-

ingly seemed to plague the theory ofpluralist democracy, and Easton'scall for a "post-behavioral revolu-tion" (1969) harked back to thepractical concerns that had tradition-ally animated the field of politicalscience. The search for "the politi-cal" and for what Wolin referred toas "fugitive democracy" as well asLowi's vision of "juridical democ-racy" were still grounded on an im-age of what Lippmann had, twogenerations earlier, termed a "phan-tom public," and both also reflectedthe practical commitments that hadcharacteristically defined the disci-pline of political science. By themid-1990s, the apostate "calling" ofpolitical theory had, for a variety ofreasons, largely collapsed as some-thing other than a separate profes-sional identity. Its theoretical chal-lenge to behavioralism evaporated,and there was a relatively suddenwholesale return to the fold of pluralism-even by some ofthose who had been its most passionate critics. Albeit, thephilosophical justifications were often new and diverse, butby the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was difficultto find any major persuasion in political theory that did notassume the reality of pluralism and seek to accommodate andbuild upon that reality the requisites and possibilities ofdemocracy. The pluralist turn was reflected in a wide rangeof claims about deliberative democracy, and whether it wascalled associational democracy or the recognition of differ-ence, pluralism was both the "fact and norm" for everyonefrom John Rawls to Jtirgen Habermas. The new pluralism is,in many respects, not the same as the old pluralism-anymore than contemporary evolutionary theory in biology is thesame as Darwin's account, but it is, at bottom, the same the-

ory. What is involved is change within a theory as opposedto change between different theories. For better or worse,pluralism evolved and survived the challenges of the mid-twentieth century.PSOnlinewww.apsanet.org 49


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The "real"revolution n politicalscience took place fourscore years ago, and, in the end, we have not been able tothinkeffectively aboutpoliticalrealityanddemocracyoutsidethe theoretical erms of that revolution.Neitherthe behavioralrevolutionnor the post-behavioralevolutionwere Kuhnianrevolutions.Even communitarianiberalsand those who equatedemocracywith social capitalaccept pluralismas a sociologi-cal realityandhardlysee it as the threat o democracy hatHannahArendt,Wolin,or Habermashad suggestedin theirerstwhiledefensesof the publicrealm.Theremay be worries

aboutthe facts and values of multiculturalismnd identity pol-itics, but few daresuggestany longer,as many had in the1960s, that social pluralism s the congenitaldisease of demo-craticsociety.Whatis worthconsidering,however,is whetherthe anomalies,and pathologies,once attributedo pluralismasa theoryof democracyhave been successfullyresolvedby thecontemporaryormulationsor whetherrecentpluralist heoryrepresentswhat Kuhndesignatedas the tendencyof debilitatedparadigms o maintain hemselvesthrough he mediumof adhoc accretions.

ReferencesAlmond, Gabriel A. 1966. "PoliticalTheory and Political Science."AmericanPolitical Science Review 60 (December): 869-79.- . 1988. "SeparateTables: Schools and Sects in Political Science."PS: Political Science and Politics 21 (autumn):828-42.Catlin, G. E. G. 1927. The Science and Method of Politics. New York:Knopf.Dahl, Robert. 1956. A Preface to Democratic Theory.Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.Easton, David. 1953. The Political System.New York:Knopf.. 1969. "The New Revolution in Political Science." AmericanPolitical Science Review 63 (December) 1051-61.Gunnell, John G. 1993. The Descent of Political Theory:The Genealogyof an American Vocation.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. 1997. "ParadoxosTheoretikos."In ContemporaryEmpiricalPolitical Theory,ed. Kristen Renwick Monroe. Berkeley: University ofCaliforniaPress.. 1998. The Ordersof Discourse: Philosophy,Social Science, andPolitics. Lanham,MD.: Rowman and Littlefield.1. 2004. Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and theDiscourse of Democracy. University Park:PennsylvaniaStateUniversity Press.

Herring,Pendelton. 1940. The Politics of Democracy. New York:W. W. Norton.Horwich, Paul, ed. 1993. WorldChanges and the Nature of Science:ThomasKuhn and the Nature of Science. Cambridge,MA:MIT Press.Kuhn, Thomas. 1970 [1962]. The Structureof Scientific Revolutions.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.. 2000. The Road Since Structure.Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.Lasswell, Harold,and AbrahamKaplan. 1950. Power and Society.New Haven: Yale University Press.Lowi, Theodore. 1969. The End of Liberalism. New York:W. W. Norton.Truman,David. 1951. The GovernmentalProcess. New York: Knopf.. 1965. "Disillusion and Regeneration:The Search for aDiscipline."American Political Science Review 59 (December):865-73.White, Morton. 1957. Social Thoughtin America: The Revolt AgainstFormalism.Boston: Beacon Press.Wolin, Sheldon. 1969. "The Vocation of Political Theory."AmericanPolitical Science Review 63 (December): 1062-82.

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