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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
“… [T]here is no necessary conflict among these three desires of the American social scientist: to be a scientist like physical and biological scientists, to provide useful technical services, and to be significant at the level of policy. The chapters of this symposium are intended to illustrate their compatibility.”
This statement indicates a major theme of The Policy Sciences – a volume that marked, as of 1951, the aspirations of a group of leading American social scientists for the policy applications of their disciplines. The harmony of goals that it suggests is no longer evident today.
The possible incompatibilities among the goals of pure science, applied science, and policy can be seen by examining The Policy Sciences in two decades' perspective. They are of three major kinds:
1. To provide intelligent advice on practical problems, the social science disciplines need to include systematic valuative discourse in a way that natural science does not.
2. Applied social science (like applied science generally) differs from pure natural science in stressing valuative dependent variables that may not be closely related to the conceptual schemes of pure science, and independent variables related to alternative choices open to the actor.
3. Different roles and channels of influence are appropriate for pure and applied science; and for applied social science in democratic regimes, participation and consent on the part of those influenced are of vital significance.
Paper prepared for Roundtable on “The Policy Science, in Retrospect and Prospect,” at meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, September, 1970.
1 Hilgard, Ernest R., in Lerner, Daniel and Lasswell, Harold D., eds., The Policy Sciences (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 43.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., ix; see also Hilgard, 43. This and subsequent references to The Policy Sciences will be given simply by listing the author's name and the page.
3 George V. Wolfe wrote in a review, “Not one of the contributors … explicitly deals with the crucial question of any ‘policy sciences,’ … that is, with the problem of values.” See Western Political Quarterly. 5 #2 (June, 1952), 320.
4 Especially Chs. 2–5, 7–12.
5 Whitaker, Ch. 15.
6 Merton and Lerner, 294.
7 Merton, 292.
8 Lasswell, 5; Merton, 302.
9 These categories are distinguished in Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965), Chs. 11–13.Google Scholar See also Etzkowltz, Henry, “Institution Formation Sociology,” Am. Sociologist, 5 #2 (May, 1970), 120–124.Google Scholar
10 Lasswell, 3.
11 Lasswell, 106, does contemplate “conditions under which the United States will undertake to organize the world by conquest.”
12 Lerner, 285ff. The utility of sociology to business has also been documented in Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Sewell, William H., and Wilensky, Harold L., eds., The Uses of Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1967).Google Scholar
13 See Merton, 298–300. Whether there should also be consultation of those affected by the policies formed is a question we shall consider below.
14 Merton, 300–301.
15 Merton, Robert K., Special Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, rev. ed., 1957), Ch. X.Google Scholar
16 Rossi, Peter H., “Researchers, Scholars, and Policy Makers: The Politics of Large Scale Research,” Daedalus, 93 #4 (Fall, 1964), 1157.Google Scholar
17 Hilgard, 41. See also Merton, 301, 306.
18 Merton, 299–300.
19 Merton and Lerner, 296. They were accorded low status in the Bush report (275). Parsons advised at the time that they proceed with caution and seek support only for work of high quality; see Parsons, Talcott, “The Science Legislation and the Social Sciences,” Am. Sociol. Rev., 11 #6 (December, 1946), 664.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Even the modest degree of intervention by the scientist-consultant in the name of his own values, suggested by Hilgard, was criticized sharply by Lundberg; see Lundberg, George A., review of The Policy Sciences, Am. Sociol. Rev., 17 #1 (February, 1952), 114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 E.g., Lasswell, 5.
21 Lerner, 284, 294.
22 Lasswell, Chs. 1, 6, p. 10.
23 A related critique is Horwitz, Robert, “Scientific Propaganda: Harold D. Lasswell,” in Storing, Herbert J., ed., Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962).Google Scholar Edward A. Shils, ten years after contributing to this volume, presented a critique of “scientism,” an ideology he judges to derive from an inappropriate extension of the values of natural science, and to fail “to contribute to the self-improvement of society rather than the manipulated improvement of society.” He fears “that the technological development of sociology under the patronage of the mighty will take a scientistlc turn.” See his “The Calling of Sociology,” in Parsons, Talcott et al. , eds., Theories of Society (New York: Free Press, 1961), pp. 1438, 1437.Google Scholar
24 Likert, 239. We shall consider below the use of this type of information in applied science, including traffic control as well as economic guidance.
25 Adorno, Theodor W. et al. , The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).Google Scholar A major collection of criticisms was Christie, Richard and Jahoda, Marie, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” (New York: Free Press, 1954).Google Scholar
26 See for example Charlesworth, James C., ed., Contemporary Political Analysis (New York: Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Ranney, Austin, ed., Essays on the Behavioral Study of Politics (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1962).Google Scholar
27 Kaplan, Abraham, The Conduct of Inquiry (San Francisco, Calif.; Chandler, 1964), p. 399.Google Scholar
28 Committee on Political Parties, APSA, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” Am. Pol. Sci. Rev., 44 #3 (September, 1950)Google Scholar, Part 2, Supplement.
29 The concern of political science with matters of valuation was viewed by one author of The Policy Sciences as separating it from the natural-science model: Hilgard, 40.
30 See Bell, Daniel, ed., The Radical Right (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963).Google Scholar
31 A perceptive review of changes over the two decades is given in Horowitz, Irving L., “The Academy and the Polity: On Social Scientists and Federal Administrators,” in Shlbutani, Tamotsu, ed., Human Nature and Collective Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970).Google Scholar
32 See for example Baritz, Loren, The Servants of Power (New York, Wiley, Science Editions, 1965)Google Scholar; Surkin, Marvin, “Sense and Nonsense in Politics,” PS: Political Science & Politics 2 #4 (Fall, 1969), 573–581.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 Parsons, “The Science Legislation and the Social Sciences,” op. cit., 665. See also Parsons, , “The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change,” in his Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Free Press, 1954).Google Scholar
34 A more detailed proposal for this type of discourse is given in MacRae, Duncan Jr., “Scientific Communication, Ethical Argument, and Public Policy,” Am. Pol. Sci. Rev., 65 #1 (March, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a related comparison of the valuative viewpoints of two disciplines, see Olson, Mancur Jr.,“Economics, Sociology, and the Best of All Possible Worlds,” The Public Interest, 12 (Summer, 1968), 96–118.Google Scholar
35 An effort in this direction by a natural scientist, which unfortunately lacks the organized support of an academic discipline, is Feinberg, Gerald, The Prometheus Project (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968).Google Scholar The political situation of natural scientists, as affected by the Oppenheimer case, is discussed in Feld, Bernard T., “Only on Tap,” The Progressive, 34 #5 (May, 1970), 44–46.Google Scholar
36 This twofold distinction is made, for example, in Lazarsfeld, Sewell, and Wilensky, eds., op. cit., pp. xxiv–xxvi.
37 See Silvert, Kalman H., “American Academic Ethics and Social Research Abroad,” in Horowitz, Irving L., ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar See also Merton, 303–306.
38 A classical statement of this problem was given in Robbins, Lionel, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan, 1937), pp. 140–141.Google Scholar See also Arrow, Kenneth J. and Scitovsky, Tibor, eds., Readings in Welfare Economics (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1969).Google Scholar
39 M. Mead, 75. But terms of this sort relate to action in the same way as the “solubility” of chemical substances.
40 Variables “accessible to control” are mentioned in Gouldner, Alvin W., “Theoretical Requirements of the Applied Sciences,” Am. Sociol. Rev., 22 #1 (February, 1957), esp. 96–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A similar distinction is made in Glen G. Cain and Harold W. Watts, “Problems in Making Policy Inferences from the Coleman Report,” ibid., 35 #2 (April, 1970), 230; but James S. Coleman argues in reply that interrelation of variables requires inclusion of non-manipulable variables, in “Reply to Cain and Watts,” ibid., 244.
41 Lazarsfeld and Barton, 156. Predictions of inevitable change have of course been coupled with the Marxist doctrine of midwifery, and Lasswell (11–12) takes a similar approach to “the world revolution of our time.” The ethical logic of this view is criticized in Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and its Enemies (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), vol. 2, p. 205.Google Scholar See also Duncan, Otis Dudley, “Social Forecasting: The State of the Art,” The Public Interest, 17 (Fall, 1969), 88–118.Google Scholar
42 Merton, 305–306n., cites Conant to this effect.
43 See Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., “Whether Party Government is Inevitable,” Pol. Sci. Quart., 80 #4 (December, 1965), 517–542 Google Scholar: Schorske, Carl E., “Weimar and the Intellectuals,” New York Rev. of Books, 14 #9–10 (May 7–21, 1970), 22–27, 20–25.Google Scholar
44 Hyman, 204. The interpretation of responses in terms of Individual motivation, as in the Hawthorne studies (Lazarsfeld and Barton, 164), has since been criticized in Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 112–113.Google Scholar
45 Lasswell, 11, and ch. 6.
46 See “Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress,” Daedalus, 96 #3 (Summer, 1967). Other work in this field is reviewed in Duncan, op. cit.
47 Examples of changing feasibility are the possible introduction of new issues into a party system after the shock of depression or defeat in war; or the possibility of political change after the retirement of a major leader, or at the time of a party reorientation. A physical analogue is the presence of “seedable” clouds.
48 Cf. the “principle of consequences,” as treated in Flathman, Richard E., The Public Interest (New York: Wiley, 1966), Ch. 8.Google Scholar
49 We wish thus to enlarge the definition of operations research as “a scientific method for providing executive departments with a quantitative basis for decisions …” For a critique of this definition on other grounds see Stoller, David S., Operations Research: Process and Strategy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 10–11.Google Scholar
50 See Edelman, Murray, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).Google Scholar
51 The extensive use by economists of simultaneous equations as descriptive of causal relations was foreshadowed in Arrow, 131, 150–153. Applications to numerous other fields are made in the journal Operations Research.
52 See Schultze, Charles L., The Politics and Economics of Public Spending (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1968), pp. 55, 75.Google Scholar
53 On evaluation studies see Likert, 244–245, 251; Hyman, 204n., 205, on the Strategic Bombing Survey; Schultze, op. cit., pp. 61ff. On feedback see Dror, Yehezkel, Public Policymaking Reexamined (San Francisco, Calif.; Chandler, 1968), p. 161 Google Scholar; Savas, E. S., “Cybernetics in City Hall,” Science 168 #3935 (May 29, 1970), 1066–1071.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
54 The contingent character of forecasts is noted by Merton, 304; the incompleteness of the engineering analogy in Schultze, op. cit., p. 60.
55 Katona, 223ff.; Likert, 239; Hilgard, 23; Lasswell, 13.
56 See Braybrooke, David, Three Tests for Democracy: Personal Rights, Human Welfare, Collective Preference (New York: Random House, 1968).Google Scholar
57 U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Toward a Social Report (Washington, C.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), p. iii.Google Scholar See also Henriot, Peter J., “Political Questions about Social Indicators,” Western Pol. Quart, (in press).Google Scholar A step toward this systematic discussion is Olson's, Mancur “An Analytic Framework for Social Reporting and Policy Analysis,” Annals of the Am. Academy of Pol, and Soc. Sci., 388 (March, 1970), 112–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
58 Lerner, 282.
59 Lasswell, 10, 14.
60 See Hilgard, 41–42; Merton, 300; Behavioral and Social Sciences Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the Social Science Research Council, The Behavioral and Social Sciences: Outlook and Needs (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969)Google Scholar, chs. 12, 13.
61 On the desirability of outside analysis as a supplement to government in-house analysis, see Schultze, op. cit., pp. 91–92. On the “fusion of the roles of the acting and knowing subject,” see Kecskemeti, Paul, “The Policy Sciences: Aspiration and Outlook,” World Politics, 4 #4 (July, 1952), 535 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on an “enlightenment model” that sees the sociologist as “part of the social process,” see Janowitz, Morris, “Sociological Models and Social Policy,” Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphil., 55 #3 (August, 1969), 311.Google Scholar
62 See Riecken, Henry W., “Social Sciences and Social Problems,” Social Science Information, 8 #1 (February, 1969), 114–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
63 See Smith, Bruce L. R., The RAND Corporation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar An interdisciplinary study recently carried out at RAND, aimed at effective self-government in the Philippines, is Averch, H. A., Denton, F. H., and Koehler, J. E., A Crisis of Ambiguity: Political and Economic Development in the Philippines (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
64 See Shils, Edward A., “Social Inquiry and the Autonomy of the Individual,” in Lerner, Daniel, ed., The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences (New York: Meridian Books, 1959).Google Scholar
65 Hilgard, 42, 41; Merton, 301–302.
66 Horowitz, ed., op. cit.; Rainwater, Lee and Yancey, William L., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Shipler, David K., “City Held Unable to Halt Housing Decay by Subsidy,” New York Times, Feb. 28, 1970, pp. 1, 14.Google Scholar
67 Schultze, op. cit., pp. 94, 74; see also p. 88 on the role of entrenched constituencies.