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The Third Cla’t Theme: Wild in the Corridors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
Extract
This essay is a preview of a forthcoming reader on contemporary American political science. I wrote it, at the solicitation of the co-editors of the volume, as a foreword — not, as Michael Haas so quaintly persists in calling it, as a “preface” (which is something that an author or editor himself writes). The conventional role of the forewordist is to associate his name or position with the volume that he introduces, and to proffer a few hyperbolic pats on the back (or head) of the author before tiptoeing sedately offstage. But my subject is not an innocuous book, and I thought it would be insulting to the editors — and most certainly, inconsistent with their principal theses — if I were to give such a foppish performance at the threshold of a work intended to catalyze a revolution in the behaviors of the members of the political science profession. Editors Haas and Kariel thought otherwise, however; and because their view of professional ethics does not require them to festoon their book with a controversial point of view with which they disagree, what was written as my foreword to their book appears instead in this alternative forum and in the form of a preview.
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- Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1969
References
* A preview of Michael Haas and Henry S. Kariel (eds.), Approaches to the Study of Political Science (San Francisco: Chandler, forthcoming 1970). Much of the thrust of the present commentary is directed toward the concluding chapter, co-authored by Michael Haas and Theodore Becker, an abridgement of which is tentatively scheduled for publication as an article now re-entitled “A Multimethodological Plea,” in the March 1970 issue of Polity. “Third Cla'm” is a contraction of “Third Classicism,” it being the editors' argument that the behavioralists of the First and Second Generations have brought about the political science profession's second period of classicism, “dating from the 1930's.” Logically, those persons who proffer a neotraditional program, as an alternative to the regnant (second) classicism, are proponents of yet another (and evidently, what would be the third) classical era. In the spirit of Fred Riggs' remarks about the virtues of neologisms (Chapter 8, footnote 12), I shall opt for the grace of brevity by referring to the promised era of the Third Cla[ssicis]m as the “Third Cla'm,” and to its neoclassicist protagonists as “third cla'ts.”
1 Ms. p. 221.
2 Cf. Haas, Michael, “Bridge-Building in International Relations: A Neotraditional Plea,” International Studies Quarterly, XI (1967), 320–338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Ms. p. 846. Clearly these neotraditionalists are neither the positivist behavioralists of the 1920's and 1930's, nor are they the theoretical behavioralists of the 1950's. Logically, I should think that they ought to describe themselves as third generation behavioralists; but it is a wise child who knows his own generation.
4 E.g., Mendelson, Wallace, “The Neo-Behavioral Approach to the Judicial Process: A Critique,” American Political Science Review, LVII (1963), 593–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 See Woolf, Harry (ed.), Quantification; A History of the Meaning of Measurement in the Natural and Social Sciences (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961).Google Scholar
6 The Fifth Edition (1968), which retains the traditional rubrics for those members who continue to identify with them, but which proffers also an even larger array of more contemporary alternatives for classification.
7 Basing my data on the Biographical Directory (ibid.), I find that as of 1968, six contributors are over 50 years of age, and the average age of these plus two others is 51; the average doctoral year for these eight was 1948. None of the eight younger contributors is over 36 years old, and their average age is 34; their average doctoral year was 1962 — one was 1958, and all others during the sixties. The differences between the means are 17 years of age, and 14 years in degrees; ihe three year difference between the differences can, perhaps, be attributed to the delaying effect of World War II upon the careers of the oldsters.
8 See Eulau, Heinz, “The Maddening Methods of Harold D. Lasswell: Some Philosophical Underpinnings,” Journal of Politics, XXX (1968), 3–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 The Future of Political Science (New York; Atherton Press, 1963).
10 Particularly in view of the concessions in Chapter 1 that “the behavioralist movement since World War II can be viewed as having a fundamentally moral basis” and that “such a conclusion stands out most clearly in the writings of Harold Lasswell.”
11 In which context it may be worth recalling that Lasswell, is the author of a book entitled Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1930).Google Scholar
12 And see, for example, Danelski, David J., “A Behavioral Conception of Human Rights,” Law in Transition Quarterly, III (1966), 63–73.Google Scholar Professor Danelski is equally well known for his work as an attorney donating his services in defense of academic freedom and racial equality, as he is respected for his research contributions as a leading judicial behavioralist.
13 Including several of the contributors to McCoy, Charles A. and Playford, John (eds.), Apolitical Politics: A Critique of Behavioralism (New York: Crowell, 1967).Google Scholar
14 On the importance of personality and academic ideological differences in scientific research, see Watson, James D., The Double Helix (New York: Atheneum, 1968)Google Scholar, a work of nonfiction; and for an account of how such differences affect the relationships between and among traditionalists and behavioralists in one (of course, fictional) political science department, see Hudson, Helen, Tell the Time to None (New York: Dutton, 1966).Google Scholar
15 I borrow the caption, of course, from Frank, Jerome, Law and the Modern Mind, New York: Coward-McCann, 1930), pp. 243–252.Google Scholar
16 Note that this kind of anxiety is the analogue of the third cla'ts' sense of loss for not having been trained, in graduate school, in the traditional lore. Perhaps (to invoke again the Freudian metaphor) this neotraditional facet of multimethodologism can best be understood as akin to penis envy.
17 Cardozo, Benjamin, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University, 1921), p. 179.Google Scholar
18 Surely it is no accident that histories of the profession are beginning to appear at the very time when there remain few surviving members of the original professional cadre, whpse personal experience encompasses the events of that history.
19 Compare Paul Goodman's statement that “The liberal sociologists of pluralism do not understand the matter of style at all (not in their prose, either). But many conservatives understand it very well and therefore have much in common with the new radicals.” “Practical Jurisprudence,” Law in Transition Quarterly, IV (1967), 7.