I take my cue for the title of this paper from Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, who wrote in 1948 that “the political experience of the past thirty years oblige us to evoke the background of non-sense against which every universal undertaking is silhouetted and by which it is threatened with failure.” Merleau-Ponty refers to the experience of that generation of intellectuals for whom Marxism was a “mistaken hope” because it lost “confidence in its own daring when it was successful in only one country.” But this criticism is equally relevant for a new generation of intellectuals in America for whom the ideals of liberalism have been emptied of reality and have become little more than a super-rational mystique for the Cold War, a counter-revolutionary reflex in the third world, and a narrow perspective of social welfare at home. Merleau-Ponty argues that Marxism “abandoned its own proletarian methods and resumed the classical ones of history: hierarchy, obedience, myth, inequality, diplomacy, and police. Today intellectuals in America are making the same critique with equal fervor about their own lost illusions.

As we search for new ways to comprehend the social realities of American life and new modes of social thought and political action to reconstruct “the American dream,” Merleau-Ponty's notion of sense and nonsense guides us to see the historical relationship between ideologies and practice, between thought and action, between man and the world he creates. It symbolizes that recurrent fact in history whereby reason parades as unreason, where even “the highest form of reason borders on unreason.” We must learn from recent history that “the experience of unreason cannot simply be forgotten;” that the most noble claims to universal truth, the most rational modes of philosophical or social inquiry, the most convincing declarations of political leaders are all contingent, and should be subject to revision and open to criticism and change.

It is only fair to begin with an admission that a few years ago I would have regarded the title of this paper as an impossible self-contradiction. Scholarship was one concept; activism another. In those days, the two concepts appeared to me to be incompatible. One could, of course, expect to encounter activists who had been scholars, or who had at least received scholarly training; but one would not expect to find a scholar who was an activist at the same time. In the simplest and most general terms, scholarship implied withdrawal, and activism meant involvement. This, at least, was the tradition with which I was familiar. True, there was such a thing as it applied scholarship, but this applied to subjects with which I was not very familiar, nor was I very comfortable with the concept. It seemed to me that the scholar who was overly concerned with the application of his scholarship was not a true scholar and that he stood in danger of compromising his scholarly objectivity and integrity. Obviously, this was the point of view of a rather standard traditionalist, trained in a study of government which had deep roots in the orthodoxy of the humanities and – in my case — lesser roots in the social sciences, which in my student days still seemed more social than scientific.

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.

Hollywood applauds Glendon Schubert's script for a possible soap opera in his pre-view of Approaches to the Study of Political Science. Stereotypic characters, miscasting of actors, words put in the mouths of fictitious persons, and maudlin grief are all present in his poignant ad hominen remarks, while a task which I regard as important — the development of a science of politics — is curiously overlooked by Mr. Schubert as the main purpose of the volume. And, in a manner similar to David Easton's eloquent 1969 presidential address, it is important to tune out Mr. Schubert's solipsistic One Man's Family and to discuss instead the real reasons for all the current fuss about postbehavioral options.

My own view is that political science has achieved considerable maturity as a discipline in recognizing a fundamental symbiosis between three facets of science as the 1970's begin. At one level, a scientist may seek to describe an individual case, to calibrate measuring Instruments, and to engineer specific changes in the real world. At a second level a scientist can search for relationships between two or more variables across several cases in order to state generalizations that will serve as guides to the future and to cases as yet unexamined. Yet myriad generalizations do not cumulatively add up to higher and higher levels of scientific achievement until we consider a third facet of science, wherein one seeks analytical explanations for empirical findings and smooths out the idiosyncracies of particular research investigations into analytically parsimonious paradigms, models, and theories concerning how the world is put together. These three levels or types of science may be called clinical, empirical, and theoretical, respectively.