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Metaphysics, Ethics, and Political Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

William T. Bluhm
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Extract

ItIs customary to describe the development of political science since the Second World War as a step toward the creation of an empirical science of politics. Not its empiricism, however, but rather its concern for theory is understood to be the defining characteristic of the new way. The prescientific period was also empirically oriented, but it was naive, unthinking empiricism which treated the acquisition of political knowledge as a matter of collecting political facts as one might collect butterflies. Empiricism became scientific, it is said, only when it became theoretical, when its practitioners realized that before they could collect butterflies they had first to fashion a proper net and devise a scheme for ordering the specimens to be caught. At the heart, then, of what we mean today by the science of politics stands political theory, understood as the self-conscious construction of conceptual systems for ordering reality and of hypotheses to explain the interconnections of the parts of these systems. Beside the scientist as survey researcher and statistician stands the scientist as theorist, as author of approaches, frameworks, and models.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 1969 , pp. 66 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1969

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References

1 The framework literature and much of the commentary on it blurs the important distinctions that should be made among such terms as framework, (approach), model, and theory. In a recent study Eugene Meehan has presented an excellent, crystal-clear statement of the distinctions. An approach or framework (for example, Almond's “systems theory”) is a “classification system for data.” It specifies items about which material should be collected, but suggests no logical relationships amongst the nominal definitions. “In a model” (for example, Anthony Downs, in An Economic Theory of Democracy) “the initial postulates are related deductively, hence the model is more than a program for classifying empirical data.” It may suggest hypotheses suitable for empirical investigation, though it does not itself explain phenomenal reality. “Theoriesexplain or relate generalizations.” Frameworks and models are “theory” only in the sense that they facilitate theorizing. The Theory and Method of Political Analysis (Homewood, 1965), pp. 130, 149–50, 161–63Google Scholar.

2 Truman, David, “Disillusion and Regeneration: The Quest for a Discipline,” American Political Science Review, 12, 1965, p. 871Google Scholar.

3 Ibid.

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5 Almond, Gabriel et al. , Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton, 1960), pp. 5, 7Google Scholar.

6 Easton, David, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York, 1965), p. 21Google Scholar.

7 Lasswell, Harold and Kaplan, Abraham, Power and Society (New Haven, 1950), p. 189Google Scholar.

8 Easton, David, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), p. 49Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 33.

10 Eulau, , op. cit., p. 7.Google Scholar

11 Reference to quotation in text above footnote 2.

12 (Princeton, 1960).

13 Easton, , A Systems Analysis of Political Life, p. 12Google Scholar.

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16 Storing, Herbert et al. , Essays on. the Scientific Study of Politics (New York, 1962)Google Scholar. See also the polemics involving a review article by Wolin, Sheldon and Schaar, John and the Straussian, rebuttal in American Political Science Review, LVII (1963), 125–162Google Scholar.

17 A Framework, p. 36. Cf. Spann, Othmar, A History of Economics (New York, 1930), p. 60Google Scholar, which gives an exegesis of some Fichtean concepts. “The spirit of the individual has as its form of existence the community or Gezweiung.” This “mental or spiritual associative tie between individuals exists as an independent entity, … it is superindividual and primary, whereas the individual is derived and secondary.”

18 Buchanan, James and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor, 1962), p. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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31 Lasswell, Harold, The Future of Political Science (New York, 1963), pp. 5, 38Google Scholar.

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37 See, for example, Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957)Google Scholar.

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39 Easton, , A Systems Analysis, p. 14Google Scholar.

40 Tullock, Gordon, The Politics of Bureaucracy (Washington, 1965)Google Scholar.

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43 (New York, 1962).

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47 Buchanan, and Tullock, , Calculus of Consent, p. 20Google Scholar.

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49 Simon, Herbert, Models of Man (New York, 1957), pp. 204–205, 196Google Scholar.

50 Landau, Martin, comment during panel on “Political Theory and the Study of American Politics,” APSA Convention, New York, Statler-Hilton Hotel, 09 7, 1966Google Scholar.

* An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the 1966 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 09 7, 1966Google Scholar. Copyright, 1966, The American Political Science Association. Copyright, 1968, The Review of Politics.