Preface
Last updated 8-14-2009
Copyright 2008-9 Robert E. Botsch
Before we get into the material for the course,
I want to make a few comments on how these readings, which are really
electronically printed lectures, are organized and how you can best make use of
them.
First, the material is organized in outline form just like a well-organized
classroom lecture would be. I'll give
you the outline before I give you the text. The outline consists of main
headings and a number of different levels of subheadings. This will hopefully help you to organize it
in your head and remember it. Before you
read the details, you would be wise to study the outline to see what the module
is all about. Then read the
details.
Second, the style of the lectures is conversational. That is, I will write them in much the same
way I would be speaking to you. Hopefully
this will make them easier to read (and more fun to write!).
Third, students always want to know what
is important, meaning what they absolutely need to know for test purposes. Obviously, I expect you to know the major
ideas. You can identify those from the
headings in the outlines that are built into the lecture and from passages and
phrases that I have underlined.
In addition, there are a number of terms that you should know. These will be identified by bold print (see, just like that!). You
can count on seeing a number of these on tests. You will see a complete list of
these at the end of each module ("Key Terms"). You may want to print
just that page, even if you print no other part of the modules, to help you
review the material for the test.
Keeping all of this in mind, let's get
started.
Chapter 1. The History of Political Science and Major
Concepts
Politics
are almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be
killed once, but in politics many times. Winston Churchill
OUTLINE
I. What is politics?
A. A personal story to illustrate.
B. Some definitions of politics
1. Who gets what, when, and how much
2. Power and the powerful, influence and the influential
3. The authoritative allocation of value
4. The art of the possible
5. Generic Politics
a. Accept and adjust
b. Try and change categories
c. Change the values associated with the categories
II. Differences between civics and
political science
A. Civics
B. Political Science
1. Scientific
2. Emphasis on power
3. Behavior
4. Use of all available tools‑‑multidisciplinary
III. History of Political Science: Some
Leading People and Periods
A. The Classical Period
1. Aristotle
a. The founder
b. Inductive methods
c. Analytical
2. Others
a. Socrates
b. Plato
c.
d. Common approach: seeking the
philosophical ideal
B. The Middle Ages
1. Politics plays subordinate role
a. Emphasis on afterlife
b. God's will
c. Deemphasis of thought
2.
C. The Enlightenment
1. Machiavelli
a. Life
b. Empirical
c. Work
2. The Contract Theorists
a. Thomas Hobbes
b. John Locke
c. Jean‑Jacques Rousseau
D. The Birth of Modern Political Science and Karl Marx
E. Political Science in the
1. Roots in history programs
2.
3. The American Political Science Association‑‑1906
4. Trend toward science‑‑the 1930s
5. The rise of behavioralism‑‑the 1950s and 60s
6. Post‑behavioralism‑‑the countermovement of the late
1960s
and 70s
7. Rational Choice--trying to make the discipline even more scientific
IV. Three Basic Concepts
A. Power
1. The first face‑‑making things happen
2. The second face‑‑stopping things from happening
3. The eternal problem of power
B. Legitimacy
C. Institutions
TEXT
I. What is Politics?
A. A personal story to illustrate.
Just like most of you, I didn't major in political science as an
undergraduate. I was in mathematics and physics and bent on being a scientist
who would discover and work with the forces of nature that could transform our
world. I had to take a couple of
political science courses as general educational requirements ‑‑
again like many of you. The courses were
interesting, but certainly not interesting enough to make me even think of
changing majors.
Several years after graduating while doing a tour in the military, I
decided I wanted to know more about politics. Consequently, I decided to return
to school and seek a graduate degree in political science. I've been hooked
ever since.
A number of factors and experiences led to this decision to study
politics. A non classroom experience I had in undergraduate school may have
helped plant the germ of an idea in my head that politics was something just as
powerful, if not more powerful, than anything I had studied in math and
physics. Moreover, the experience led me to think that the power of politics
was even less well understood than quantum mechanics or vector analysis.
Indeed, I now know that none other than Albert Einstein said that
"politics is far more complicated than physics." I certainly wouldn't
have believed that during my first couple years of college.
I'd like to share that experience with you. Not only does it explain why
I find politics so fascinating, it also helps to understand several of the many
definitions of politics. We'll look at those shortly.
I lived in a small and old dormitory my junior year of college, one of
those dorms that was in some ways much like a frat house. Everyone knew
everyone. We did a lot of things together. The atmosphere was quite different
than that in the newer high rise dorms that dotted the landscape across the
rest of the campus. Late in the fall semester we found notices slipped under
our doors while we were sleeping. They announced that we would all have to
leave the dorm in the next month and be relocated. The Student Housing Office‑‑a
long hated administrative entity‑‑had decided to remodel the dorm
during the Spring semester so it could be used as a women's dorm for the next
academic year. The letter was one of
those awful things generated by bureaucrats and signed by someone whose title
was "Director of Student Housing." It ended with a phrase that read
something like "We regret any inconvenience that this may cause you, but
your cooperation will be greatly appreciated." In other words, tough ____!
To say that we were angry is an understatement. We loudly complained and moaned to each
other. Several of us went to see the
Director of Student Housing. After being
kept waiting by his secretary in the outer office for nearly an hour, he
listened to our arguments, which we thought were quite logical. The move would disrupt our schoolwork during
a critical time in the semester. All of
our social relationships would be disrupted, roommates split up. Wouldn't there be enough time to make this
conversion during the summer, or at least after the fall semester was
over? Didn't this forced move violate
the spirit of the student handbook that promised that one of the university's
top priorities would be to build a community atmosphere in which lasting
friendships would be formed? Was future
growth more important than current community?
While glancing at his watch, he told us that he sympathized with our
problems and complaints, but there was nothing he could do because the
contractors were already scheduled to come in and the decision had already been
made. He would do all that he could to keep roommates together and group as
many of us together in the larger dorms as possible, but we had to understand
that they wanted to minimize the inconvenience to other students in moving us.
In other words, "you're wasting my valuable time and I'm not going to do
anything other than pat you on the head and send you on your way."
So what could we do? You can't fight city hall. We were only 200
students against a university bureaucracy that numbered in the thousands. We
spent several more days complaining to each other and fantasizing about
barricading ourselves in and refusing to move. One psychology major among us
told us that we were merely going through cathartic exercises necessary to vent
our frustrations. This would make it possible to accept the inevitable.
Then someone had an idea. People sometimes use the courts to stop things
from happening. Maybe we could. So we agreed to pool our money and go see a
lawyer one of the guys knew and ask him if anything could be done. We went. The
lawyer advised us that a court injunction was a long shot, but a possibility
depending on how a judge interpreted our student handbook.
Another student had an idea. Perhaps we could make this into a
potentially embarrassing situation for the school so that they would have a
reason to let us stay. At the least we could try to get even with the school
for what they were doing to us. Revenge is a powerful motivating force.
We talked about a press conference, but realized that this would not
make a very exciting news story and not get the coverage we needed. The media
needs conflict, confrontation, and good action in its video. So we decided to
stage a confrontation between us and the Director of Student Housing. But this
time it would take place on OUR turf. One student who knew a local tv reporter
told him about our problem and the meeting we were planning. He suggested that
it would make a good human interest story to see angry students confronting a
school official about his forcing them out of their homes. The reporter agreed
to cover it with a camera team.
The stage was almost set‑‑all we needed was the guest of
honor. We humbly called the Director of
Student Housing once again and asked if he would please attend a meeting with
all the students in the dorm to reassure them in a personal way‑‑the
same way he had reassured us in our earlier meeting. We asked if he would
answer a few questions students had about details of relocating. We suggested
the recreation room in the basement of the dorm and agreed upon a time. After
calling our lawyer and making sure he would be there and confirming the time
with the tv news team (they were to arrive a half hour earlier so that they
could interview dorm leaders who would voice their specific complaints on
camera‑‑we wanted to make sure that the reporters heard our side
first), we planned the "questions" that students would
"spontaneously" ask the Director of Student Housing. For example, one student was to ask him how
this move would help us complete term papers and research projects that would
soon be due. Another was to read him a
section from the student handbook stating that one of the objectives of student
housing was to "build community" and then ask how this forced move
was consistent with that goal. With this done, the stage was set.
Words can hardly describe this bureaucrat's looks of bewilderment and
discomfort when he stepped into our recreation room, was greeted by the dorm
president and officers (who were dressed in business suits and ties), was
introduced to our lawyer, saw the glare of tv lights, and was asked to step to
the podium we had arranged for him that had a microphone in front of it. It was
his turn to sweat. We asked him to wait for a couple of minutes while cameras
and lights were adjusted. The well rehearsed questions from righteously
indignant yet appropriately respectful students struck him like well aimed
shots from a high powered rifle. His hesitant and defensive attempted answers
sounded like the thoughtless excuses of someone who knew he was completely in
the wrong.
The press coverage came off just as we had hoped. We were the top story
on the local evening news that night. The next day other local tv stations, the
newspapers, and even radio stations called and sent teams for interviews.
Within 24 hours the president of
the university called a news conference (with our dorm president as invited
guest on stage). The president announced that we would be allowed to remain in
the dorm for the rest of the academic year because the school does indeed
respect the social needs of students. Of
course, the university president said that had he known what was being done in
the first place, it never would have been allowed to happen.
I would have loved to have overheard the phone call that must have taken
place from the president to the Director of University Housing the night
following the tv news story. So we won the battle, and soon all of us got back
to the routines of college life.
Something slightly remarkable had happened here. The confrontation
certainly was not important in the larger scheme of things. It was
insignificant compared to the civil rights struggle that was taking place in
the nation at the time. But for many of us white middle class kids who had been
taught that adult authority was always right and that we should defer to that
authority, the battle was revealing.
Adult authority, even in the form of institutions of higher education,
was not always right. Moreover, if you understood the nature and rules of the
games these adults were playing, you could sometimes beat them!
The way you beat them was not through the logic of your arguments or the
official rules of appeal (the kind of stuff you get in classes and handbooks),
but through other kinds of rules that didn't seem to be written down anywhere.
At least we didn't know where to find them.
In short, we figured out a few of the unwritten rules of politics well
enough to win a struggle that made a great difference in our daily lives. At the time we didn't even know that all of
this is the nitty gritty of politics. I eventually did understand what had
happened and its political significance. I decided I wanted to learn more about
the rules of this fascinating game that can be so important, even to the point
of life and death. As I later learned,
others had discovered these political rules as well and had written about them
hundreds of years ago. This wonderful
and at the same time potentially terrible power that we had
"rediscovered" is what this course is all about.
B. Some definitions of politics
No single correct definition of politics is accepted by all political
scientists. So let me offer you several
that capture the flavor and activities of the things that I study as a
political scientist. If you get the
impression that political scientists cover a broad range of territory from
these definitions, you are certainly correct.
We overlap with many other fields‑‑just as do the other
social sciences. We do not fit into a
neat little well defined box as you might think from the way universities are
organized.
1. Politics is who gets what, when, and how much.
This is probably the most popular definition of politics among
political scientists. It is the one you are most likely to find in American
government texts. It is power oriented and materialistic, and I don't
mean that in any negative sense. A great deal of politics involves questions of
material distribution: who gets tax advantages, who gets services, whose
activities are regulated and in what way, who has to give up their dorm room,
and so on. The next two definitions also have this same emphasis on power,
although they differ a little in wording and focus.
2. Politics is power and the powerful, influence and the influential.
Power is right up front in this definition. If this is what politics is,
then political science is the study of power and the powerful, of influence and
the influential. Indeed, those who study what is called elite behavior do precisely this.
However, I think this definition is too limited. Politics also involves
the powerless and what is done to them. I would also not separate influence
from power because influence is a form of power. Coercion is another form of power. We will
define these terms more precisely later on.
3. Politics is the
authoritative allocation of value.
This definition of politics is similar to a definition of economics:
economics is the allocation of scarce resources. It is also power oriented.
Politics is authoritative in the sense that those who do it can make it
stick‑‑they can make you leave your dorm room, or put you in jail
if you don't submit to the draft or pay your taxes. It involves value,
which is more general than the economic idea of resources in that value
includes not only material things, but what people say about you and how people
treat you (public recognition, condemnation, adult, felon, etc.).
4. Politics is the art of the possible.
This definition was offered by Lyndon Johnson, who as Senate Majority
Leader was a master of this art. This definition emphasizes the need for
pragmatic calculations and negotiations and recognizes that politics is a group
activity. Even the most powerful of totalitarian leaders had limits on what
were possible for them.
It also recognizes a truth that political scientists would rather
ignore. Politics is at least as much a craft as a science. Those who practice
it must certainly learn all they can about what has worked in the past. They
must study political history. But they must deal with new complexities and new
situations and conflicts for which there are no clear historical guides and no
precise right answers. The practicing politician must choose between
alternative evils and alternative goods, rarely between a clear good and a
clear evil. This is why Einstein said politics was so complex. The answers keep
changing. Politics takes someone who has the creativity of an artist to survive
in such a craft. Being a mere scientist is not enough. As Ross Perot learned in
his failed presidential candidacy of 1992, being a smart business person is not
enough.
5. Generic Politics: politics is who you are, in terms of the
categories you fit in, the values that are attached to those categories, and
how you respond.
Although I find the last definition compelling, this one is probably my own
favorite definition. It is the most personal of these definitions. Moreover, I
think it captures most of what is in the other definitions and adds an
important psychological and personal focus. It raises the political issue of
identity, an issue that is fraught with conflict. Unfortunately, it is also the hardest to
understand.
Let me illustrate by applying the definition to you. What would you answer if I asked you
"who are you?" Other than your name, you would probably tell me you
are a college student. It is noteworthy that we Americans often think of
ourselves in terms of what we do, and others tend to think of us this way as
well. Who is
The rule has some notable exceptions, exceptions that have political
significance. Sometimes these exceptions signify the subtle workings of racial
or ethnic prejudice.
Let me give you an example out of the July 29, 1985 issue of Newsweek. In a long story commemorating the dropping of
the first atomic bomb on
Okay, so we now have the category part of the definition down, so let's
deal with values that are attached. If you think about it, almost any
category in which you get placed has value connotations. Some are more obvious
than others.
Let's go back to the occupational category of "student."
"Student" has a number of values associated with it. How many can you
think of and how positive or negative are they? Among other things, student is
associated with the values of ambitious, hard working (unless you are seen as a
"professional student"), looking ahead, deferring gratification,
serious, and intellectual, all of which are generally valued very positively in
our society. In fact, they are valued so positively that we as a society have
decided to tax others so that you can better afford to attend college and be a
student. Think about the other
categories you may fit into: male, female, white, black, African‑American,
native-American, person of color, Baptist, Jewish, gay, straight, southerner,
teenager. What values are attached to these categories? Are they positive of
negative? How did they get to be that way? It just didn't happen by accident.
How it got that way is our next question.
How you and others respond to these values is one way the
activities of politics come in. Politics also explains how these values got
there. Whether a category is valued negatively or positively, chances are that
at some point in time someone or many someones worked to make it that way. They
talked about the category in positive ways, and perhaps even got laws passed
that reinforced, rewarded, or punished. How you react today will in part
determine how these values will be in the future. In general, you have three
choices.
1) You can accept and adjust. This is what most people do. Until this century, most women could not vote
or hold property independently of their husband. In many societies this is yet
true. Most simply accepted this as a fact of life and did the best they
could. The same can be said for blacks
under slavery and Jim Crow laws (i.e., laws enforcing racial segregation). If
they hadn't, the system could not have lasted so long. This may be seen as the conservative
approach. Accepting and adjusting does not endanger the status quo.
2) You can try to change the categories that apply to you. This
is in fact what you are doing by attending college. All of you want to move
into the category of educated professionals. You want all of the positive evaluations
that go along with this category‑‑as opposed to high school
graduate, or college drop‑out.
In certain areas changing categories is easy to do. But in other areas,
specifically those that are part of your physical selves or those that you were
born with, change is much more difficult. In extreme cases, people sometimes
try to change even their physical characteristics.
Karl Marx's father was a Jewish lawyer who lost his business as a result
of laws that were passed by Prussian leaders that discriminated against the
Jews. He converted to Christianity in
order to attempt to regain his business.
He was less than totally successful.
(By the way, this partly explains Marx's hatred of religion.)
You don't have to go very far back in history to find a multitude of
products that purported to make blacks look more like white people, though they
were rarely advertised in this way.
Millions of dollars were spent on products to straighten hair, skin
bleaches, and white clothing styles all offering the false hope of capturing
some of the positive social evaluation that went along with being white. People paid terrible prices in physical and
psychological pain to try and fit into the categories valued by the majority.
To get ahead in business, many women attempt to adopt male
characteristics of dress style and mannerisms. Women often wear "business
suits" that draw attention away from female physical traits. These outfits
look much like the male version of the business suit. Women sometimes act
aggressive in business relationships, just as successful men often do. To some
extent this works, but it also has a price in that these same behaviors are
almost always less positively evaluated when women display them. What in a man
is seen as assertiveness is seen in a woman as "bitchiness."
Changing categories, like accepting and adjusting, is also a
conservative approach. It too accepts and reinforces status quo values. People try
to change themselves rather than change social values.
3) You can attempt to change
the values associated with the categories.
This is the most difficult of your three options and is by far the most
radical. Changing the values associated involves changing the beliefs and
behaviors of large masses of people. Changing social values necessitates
political action.
This third option is what the feminist movement and the civil rights
movement are all about. Both basically
are an attempt to get our society to alter the values that are attached to the
category of woman and black respectively.
In both cases, the first order of business was to get those in that
category to understand what had been done to them and reject those negative
values themselves. Back in the 1970s
women's "consciousness raising" groups sprung up all over the
country. Women shared their frustrations, experiences, and hopes. The "black is beautiful" theme and
"natural" look can be interpreted in the same light‑‑attempts
to raise consciousness in what was done to blacks and foster pride and positive
values in being black as opposed to a darker version of white. Of course, once you have a significant number
of people liberated from stereotypes, you can begin to attack social
institutions and laws that reinforce these negative evaluations.
The rejection of old terms that have negative evaluations by the
majority is part of this political battle. Thus, the ugly term
"nigger" is replaced by "black" which is now in the process
of being replaced by "African‑American." Some feminists wanted
to change the spelling of "women" to "womyn."
One last example. In a garbage
workers' strike a number of years ago, pickets were shown carrying signs by the
media. The words on the signs were
rather unusual and can best be understood in terms of generic politics. Rather than demanding more wages or better
working conditions, the signs simply said "I AM A MAN!" Think about what that means.
II. The Difference Between Civics and
Political Science
Most of you come to this class with little or no understanding about
political science. You may have some vague impressions from high school
experience that political science has something to do with government and is
something like history, but that's about it.
This feeling exists because no one teaches political science as a
subject in high school. The only courses where you ran into politics were
history and civics. Well, if this is the
impression you have, it is partly correct. But it is mostly wrong, because
civics is but a very small part of political science. Let me briefly explain by
comparing definitions.
A. Civics.
Civics usually involves the study of government institutions that
focuses mainly on official structure and legal framework. This legalistic
structural approach once did play a dominant role in political science, but no
longer does. This is more than likely what you did in high school. You studied
the constitution, the official powers of the president, the steps by which a
bill becomes a law, and perhaps studied an organizational chart of the cabinet
departments and the court system. If you were lucky, you may have discussed a
few issues that trouble our society, but it was probably mostly learning about
structures and laws.
Political science still includes this sort of thing. However, long ago
we recognized that structures and law are important, but they are of very
limited value in understanding what actually happens. We must cast a much wider
net and bring to bear many tools and methods to understand political behavior.
B. Political Science.
Political science is the scientific study of human power
relationships and political behavior. The three key words here are scientific,
power, and behavior.
1. Scientific. Political science is scientific in that we apply
the scientific method to establish truth that is observable and testable. At least
that's the elusive goal. I'll be talking a whole lot more about what scientific
means in terms of how we go about the study of politics when we look at
empirical political science. The bottom line for me after more than 25 years of
study is that science does help us in understanding politics. But it is also an
art in the sense that those who are in politics can be creative and find ways
around current theories that supposedly predict behavior.
2. Emphasis on power. Power is to political science what the
point is to geometry, i.e. it is the basic element without which there could be
little else. I will give you a formal
definition of power at the end of this lecture when we define basic concepts.
In studying power we not only look at how power is actually used, but consider
ethical and moral questions of how it should be used. This is the area of
political philosophy or normative theory. We'll have a lot more to say about
normative theory as well.
3. Behavior. Behavior refers not only to what people and
officials are supposed to do according to the official rules, but to what they
actually do. Actual behavior depends on their individual values, skills, and
the unofficial rules of conduct they follow. Discovering those unofficial rules
is a big part of political science.
Moreover, the behavior in which we are interested involves much more
than just what goes on in government far away from most of us. As I hope you
saw in the concept of generic politics, political behavior involves most of our
everyday lives and activities. Political behavior is the process by which we
negotiate our identity and value. Therefore, we can talk about the politics
of the classroom, office politics, church politics, and even the politics of
dating. Understanding how power is used in all of these everyday situations is
an important part of political science.
4. Use of all tools‑‑multidisciplinary. In short, anytime
power and politics are involved, the job of political scientists is to find and
adapt whatever tools she or he can to understand what is going on. This means
that we use the tools of sociology, psychology, history, statistics,
mathematical game theory, law, logic,
philosophy, economics, and even biology when they can help us
understand. This multi‑disciplinary approach that focuses on most of the
important parts of our lives is what I really like about political science.
This approach allows me to be able to study almost anything I find interesting
and use a variety of tools to study it.
III. History of Political Science: Some
Leading People and Periods
My goal here is a very brief and therefore necessarily over‑simplified
overview of how the discipline of political science has evolved and continues
to evolve. In looking at what I shall call periods of the discipline, you
should see a "politics of political science." That is, the study has
been greatly affected by the political forces in the world around it.
At times those who study politics have been limited in what they were
allowed to do. They were limited in the questions they could ask, in the
methods they could employ, and even in the kinds of conclusions they could
draw. Those who violated these norms of behavior have been dealt with in a
variety of ways. Socrates asked forbidden questions and paid for those
questions with his life. Machiavelli was tortured. His success only came in
what he left behind for us to read. If they succeeded, the discipline changed.
Luckier losers simply were denied important institutional positions in
universities and government or lost foundation grants.
Even today certain kinds of questions are much easier to get funded than
others. If you can find an issue that has potential profits for large
businesses and corporations, your chances for grant monies are much greater
than if you want to do research on the homeless. In short, the study of
politics itself can be understood as a political process because it involves
who gets how much and authoritatively allocates value‑‑the
definitions of politics we laid out earlier.
A. The Classical Period
This is the first period in western culture from which we have records
of the study of politics. The emphasis during this period was on what we would
today call political philosophy and was dominated by the Greeks. The aim was to discover the
"good" using the powers of the human mind and to use that discovery to create the kind of
society that would foster the growth of "the good."
1. Aristotle
a. The founder. Aristotle is
often called the founder of political science. Today he would be
considered a "comparative political scientist" in that he studied the
constitutions of 158 Greek city‑states that existed at the time and
compared how well they worked. Except
for his analysis of the constitution of
b. Methods. His principle method of research was inductive logic,
meaning he went from commonalities he found in the cases he studied and
generalized to other situations. His style was to draw analogies between
politics and biology. For example, he would compare the health of the state to
the health of the human body. He was no doubt influenced by his father, who was
a court physician.
c. Analytical. As a good political scientist would do today, Aristotle
went beyond the structure of the governments he analyzed. He talked
about how they actually worked and the potential dangers that existed.
For example, his analysis of
2. Others. Other great thinkers that fit into this period would include
Socrates, Plato, and Cicero. I am doing a great injustice in lumping these all
together, for all had very important things to say and important questions to
ask‑‑questions that keep reemerging in the political controversies
of today.
a. Socrates. We have nothing
left of the earliest of these thinkers, Socrates, except what Plato wrote about
his friend and teacher. One of the best
known works written by Plato about Socrates is the Apology. This is the story of the trial of Socrates that resulted
in the death penalty. It is about the choice that Socrates made to accept death
rather than stop asking questions that upset the powers that be. He was a
teacher who put his life on the line for his ideas.
b. Plato, who was 43 years
older than Aristotle, is best known for not only his works on Socrates, but
also for his own work, including the Republic
and the Laws. In these works, Plato
has Socrates playing the role of a speaker who is debating important questions
with protagonists. The writing style is that of a dialogue.
For example, in one famous exchange, Thrasymachous, who is something of
a wise guy, argues with Socrates that justice is nothing more than the
self-interest of those who have power. I'm sure you have heard this idea.
Another way it is expressed is that the victors write the history books. Does
might make right? Socrates responds by asking questions. In this case he
asks what is the self‑interest of those in power? The answer that evolves
is that those in power want to keep power. The catch is that in order to
keep power they must do what is in the interest of the many. Thus, justice
for the many is served in the self‑interest of the few with power.
Thrasymachous ends up defeating his own argument. Of course, we might add that
too many of those with power do not understand this political necessity.
Ultimately, they often bring themselves to ruin as well as those over whom they
have power.
This style of teaching by asking questions has made a lasting impression
on teachers today, who often say that they teach using a "Socratic"
method. What this means is that they ask
you penetrating questions that force you to think and discover truths through
discussion and debate and confronting the illogic of your own ideas.
In my own years of teaching I
have found that figuring out what the most important questions are is one of
the most difficult parts of teaching. An infinite number of facts exist,
but the questions that link them together in a meaningful way are what makes
those facts important. Again, let me give you an example. A lower level
question in American politics might be to ask how a bill becomes a law. That's
a pretty standard civics type question. A more important question that
incorporates many of the same facts is what makes change so difficult in our
society. Exploring a little further, why would the people who designed our
government want to make change difficult?
c.
How do you think this argument fits the Gulf War of 1991 when the
d. Common approach: seeking the philosophical ideal. What all of these
thinkers have in common is that they did use a philosophical approach in
examining eternal questions. They concentrated on notions of the ideal,
on what life should be like. What is the good society? When should one obey the
law? What obligation do we have to speak what we think to be the truth? Does
power necessarily corrupt justice? When is killing other people justified?
B. The Middle Ages
This is a long period in which the study of politics was dominated by
religion, specifically Christianity and the factions that struggled for
dominance within the Catholic Church.
1. Politics plays subordinate role. The study of politics in the Middle
Ages can be characterized by several ideas and values. Nearly all of
these ideas and values tend to subordinate any open and remotely objective
study of politics.
a. Emphasis on afterlife. The real world in which people lived
was secondary to the afterlife in importance. Therefore, attempts
to make the real world better through politics was of no real or lasting
importance‑‑in fact it was contrary to God's will. God presumably
wanted suffering to take place in this world in order to prove one's worthiness
for a joyous afterlife. Alternatively, suffering was necessary to make us
realize our own basic sinfulness and turn to God.
b. God's will. Here is the second major idea that constrained what
people could do about life in this world. Politics is under God's providence
through the institution of Divine Right. Because God designates the rulers
and the best forms of government, people can or should do little to change things‑‑so
again little reason exists to study politics.
c. De-emphasis on human political thought. Both of these ideas result in
the rejection of the Classical idea that people can improve themselves
through thought. The only improvement that can come is in the next world
which can only be reached through submitting oneself to the Grace of God. Any
attempt to do so is an attack upon the will of God in that it attempts to
elevate man through his own effort. The result of this belief is that a lot of
"free thinkers" of the time who had different interpretations were
literally burned alive. Their ideas were judged to be blasphemy.
2.
C. The Enlightenment
Now we are up to the 16 and 1700s in which the study of politics once
again became important in its own right.
We will look at four people here whose work reflected and even helped to
bring about the enormous changes that were taking place in the world.
1. Machiavelli. If Aristotle was the first political
scientist, Machiavelli must surely be the first empirical political scientist. Political scientists often give him this
label. In the next module, we will look
at his very important ideas in more detail. For now we will just introduce him.
a. Life. Strictly speaking, he lived and wrote in what historians
consider the Middle Ages, as he lived from 1469 to 1527. Because he did not support official religious
ideology, his work was much vilified by the religious authorities of the time.
For example, the term for the devil, "Old Nick," was a reference to
Niccolo Machiavelli. The Catholic Church banned his work. Despite when he
actually lived, we should consider his heretical ideas a part of the
Enlightenment, in the sense that his objective thinking paved the way for later
work.
b. Empirical. His work is empirical because to a much greater
extent than anyone before him, he was interested in describing and
understanding the actual behavior of politicians in the world. He was much less interested in specifying
how they SHOULD behave. However, as you will see when we look at him in
more detail, he was by no means totally either immoral or even amoral
(make sure you know the difference between these two words!) as is so often
popularly charged.
c. Work. His best known and most widely read, acclaimed, and criticized
work is The Prince. The book is
really a handbook on how to be an effective politician. It is based on
his observations of the world around him‑‑hence we regard it as
empirical, i.e. based on observable evidence. To the extent that we are all
politicians, his observations and advice is relevant to us all. That is why we
shall place a big emphasis on the study of Machiavelli in the next section of
this course.
2. The Contract Theorists
The three theorists we shall briefly look at here represent an important
new tradition in the study of politics. They undermined one of the basic
assumptions of the Middle Ages, the idea of Divine Right. Although all three differed greatly on
specific questions about the precise nature of people and the kind of
government that would serve people best, they all began with the idea that
government was not ordained by God. Rather it represented an artificial
relationship made BY people and FOR people. They saw government as a kind of
contract. All talked about a natural state, which they called the state of
nature, in which there was no government.
So by defining people's natural state as without government,
and by defining government as artificial, the idea that God wills
any specific form of government through Divine Right was undermined.
a. Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes,
the earliest of the three, saw man as essentially selfish. Therefore, to use his now famous words, life
in the state would be "nasty, brutish, and short." Thus government was needed for the
simple reason that man needed to be protected from his own selfish nature. Hobbes didn't particularly care what kind of
government it was so long as it was powerful enough to restrain people. The title of his best known work reflects
that goal: The Leviathan, which
literally means large sea monster.
No better example exists of government restraining people's tendency to
create chaos than what happened after the fall of the
Or maybe this also may be applied to
b. John Locke. John Locke had
a different view of the state of nature and hence of the basis for
government. Because of the mixture of
good and evil that Locke saw in people, life in the state of nature would
be possible for Locke. He felt that enough people would enforce the natural
rights of life, liberty, and property so that life could be carried on.
However, life would be inconvenient because people would have to constantly
take the time to form vigilante groups to catch and punish those who violated
these natural rights. So people left
their natural state more as a matter of convenience than necessity.
c. Jean‑Jacques Rousseau. Jean‑Jacques
Rousseau was the most optimistic of the three contract theorists about the
state of nature and the nature of people. He argued that people were essentially
good. Life in the state of nature
would therefore be wonderful, and it would be a wonderful thing if we could get
back to the state of nature. The problem is that our nature has been corrupted
by society and by the governments that are created by society. In a sense,
Rousseau would have agreed with many modern politicians that government was the problem. That's about
where the agreement would end, however.
Rousseau argues that we left the state of nature by historical accident.
So government is more of an unfortunate accident than a social contract. Thus,
the title of his most famous work, The
Social Contract, is somewhat misleading.
What Rousseau would like is a
government that allows and encourages our natural goodness to be expressed. He
argues for a direct democracy in which important questions are answered through
majority rule. The more important the question, the greater the majority
required. These answers he calls the "general will." This concept is quite close to what we call
the public or general interest in today's political terminology.
Rousseau is an absolutely fascinating figure whose personal life can be seen
as an almost total repudiation of his philosophy. For example, he gave his own children up to
the state to be cared for. That did not prevent him from writing a book on the
proper way to rear children!
D. The Birth of Modern Political
Science and Karl Marx
If modern political science differs from what was done in the past by
seeking to discover laws and principles that can be established through
observation and used to describe, explain, and predict political behavior,
then Karl Marx can be seen as the first modern political scientist.
Don't misunderstand this! Marx did not consider himself a political scientist.
By training he was a philosopher. The term political science was only beginning
to be used around the time of his death. This also does not mean that political
scientists were or are all Marxists‑‑a few are, but most are
not. Rather, it was what Marx attempted
to do (only partially successfully), and how he attempted to do it that make
him one of the earliest and certainly most well know examples of a modern
political scientist.
In a nutshell, Marx identified variables he thought to be important in
determining political relationships, variables like class consciousness,
the economic distribution of wealth (or means of production), and alienation.
Social scientists still consider these variables important today. He then
arranged these variables into a general model or set of laws that explained the
political evolution of society (economic determinism driven by dialectics,
i.e. force confronting a counterforce resulting in a new force) and predicted
future stages of political evolution. He
claimed to have done for political history what
We shall look more closely at Marx in the next module on as an example of
empirical theorist and evaluate his theories. For now, we shall leave Marx as
the beginning of a new and more sophisticated stage in man's study of politics.
E. Political Science in the
1. Roots in history programs. The earliest programs were part of history
departments and not clearly distinguishable from history. The approach and focus could be conceived of
as current history, if that is not a contradiction in terms. Apparently, the
contradiction was too much for some of those involved. They split off to form a
separate discipline.
This reminds me of a story of a historian I know. A few years ago he
wanted to teach a course on the history of the Vietnam War at his school. His
department rejected the proposal on the grounds that the war was too current at
the time to be history. So being a good politician, he went with his proposal
to the political science department who gladly supported it under their name
with him as instructor. It is now one of the most popular courses on that campus.
He told me that his history colleagues have since regretted their narrow time
focus.
2.
3. The American Political Science Association. About 1903 the American Political Science Association
was formed and the first edition of The
American Political Science Review was published in 1906. Since then many regional associations have
been formed, including a Southern Political Science Association and a South
Carolina Political Science Association.
Until well after the turn of the century, the profession was indeed much
like current political history or civics in focus and methods. The emphasis was
on studying legal structures, institutions, and political philosophy. Even early political scientists, such as
Woodrow Wilson, who was an early president of the American Political Science
Association and of course later President of the U.S., were dissatisfied with this state of affairs.
In 1893
4. Trend toward science‑‑the 1920s. In the 1920s a trend
began that led the discipline toward being more scientific. Political scientists began using statistics
and the more formal steps of scientific investigation (which we shall look at
later).
This movement was led by Charles
Merriam at the
This scientific movement was strengthened by the experiences of World
War II. Political scientists realized that they had failed miserably in their
theories to explain or to predict this catastrophic event. The loose methods of
post hoc historical analysis were blamed for this failure. The drive for a more
objective and scientific political science became so strong that it was given a
name and its proponents came to dominate the field. This is the next period to which we now turn.
5. The rise of behavioralism‑‑the
1950s and 60s. Prominent political
scientists as David Easton, David Truman, and Gabrial Almond led this movement
within the discipline. The movement can be seen as the culmination of what
Merriam had begun.
The Dictionary of Political
Analysis defines "behavioralism" as follows:
"An approach that emphasizes the application
of scientific methods and perspectives to the study of politics and
government. Behavioralism focuses on the actual behavior of individuals
and groups rather than on their formal roles or the institutions and structures
within which they function. ... try to be rigorous and systematic in their
research, and seek precision by quantification and measurement of data
... attempt to discover uniformities or regularities in political behavior
through formulation and testing of empirical hypotheses ... . Theory should be verifiable by reference
to actual behavior, and the search for facts should be guided by theory
(Jack Plano et. al., 1982, pp.13‑14)." (Emphasis added.)
If you look at the terms I underlined in this rather long definition,
you can see that the ideas are very much like the earlier description of
political science in general. About the
only new addition is the term "quantification."
One of the additional advantages of this "scientific" approach
according to its many advocates is that it is more neutral, objective, and
value free than earlier historical and philosophical approaches.
Quantification encouraged these worthy goals. If you look at issues of the American Political Science Review
through this period, you would be struck with increasing frequency of
mathematical models and statistical analyses.
Indeed, my own personal entry into the area of political science in the
late 1960s from an undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics was through
game theory, which is an attempt to analyze and understand conflictual
situations using mathematical models.
7. Post‑behavioralism‑‑the
countermovement of the late 1960s and 70s. Just as the traditional approach to
the study of politics was blamed for the
failure to deal with World War II, the behavioralists were blamed for the
failure of political science to adequately predict or explain or take morally
defensible positions on the problems of the 1960s and 70s. Specifically,
they were concerned with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. In fact, critics of behavioralism went so far
as to argue that the behavioralists were hypocritical. Post-behavioralists
charged that the behavioralists were not really objective, that they were not
really value free in their work. The charge went on to argue that behavioralist
methods and their stance of noninvolvement tended to support the status
quo. This attack was led by two
groups of political scientists.
The first were the older traditionalists. They felt that the new
models and empirical methods oversimplified reality and often ignored important
questions. They argued that the behavioralist methods led political scientists
to concentrate on trivial questions simply because more easily quantifiable
data were readily available. Relatively few behavioralists were engaging in the
difficult basic questions of political philosophy. Many were doing voting
studies where they could easily accumulate and manipulate lots of numbers. But
the traditionalists had been fighting a losing political battle within the
discipline for a long time. So as logical as these criticisms were, those
making them did not have the power to change the focus of the discipline by
themselves.
A second group of discontented political scientists joined forces with
the traditionalists. Combined together, they were strong enough to create
another shift. This new group was composed of young and activist scholars
who strongly felt that the discipline had an obligation to take a stance on
important questions of the time. To fail to do so was making the discipline
irrelevant to politics. Many of them wanted the American Political Science
Association to take a stand on the Vietnam War and to be supportive of the
civil rights movement. The behavioralists counter‑attacked that to do so
would undermine the professionalism and reputation of the association.
As the immediate issues of civil rights and unpopular foreign wars
receded in prominence, the urgency of pressing the political battle within the
discipline to a conclusion also waned. People in political science grew tired
of the debate and in effect tacitly agreed not to talk about it much anymore.
I remember writing a paper about this political battle within the
discipline of political science while I was in graduate school. My professor at
the time severely criticized my choice of topics. He said that he was tired of
hearing about all of this. Of course it was all new and fascinating to me.
However, the differences still exist and surface in a variety of ways:
in debates over the proper methods of research and in the kinds of articles
that should be published and in such basic things as the kinds of and mix of
political scientists that should compose a proper political science
program. Should we hire statisticians or
philosophers? In what areas should
graduate students be encouraged to specialize?
These questions may not seem important to you, but they are certainly
bread and butter issues to those of us who are trying to make a living in
political science. They also affect you in terms of the ways in which political
science courses are taught. They affect the kinds of courses schools require
for those of you who may want a political science degree. To the extent that political science does
affect political reality‑‑and many political science studies do
have political implications‑‑this debate can affect your daily lives.
Some observers noted a softening on both sides in the debate in the
1970s and felt that a kind of synthesis of opposing positions had taken place.
They labeled this synthesis "post‑behavioralism."
This synthesis, if indeed it existed, was not a well defined school of
thought or approach. Rather, it was the result of what we learned from
each other in this debate. It was a heightened awareness of our limitations and
of our value assumptions--regardless of the methods we used.
8. Rational Choice. A new effort to add more rigorous science to
the discipline began to be born in the 1970s. It was centered at the
Wondering aside, the new approach emphasized applying highly
mathematical models to political behavior and then testing to see if the models
described actual behavior. This required knowledge of calculus. Implicit in
this approach is the assumption that people act rationally, that
they have a set of priorities, and that they do things (make choices)
that they think will help them achieve their priorities.
The rational choice school grew in power so that by the 1980s they had
become perhaps the dominant approach in political science. They began to only
hire political scientists who shared their approach. Traditionalists began to
fear another take-over. By the 1990s another counter-offensive was under way.
The criticisms were similar to those of behaviorism: they missed the most
important hard questions because their mathematical models best explained the
trivial and easy to quantify. Thus the battle continues between those who want
universal and rigorous scientific theories and those who see that nearly all
things political have some unique element that is difficult if not impossible
to quantify. (For a good review of this latest battle, see Jonathan Cohn,
"When Did Political Science Forget About Politics?" The New Republic, 25 October 1999, p.
25. It is available electronically through USCAN.)
If this is becoming rather abstract to you, don't be too concerned at
this point. You will see this debate
reemerge as we talk about the two basic types of theory in political
science. The strengths and weaknesses of
each type of theory are at the heart of this debate.
For now, let me end this discussion on a personal note. I was trained as
a rather strict behavioralist coming from a background in mathematics. I
believed that if we were smart enough, we could predict human behavior using
game theoretical models. I would have been an ideal rational choice professor.
But what happens when we lend our expertise to the Defense Department and
predict that a certain amount of bombing will bring North Vietnam to the peace
table, or that our population will tolerate a certain fatality rate so long as
we can show progress in the war, or that a certain kill ratio is needed in the
field to make progress toward winning a guerrilla war? What happens is that
real policy decisions are made and real people are killed and we are no longer
noninvolved and neutral. What is perhaps even worse is that we were wrong in so
many of our predictions and models‑‑they didn't come to the peace
table begging for mercy. Of course I am talking about the
I would add that some of these
questions are relevant today to the Iraq War, and to the assumptions made by
leaders who said that it would be a quick and cheap war. We would be welcomed
as liberators and the oil from
IV. Three Key Concepts
You have already been exposed to many terms and ideas in reading this
much. At this point, I want to focus on three key concepts that are extremely
important in studying and understanding politics: power, legitimacy, and
institutions.
A. Power
As noted earlier, power is the basic element of politics and what we
study as political scientists. If power is involved, then it is a legitimate
subject for political scientists to study. Now let's give a formal definition.
Power is the ability of A to make B do
something B would not otherwise ordinarily do, or alternatively, cause B to NOT
do something that B might otherwise do.
"Something" includes both actions and thoughts. A and B can be any political entity: nations,
organizations, or people. A accomplishes her task in one of two general ways.
First, she can use the threat of force or coercion that involves rewards
and/or punishments. For example, if you don't study for this test I'll give
you an F. Second, she can use influence and moral persuasion. That is, she
convinces B to do or not do something for its own intrinsic value. For example,
you will enjoy studying this material because it is so interesting.
If you read this carefully, you will note that there were two kinds of
power involved in this definition. Political scientists call these the two faces of power.
1. The first face of power is the ability to make something happen. Political scientists study this kind of power
using empirical methods of observation. They observe what happens and come up
with ways of measuring it. They see what preceded it and measure that as well
and try to come up with logical explanations that relate the observable events.
This is the stuff of behavioralists.
People vote, make wars, write their legislators, demonstrate, and so
on. All of these things can be observed
along with the events and attitudes that precede them so that patterns can be
discovered. Although the measurements are sometimes hard to do and figuring out
the right things to observe is sometimes tough, the first face of power is a
lot easier to study than the second face.
2. The second face of power is the ability to stop something from
happening that might have otherwise happened. This is much more difficult
to deal with from a research point of view, because, by definition, we can't
observe what is NOT happening. If we can't observe it, how do we know it's
there and not somewhere else? How do we know it's even important because an
infinity of things are not happening? Why aren't students picketing the
administration building? Why aren't you protesting my grading policy? And even
if we can figure out what it is that we are not observing, how can we decide
which events and forces lead to this "nonevent?" What made it NOT
happen? Students have never picketed our administration building, so it just
can't be because of something that happened this year‑‑it must be
something that is ongoing‑‑but what? Few really good clues exist.
This kind of analysis can be done, but the analysis is much more
difficult and rests on much more fragile logical grounds. You have to examine
the totality of social forces that exist in a political situation, the values
that are held and how they are learned, the fears that people have, and how these
fears developed.
In my own research, I have applied this kind of analysis in trying to
understand why southern workers failed to unionize when the objective working
conditions and pay were worse in the South than in the rest of the nation (We Shall Not Overcome.
3. The eternal problem of power. Perhaps the greatest problem of power
is the question who should have power and how much should they have.
This problem has two parts. You probably are more familiar with the first part.
We know that power has a corrupting influence. You have all heard Lord
Acton's quotation: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely."
When we say that people abuse power, whether that be an elected official
or a supervisor on the job or a parent or a teacher, we are talking about
actions they take that are self‑serving rather than for the benefit of
those over whom they have power. The key idea here is not what was done to the
subjects, but why and how it was done.
Is doing violence an abuse of power? We put people in prison and take
away their possessions all the time. Parents engage in corporal punishment.
Teachers fail students. Employers fire people. At times these actions of
violence may be justified. Usually we demand that these actions be justified in
terms of some notion of the greater good, of long term benefits, and so on. If
the only justification for these actions is the self‑interest of the
person with power, we tend to call it an abuse. Often this judgment is
difficult to make. In addition, those with power have an ability to rationalize
self‑interests in terms of general interests. They may even be fooling
themselves. We might say that power has corrupted their judgment.
Another more subtle form of violence is violence to the truth.
Deception, spreading false rumors, destroying another's reputation with half‑truths
and misinterpretations or taking things out of context are all forms of
violence to the truth. Examples of all of these range from gossip about a
fellow student or professor to distortions used by talk show hosts to negative
advertising in political campaigns.
Is lying ever justified? Unless you take an absolutist position, and few
people do, we must ask the same questions as we did in thinking about when
violence is justified. In whose interest was the lie? When a friend did badly
on a test or said or did something really stupid and their confidence is low,
do you use the power that you have as a friend to tell them the straight truth?
Or do you lie about how stupid they were? Most of us would justify saying that
a friend's actions were not all that bad as a little white lie. The untruth was
told in THEIR interest, to bolster THEIR confidence at a time when THEY needed
it. If you concede this argument, then all other situations become questions of
degree. When is it justified for parents to lie to their children? Bosses to
lie to their employees? Leaders to their followers?
The corrupting influence of power is only half the problem of power. The
other half is the realization that those in charge must have sufficient
power to accomplish those things that need to be accomplished. Leaders
cannot lead if they are denied power. Small problems grow into major crises.
Citizens become disillusioned with their system of government.
How have we dealt with this problem of power in the
When it became apparent that this weak structure had insufficient power
to deal with pressing problems of trade, commerce, and foreign relations, we
moved to a federal structure. It concentrated more powers in the central
government. However, as any student of American politics knows, fear of anyone
having too much power was still a great concern. Checks on power were built
into this American invention. Unlike a parliamentary
system in which the prime minister is chosen by the majority party from
within the legislature, we made sure that in our presidential system the chief executive was independent from the
legislature. He was independently elected. Unlike a parliamentary system in
which the upper house often plays the role of highest court, we also had a
separate Supreme Court. If this was not enough, we gave each of these separate
branches checking powers on the other branches. We also gave the now weakened
states some powers over the central government. For example, the states have
the power to change the constitution and decide how presidential electors are to
be chosen.
This system, purely an American invention, was called the presidential
system. It reflects a peculiar American distrust of centralized power. It
distrusts power much more than a parliamentary system. Yet we pay a price for
our system. It divides and spreads power so much that the danger of stalemate
is possibly greater than the danger of tyranny. When the economy is sour and
the national debt soars, citizens are not quite sure whom to blame. Is it the
most visible political leader, the president? Or should we blame all those
people in Congress? Is it fair to blame a president who cannot get his programs
passed by Congress without really watering them down? Perhaps it's the
President's fault for not being persuasive enough? Or is it out fault for not
giving him enough popular support to be persuasive? Or for electing him in the
first place while we elected members of Congress who feel differently? For most
of recent history we have elected a president of one party and a majority of
Congress of the other party. Even when we elect a president and congressional
majorities of the same party (Clinton the and Democrats in 1992 and Bush and
the Republicans today), members of the majority party often feel differently on
major issues than their president (e.g. national health care or deficit
spending).
The answer is that the system is doing just what it was designed to do.
It prevents either branch from being fully responsible or accountable. They will
only get together and act when there is some great crisis with a clear
solution. That is rare. We are paying the price of preventing tyranny. We live
with the second part of the problem of power.
B. Legitimacy
Something is seen as legitimate if it is acceptable as basically just
and proper. Legal is a term that is similar to legitimate. Legality is an
element in making something legitimate, but legality falls short of
legitimacy. We can think of many things
that are legal which are not at the same time just or proper: segregation laws
that existed for a half century in most of the nation, victims of crime that go
uncompensated, perpetrators of crime that go free because of what many regard
as "legal" technicalities, and so on. A classical historical example
was the trial of Joan of Arc in which all the legal rules of the time were
meticulously followed leading to an unjust punishment. If the laws are unjust,
then legality becomes irrelevant to legitimacy.
C. Institutions
Institutions might be simply defined as well established patterns of
relationships. For the purposes of this course, institutions are where
important political decisions are often made.
This school is an institution, as is the family unit, the
We have considered the nature of politics, the evolution of the study of
politics, and some key ideas and problems in that study. Next we will turn to
the major areas of political science and a more detailed examination of some of
the problems with which political scientists struggle.
KEY TERMS
politics
elite behavior
generic politics
civics
political science
classical period
Aristotle
Socrates
Plato
Middle Ages
the enlightenment
Machiavelli
Contract theorists
Thomas Hobbes
John Locke
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
birth of political science
Karl Marx
American Political Science Association
Charles Merriam
behavioralism
post-behavioralism
rational choice
power
two faces of power
parliamentary system
presidential system
legitimacy and legal
institutions