[Discussion] US and political science

[Paksoy, Hb]

Chronicle of Higher Education 
Thursday, August 29, 2002 

  

  How America's Foreign Policy Affects Its Political Science 
By IDO OREN 

American political scientists seldom reflect upon the identity of their
discipline. They instinctively associate political science with freedom and
democracy even as their texts represent the discipline as an objective
science. Thus, the self-image of American political science is paradoxically
that of detached scholarship attached to particular ideals. 

The linkage between political science and democracy is so taken for granted
in the profession that it requires little explicit affirmation except, from
time to time, in rituals such as the annual address of the president of the
American Political Science Association. So it was that, in his 1987 APSA
presidential address, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard stressed that "the
connection between democracy and political science has been a close and
continuing one. ... Where democracy is strong, political science is strong."


But a careful reading of the same text raises some doubt about the firmness
of that alleged bond. The main theme of Huntington's talk was that
democratic reforms must be carried out very cautiously. Dictatorships must
not be pushed too hard because "however bad a given evil may be, a worse one
is always possible and often likely: Witness the unhappy recent experiences
of Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia. ... The political scientist, consequently, can
only be skeptical of a claim that, as one Chilean dissident [Ariel Dorfman]
put it, 'there is no way in which we are going to see anything worse than
General Pinochet' or the argument of an opponent of apartheid that 'the
first African government of South Africa ... could scarcely be any worse'
than the current regime." 

Huntington's mention of South Africa was not accidental; several years
earlier, he had traveled to Johannesburg to meet with South African
officials and deliver a scholarly paper on political reform. The context of
his trip was the apartheid regime's attempt to engineer limited
constitutional change that would extend some political rights to the
country's mixed-race and Asian population, but none to the black majority. 

In the paper Huntington delivered in South Africa, he questioned "the
relevance to South African needs" of the "liberal belief that each person
deserves equal political and civic rights." He argued that "the
centralization of power may also be necessary for the government to maintain
the control over violence that is essential to carry through major reforms."
Joseph Lelyveld, then the South Africa correspondent for The New York Times,
observed that regardless of what Huntington actually meant by such
abstractions, South African officials used the "Huntington thesis," as Johan
Coetzee, the national police chief, called it, to legitimate their
repressive actions. 

Lelyveld's commentary suggests that, although political scientists as
private persons may be committed to democracy, political-scientific concepts
and political science as a profession are not inherently incompatible with
nondemocratic regimes. 

Huntington's own biography also raises doubts about the other element of the
discipline's paradoxical self-image: its presumption of objectivity.
Throughout his career, Huntington wrote some of the most influential books
of 20th-century political science. He was a consultant to numerous
government agencies, including the State Department, the Defense Department,
and the Central Intelligence Agency. He served on several government
commissions and was coordinator of security planning at the National
Security Council in 1977-78. Some of Huntington's published research was
financed by the CIA. 

My concern is not with the ethical propriety of scholars' working for the
government, but rather with the connection between the politics of U.S.
foreign policy and the substance of political-science scholarship.
Huntington's career provokes important questions: What are the ramifications
of political scientists' imbrication in the politics they study for the
claim of their profession to be a detached science? Is American political
science in fact more attached to its homeland than to "democracy"? 

Max Weber, in his essay on objectivity in social science, stressed that "all
knowledge of cultural reality ... is always from particular points of view."
But although Weber has become a canonical figure in contemporary political
science, his insistence on the perspective-bound nature of social science
has had little resonance in the discipline. The postmodernist view that
politics and scholarship constitute a single "nexus" has generated even less
interest. Indeed, from books on the scope and method of political research,
one would hardly guess that point of view is an important issue in
social-science epistemology. By default, the image of political science that
emerges from its discourse is one of an objective science that investigates
yet remains outside politics, and whose constructs are not imbedded in any
historical or national context. The notion that political science in the
United States might reflect a distinctly American point of view receives
almost no consideration. 

That's a serious lapse, because America's foreign relations have been
mirrored in its political science. The discipline has been transmuted again
and again, depending on which of America's chief enemies it was confronting.
Imperial Germany, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Stalin's Soviet Union
maintained decent, sometimes even cordial, relations with the United States
before they became its bitter rivals. And exploring the discipline's
portrayals of those regimes before and after their conflicts with America
affords a critical examination not only of the presumed objectivity of
political science but also of its purported attachment to democracy. 

In all cases, the images of America's enemies presented by American
political scientists became considerably darker after the conflict's onset.
The current image of Imperial Germany as an "autocratic" antithesis of
American "democracy" was not shared by two of the most important political
scientists of the late 19th century, John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson.
Burgess, founder of the first graduate school of political science in
America (at Columbia), regarded Germany's political system as second only to
America's. Whereas political scientists today regard the kaiser's lack of
parliamentary accountability as a serious flaw, Burgess saw that
conservative feature of the Wilhelmine system as its virtue. Similarly, in
the 1890s Wilson regarded Imperial Germany as an advanced constitutional
state whose efficient administration was a model for American administrative
reform. Whereas present-day political scientists condemn the three-class
electoral system of Prussia for its violation of equal suffrage, Wilson
recommended that American cities adopt that very system because it rewarded
the "better" elements in society. 

Since World War II, political scientists have had nothing good to say about
Fascist Italy, but in the 1920s and 1930s prominent scholars expressed
rather uncritical views of Mussolini's regime. Some portrayed Mussolini's
dictatorship as a vigorous modernizing force appropriate for a backward
nation such as Italy. Henry Spencer of Ohio State University, the
profession's leading authority on Italian politics, portrayed the Italians
as "passive subjects" by nature and praised Mussolini for energizing Italian
public life. Other scholars believed that certain aspects of fascism might
be appropriate for modern America. Charles Merriam of the University of
Chicago, for example, the most important political scientist of the interwar
era, was intrigued by Mussolini's "striking experiment" in civic education.
Merriam sponsored a study of the methods by which the Fascist regime
fostered civic loyalty, characterized those methods as "full of meaning for
the student of civic training," and was open to the possibility of adapting
them to American conditions. 

Hitler's Germany is now our paradigm of extraordinary evil. The attitude
that Nazi Germany had its "good points" is taboo in current political
science, but before World War II it was well within the bounds of legitimate
discourse. A review of an abridged English edition of Mein Kampf in The
American Political Science Review in February 1934 praised the translation's
editor for selecting passages that present a "very fair picture of Hitler,"
including Hitler's "most enlightened comments on the theory of the state and
the nature of government." This review was not an aberration. During the
1930s, some prominent political scientists maintained that the Nazi regime
was not without positive achievements, especially in the area of public
administration, and that Americans could learn from those achievements.
James K. Pollock, for example, translated into English the Nazi Civil
Service Act of 1937, describing it as "the most complete and thorough code
of personnel matters to be found anywhere in the world." "Its value to
students of personnel problems," he assured, "will be apparent even after a
very cursory study." It was true, Pollock conceded, that Nazi enforcement of
"political reliability" had created "some demoralization" among German civil
servants, but, thankfully, "nothing approaching the American spoils system
has been developed." Pollock was chairman of the University of Michigan's
political-science department from 1947 to 1961 and served as president of
the APSA in 1950. 

In the 1950s, political scientists, most notably Merle Fainsod and Carl
Friedrich of Harvard, played a key role in elaborating the concept of
totalitarianism and applying it to the Soviet Union. The concept entailed an
analogy between the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, and connoted a form of
tyranny far more "ghastly" than that of conventional autocracies. But during
the 1930s it was not uncommon for American political scientists to portray
Stalin's Soviet Union in far more positive terms. Merle Fainsod was
intrigued in 1934 by the Soviet experiment in central planning and
conspicuously refrained from identifying Stalin's regime as a dictatorship.
The Harvard Sovietologist Bruce Hopper contended in 1937 that "the Soviet
solution of Capitalist evils offers eventually greater freedom to the
individual than any other successor to democracy." And the University of
Chicago's leading Sovietologist, Samuel Harper, threatened to sue his
publisher in November 1938 to prevent inclusion of Harper's book in a series
entitled "European Dictatorships." 

The image of Japan underwent the same process. That case has already been
ably examined by Richard J. Samuels of MIT. "The intellectual history of
Japanese studies in this country," he concluded, "reflects closely the
changes in the foreign relations of the United States and Japan. The
predominant images of Japan in U.S. scholarship have been positive when
U.S.-Japanese relations have been friendly and have turned critical when the
relationship has been more adversarial." 

The history of America's international rivalries has impinged on the history
of American political science in still more ways, occasioning broad
theoretical changes that amounted to changes in the image of America itself.
Such theoretical re-imaginings were partly inspired by the active
involvement of political scientists in America's war efforts. 

Political science as an academic profession was born in the aftermath of the
Civil War. The trauma of national rupture issued the compelling task of
laying intellectual foundations for national cohesion. The pioneers of the
profession located such foundations primarily in theories of America's
Teutonic heritage and in the doctrine of the supreme sovereignty of "the
state" to which their German mentors introduced them. 

World War I shaped the discipline's theoretical trajectory in several ways.
First, conflict with Germany shattered the image of America as an
Aryan-Teutonic nation. Second, the war occasioned the precipitous decline of
the doctrine of the state, a decline that had as much to do with its German
accent as with its analytical shortcomings. Third, in 1917-18, political
scientists participated in the massive campaign to propagate America's war
aims throughout the nation and the world. The remarkable success of this
campaign alerted political scientists to the significance of non-rational
forces in human affairs, and suggested to them that mass opinion was fickle.
This "lesson" contributed to the emergence of a "social control" vision of
American democracy in influential circles within the profession. Charles
Merriam, who served as chief U .S. propagandist in wartime Italy, came to
believe that progressive reform could best be achieved by expert technocrats
who would harness psychological, social, and eugenic science to the causes
of national economic planning and the fostering of civic cohesion. 

The second war against Germany wrecked another theoretical field with a
marked German connection: public administration. From the late 1880s through
World War II, public administration had been a central subfield of political
science. It was unified by the conception of administration as a technical
endeavor and celebrated bureaucracy's rationality and efficiency. The
founders of the field sought to rescue wide areas of policy making from the
corruption of partisan politics by entrusting them to the hands of a
meritocratic civil service. Dismayed by the backwardness of American public
administration, these scholars turned to foreign models for inspiration, and
they especially admired the German bureaucracy for its efficiency. After
World War I, public administration's distrust of mass politics and its focus
on technique fitted neatly within the emergent vision of technocratic social
control. Merriam facilitated the continued health of the field by
establishing the Public Administration Clearing House -- a resource-rich
adjunct to Chicago's political-science department whose function was to
foster national and international networks of administrative experts. 

The luster of German administrative efficiency survived the Great War, and
even the Nazi takeover did not put an end to pilgrimages to Germany by
American scholars of administration. These pilgrims did not endorse the aims
of Nazism, but their tradition of conceptualizing administration as
apolitical permitted them to study Nazi administrative reforms
dispassionately. World War II and the Holocaust -- by illustrating how a
long-admired bureaucracy could so rationally execute a horrible political
program -- finally discredited the notion that administration was
apolitical. The Nazi "lesson" helps explain why public administration fell
into a prolonged identity crisis soon after the war and why it lost the
status it had previously enjoyed in American political science. 

The cold war distanced political science from ideals and concepts that were
associated with socialism. Merriam's vision of "social control" was among
the conflict's chief casualties. Notwithstanding the aging Merriam's sincere
insistence that his cherished notion of a planned society was strictly
democratic, in the charged anticommunist atmosphere of the early 1950s
anything that smacked of "planning" was deemed too Soviet to remain part of
the conceptual vocabulary of political science. 

Progressive definitions of "democracy" that had been common in the 1930s met
a similar fate. During the Great Depression political scientists often
defined democracy as much in economic as in political terms and as much in
terms of substantive ideals as in terms of electoral process. Merle Fainsod,
for example, believed in 1934 that "Democracy is as much concerned with the
eradication of poverty ... as it is with universal suffrage." Robert A. Dahl
of Yale mounted a lucid defense of democratic socialism in his doctoral
dissertation in 1940. Merriam defined democracy partly in terms of ideals
such as "the perfectibility of mankind" and fair distribution of economic
gains throughout society. But, in the 1950s, political scientists concluded
that faith in human "perfectibility" was a pathology associated with
"totalitarian" regimes, and they abandoned substantive visions of democracy
in favor of procedural definitions inspired by the work of Joseph A.
Schumpeter. Against the backdrop of the cold war, the vision of America as a
state in which technocratic elites scientifically guided society toward
progressive ends gave way to a vision of America as a strong pluralistic
society whose politics no longer needed to be rescued by apolitical,
public-minded administrators. 

Paradoxically, at the very time that the apparatus of the state was being
elided from political-science discourse, the profession was becoming
increasingly enmeshed in the national security state. The full story of this
enmeshment remains to be written. A partial account of the ways in which
political power and political science commingled during the Cold War
includes, for one, the active participation of public-administration
scholars in U.S. foreign-aid programs in Southeast Asia and Latin America,
which led to a surge of scholarly interest in "comparative administration."
Other instances of enmeshment involved the cold-war career of the Center for
International Studies at MIT -- a CIA-supported think tank that evolved into
MIT's department of political science -- and the story of Evron Kirkpatrick,
who left the intelligence unit of the State Department in 1954 to become the
executive director of the APSA. Kirkpatrick assiduously promoted the
discipline's identity as an objective science while engaging in the politics
of the liberal anticommunist wing of the Democratic party and covertly
maintaining ties with the government's intelligence agencies. 

The Vietnam experience created on American campuses a climate in which
cloak-gown collaboration was regarded as unethical, but this norm appears to
have evaporated since the end of the cold war. As a Yale University
political scientist with ties to the CIA put it recently, cooperation
between professors and U.S. intelligence agencies "is now very much to the
fore." The question persists whether political science can be an objective,
disinterested science while it serves the interests of the American state. 

--------------------------- 
Ido Oren is an assistant professor of political science at the University of
Florida. This essay is adapted from his book, Our Enemies and US: America's
Rivalries and the Making of Political Science, to be published in December
by Cornell University Press. Copyright © Cornell University Press.