Stultifying Politics Today: The “Natural Science” Model in American Political Science—How is it Natural, Science, and a Model?

Abstract

This article “follows the actors” to examine the high regard for “the natural science model” in contemporary American political science. How this model is accepted as a science remains an ongoing struggle for epistemic control. This conflict shapes ideological and institutional struggles over who dictates to whom how the “study of politics” is conducted in evolving mainstream professional networks as well as civil society at large given the organizational dynamics of the contemporary American research university. These approaches to “studying politics today” also appear to be “stultifying politics today” inasmuch as this putative methodological objectivity exerts a dulling effect on civic discourse, political vision, and active citizenship.

Notes

¹ See Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Interference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

² David Easton, The Political System: An Enquiry into the State of Political Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

³ Timothy Lenoir, “The Disciplines of Nature and the Nature of Disciplines,” in E. Messer-Davidow, D.R. Shumway, and D.J. Sylvan (eds), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 75.

⁴ Gabriel Almond, “Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science: A Roundtable Discussion,” 21:4 (1988), pp. 828–842.

⁵ King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, pp. 32–36.

⁶ Robert Seidelman and Edward J. Harpham, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), p. 241.

⁷ Many external forces affect how political science is regarded in the university, which political scientists must manage to maintain, or improve, their symbolic and material status in struggles for resources. So the symbolic aspirations and organizational economies of university administrators cannot be ignored as influences in the evolution of knowledge definition, production, and valorization in American political science, particularly as universities have developed since the 1950s. Natural science disciplines remain the most highly prized by the economy and society. Hence, other disciplines, like political science, rush to compete with these colleagues to gain the same status as the life, mathematical, and physical science disciplines by adopting natural science models of knowledge.

⁸ On one level, granting even provisionally that there is a stable, certain, and definitive analytical formation in the natural science model suggests there is a widespread presumption that methodological consensus and clarity about the natural sciences actually exists. On a second level, the natural science model functions as a stable normative ideal, which is folded together out of innumerable hazy opinions about what some political scientists actually imagine their practices truly “are,” because in their minds their methods actually match this mythic model of science. On a third level, conforming to such scientific ideals, in turn, leads political science departments, and professional organizations constructing a vague professional consensus to associate as a weak operational community known as “American political science” whose unity and quiddity are, in fact, tenuous at best. Yet, these sociological pressures still seem to serve the interests of this academic discipline as an intellectual project, although its students and teachers increasingly are “academically adrift.”

⁹ See Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (London, UK: Lowe and Brydone, 1952); see also Gary King, Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

¹⁰ See Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 1996), pp. 3–22.

¹¹ Carolin Kreber, The University and its Disciplines: Teaching and Learning Within and Beyond Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 2008).

¹² See David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); see also Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964); and C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

¹³ C.A. Taylor, Defining Science: A Rhetoric of Demarcation (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 100.

¹⁴ Ibid., 222.

¹⁵ Theodore Lowi, “The State in Political Science: How We Became What We Study,” American Political Science Review 86 (March 1992), pp. 1–7.

¹⁶ See Kristin Monroe (ed.), Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and Stuart Schram and Brian Caterino (eds), Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research and Method (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

¹⁷ Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 29.

¹⁸ See King, Unifying Political Methodology; and Monroe, Perestroika!

¹⁹ Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 24–25.

²⁰ See Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972); and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970). Husserl sketches out a similar critique in his phenomenological writings (1960; 1968), which figures most prominently in his unfinished last work, The Crisis of European Science (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

²¹ Husserl, The Crisis of European Science, p. 23.

²² Ibid., 26.

²³ See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (London, UK: Harvester Wheatsleaf, 1993); see also Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1995); James Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Huizinga, Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); and E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science: The Scientific Thinking of Copernicus; Galileo, Newton, and the Contemporaries (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Doubleday, 1954).

²⁴ Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), pp. 156–157.

²⁵ King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 23.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid., 24.

²⁹ Ibid., 25.

³⁰ Ibid., 25.

³¹ Ibid., 26.

³² Ibid., 27.

³³ Ibid., 34.

³⁴ Ibid., 34 and 35.

³⁵ Ibid., 35.

³⁶ Ibid., 3.

³⁷ Ibid., 43.

³⁸ See S. Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).

³⁹ Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life (London, UK: Sage, 1986), p. 180.

⁴⁰ King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 6.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Ibid., 81–82.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 3.

⁴⁵ See Kenneth A. Shepsle and Mark S. Bonchek, Analyzing Politics (New York: Norton, 1997).

⁴⁶ King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 4.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 4–5.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 7.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 6.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 7.

⁵¹ Ibid., 7–9.

⁵² Ibid., 9.

⁵³ See Timothy W. Luke, “The Discipline as Disciplinary Normalization: Networks of Research,” New Political Science 21:3 (1999), pp. 345–363.

⁵⁴ King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 7.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 10.

⁵⁶ Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy (London, UK: L. Johnson, 1812), p. 2.

⁵⁷ Kim Quaile Hill, “Myths about the Physical Sciences and Their Implications for Teaching Political Science,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 37 (July 2004), pp. 467–476.

⁵⁸ Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan, Knowledges, p. 10.

⁵⁹ Steve Fuller, “Disciplinary Boundaries and the Rhetoric of the Social Sciences,” in E. Messer-Davidow, D.R. Shumway, and D.J. Sylvan (eds), Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 139.

⁶⁰ See Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

⁶¹ See Schram and Caterino, Making Political Science Matter.

⁶² Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan, Knowledges, p. vii.

⁶³ Cassirer, The Individual, p. 10.

⁶⁴ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2001).

⁶⁵ Cassirer, The Individual, p. 10.

⁶⁷ Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (London, UK: Walter Scott, 1892), 16.

⁶⁶ King, Keohane, and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 3.

⁶⁸ Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 208–226.

⁶⁹ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1991); and Timothy W. Luke, “From Body Politics to Body Shops: Power, Subjectivity, and the Body in an Era of Global Capitalism,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 19 (1999), pp. 91–116.

⁷² Husserl, Crisis, p. 28.

⁷⁰ Husserl, Crisis, p. 27.

⁷¹ See Steven Shapin and Steven Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and The Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967).

⁷³ Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Universal Press, 1999).

⁷⁴ Foucault, The Order of Things.

⁷⁵ Husserl, Crisis, p. 29.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Galileo's imaginative construction of both celestial motion and terrestrial mechanics through mathematical operations performs vital roles. With regard to the substance and form of nature, “by idealizing the world of bodies in respect to which has spatiotemporal shape in this world, it created ideal objects. Out of the undetermined universal form of the life-world, space and time, and the manifold of empirical intuitable shapes that can be imagined into it, it made for the first time an objective world in the true sense—i.e., an infinite totality of ideal objects which are determinable univocally, methodically, and quite universally for everyone. Thus mathematics showed for the first time that an infinity of objects that are subjectively relative and are thought only in a vague, general representation is, through an a priori all-encompassing method, objectively determinable and can actually be thought as determined, decided in advance, in itself, in respect to all its objects and all their properties and relations. It can be thought in this way… precisely because it is constructible ex datis in its objectively true being-in-itself, through its method which is not just postulated but is actually created, apodictically generated” (Husserl, Crisis, p. 32). With these roots, the ontography of mathematicization writes out meaning in the life world, and leaves the specificities of the sensory adrift in the technicization, mechanization, and instrumentalization of method.

⁷⁸ Edgerton Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery, pp. 4–7.

⁷⁹ Michel Foucault, Language, Counter Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 146.

⁸⁰ See Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1962).

⁸¹ Richard Harvey Brown, Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 5.

⁸³ Ibid., xxv.

⁸² Hobbes, Human Nature, p. 206.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 197.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 197–198.

⁸⁶ Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

⁸⁷ Hobbes, Human Nature, p. 198.

⁸⁸ Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 20.

⁸⁹ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London, UK: Penguin, 1987), p. 105.

⁹⁰ KKV's systemic construction of naturalized objectivity also allows the expressions of now “objectively natural” forces and forms to transmogrify ontic substances. That is, geometric ideals abstracted from nature as such become applied geometries in/for/about nature. Developing natural scientific research practices for society then constitutes with modernity, as modernity, and alongside modernity, “a general method for knowing the real” (Husserl, Crisis, p. 33).

⁹² Cassirer, The Individual, p. 156.

⁹⁴ Husserl, Crisis, p. 51.

⁹¹ See Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

⁹³ Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 60.

⁹⁵ See Pierre Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

⁹⁶ Foucault, Language, p. 142.

⁹⁷ Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Interaction (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 105–106.

⁹⁸ Galileo's operational notions of dynamics and statics trace nature's inferred and observed mechanics. From Galileo in astronomical and terrestrial physics to Hobbes in psychology and politics, the ultimate test of natural philosophy is shaped knowledge of material effects by mapping their causes. The pictorializations of data, the verifiable exactness of fitting hypotheses to data, and the respecification of new hypotheses against this mechanistic horizon of methodological rigor also are KKV's ideals for analytical accomplishment. Such idealizations of machinic spatio-temporality in the world culminate in the twentieth-century's valorization of physics by modern research universities as the normative ideal of “big science,” “good research,” or “valid explanations.” By these discursive devotions, geometry contours history as social reification; and, method as/or/about the true knowledge of “what is under research,” is twisted toward measuring reified social relations in the embedded mechanisms written out through the natural science ontography and epistemography.

⁹⁹ John Dryzek, “The Progress of Political Science,” Journal of Politics 48 (1988), pp. 301–320.

¹⁰⁰ See Ben Agger, The Decline of Discourse: Reading, Writing, and Resistance in Postmodern Capitalism (New York: Falmer Press, 1989).

¹⁰¹ Seidelmann and Harpham, Disenchanted Realists, p. 241.

¹⁰² Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 59–62.

¹⁰³ Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, 119.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 128 and 122.

¹⁰⁵ See Ben Agger, Reading Science: A Literary Political and Sociological Analysis (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1989).

¹⁰⁶ John Dryzek and Stephen Leonard, “History and Discipline in Political Science,” American Political Science Review 82 (1988), pp. 145–160.

¹⁰⁷ Lenoir, “The Disciplines of Nature,” p. 72.

¹¹⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰⁸ Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, p. 106.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid.

¹¹¹ See David S. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Fusion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

¹¹² Lenoir, “The Discipline of Nature,” p. 72.

¹¹⁴ Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 79.

¹¹³ See Ido Oren, Our Enemies & US: America's Rivalries and the Making of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom (New York: Free Press, 1994).

¹¹⁵ See Karl Hübner, Critique of Scientific Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

¹¹⁶ See Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy; Schram and Caterino, Making Political Science Matter; Seidelman and Harpham, Disenchanted Realists; Oren, Our Enemies & US; Monroe, Perestroika! and the contributions to this New Political Science issue.

¹¹⁷ Pierre Bourdieu, “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” Social Science Information 14 (1975), p. 19.

¹¹⁸ See Oren, Our Enemies & US; see also Latour, Science in Action; and, Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

¹¹⁹ See Agger, The Decline of Discourse; see also Lowi, “The State of Political Science”; Luke, “The Discipline”; and Monroe, Perestroika!