Principal Research Directions in U.S. Political Science in the 1970s

Abstract

A predominance of behaviorism and functionalism, which have pushed the traditional approaches — legal, historical, and philosophical — into the background, is characteristic of political science in the United States today. This objectivist or, as it calls itself, "scientistic" political science has enunciated a demand for scholarly neutrality, stress upon empirical data, and the need to systematize them rigorously and process them mathematically. While making broad use of sociological, social-psychological, and quantitative techniques and concepts, it has focused its attention principally on empirical and theoretical analysis of the mechanisms of political power and political behavior, claiming that analysis by political science is not less exact than knowledge in the natural sciences. At the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1970s, under the influence of the crisis in the socioeconomic system of the USA, of bourgeois political institutions, and of detente in international relations, this discipline, which is regarded as an important tool for sociopolitical reformism, witnessed a revaluation of established notions about its epistemological foundations, its purpose, and its methodological profile. The orientation of behaviorist-functionalist political science toward maintenance of political stability, its excessive attraction to problems of methodology, to the theory of political pluralism, to America-centrism in comparative studies of politics and international relations, and apologist tendencies in political science as a whole were subjected to sharp criticism by the anti-behaviorist opposition, represented by academic political scientists of the most diverse political ideologies and methodological orientations. The narrowly technical nature of behaviorist empirical research and the failure of political theory to correspond to political practice were admitted by the leading American theorists of political science. (1)