A Comment on Positive Theory

Abstract

The Association allows its members to identify themselves as theorists. I am a member who so identifies himself. Over several years, numerous political scientists (not themselves positive theorists) have asked me (sarcastically) whether positive theory is the opposite of negative theory. In each case, to avoid heaping sarcasm upon sarcasm, I answered that the word positive, in this case, referred to positivism, as in Comte's Philosophy and Polity. It referred to the assignment of a central role to observing phenomena and discovering the laws that relate them, and doing so gradually and laboriously, and, as Comte already understood and Weber makes crystal clear, without ever coming to final Truth. It did not refer to plus or minus signs. What I left out is that the word 'positive was in fact used early on in contradistinction to negative thought. But it may be useful to do so impersonally, for the information of those who seem unfamiliar with the ideas of our founders. The early positivists understood that human beings need to make sense of experience. They also understood the arduousness of doing so by theory based on and tested by observation, especially in the case of phenomena more complex than, say, astronomical motion. This, they argued, accounted for resorts to pseudoexplanations: to theological or metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. That sort of thought was negative thought ---negative, because not resting on solid bases and likely to do more harm than good. The early positivists were convinced that positive thought would gradually triumph over negative, fetishistic thinking, in all fields---spreading slowly from the simplest to the most complex phenomena. Surely, they have been substantially right, although they underestimated the continued appeals of high-flown obscurantism in the social sciences. Positive thought also had a secondary meaning early on, related to its primary meaning. It arose in the wake of the French Revolution, and involved a reaction against that revolution's guiding idea: that utopian transformation could be achieved by simple negative action: getting rid of feudal or similar constricting relations. One reaction to the revolution's failure to