A Review of Herbert Simon's Review of My View of the Discipline

Abstract

Dear Professor Simon:It is an honor to be read, and read carefully, by someone of your distinction. But since you missed the major premise of my March 1992 essay, it is virtually impossible to engage in a point-by-point rebuttal. In fact, few of your propositions I'd care to rebut, not only because they are irrelevant to my argument but also because I tend to agree with you. After all, I am a product of your work of the 1940s and early 1950s, as I am of the writings of the various Chicago political scientists you singled out for praise—having read their every word, including yours, and having studied with some of them as a student and served with some as a colleague. I contributed to the revival of Gosnell's Machine Politics—Chicago Model with a foreword (1968), in which I said, among other things, “It is a masterpiece in the imaginative use of aggregate data in the study of political phenomena. A direct predecessor to the work of V. O. Key, this study is unexcelled to this day as an effort to understand political behavior in its institutional setting” (vii).