The State of American Political Science: Professor Lowi's View of Our Discipline

Abstract

This note questions both some of the premises and some of the conclusions of Theodore J. Lowi's diagnosis, in the March 1992 American Political Science Review, of the state of the political science discipline. Since I am given a prominent, if undeserved role, in his analysis of historical trends, perhaps I may be pardoned if it begins by refuting that part of his argument.' Surely one should feel great (and devilish) delight at learning that one has exercised diabolical influence over the shaping of political science. Alas, I am wholly lacking in the power that Professor Lowi attributes to me in his paper. Alas also, if I were armed, my gun was not aimed in the direction he supposes it was. I am not at all in sympathy with the Third American Government whose (confused) economics-based ideology he presumes I created, as anyone will recognize who has read the foreword to the recent re-issue of the SimonSmithburg-Thompson textbook, Public Administration, 2 or the earlier work, Administrative Behavior (AB),3 or the more recent Reason in Human Affairs. 4 Are these books written so obscurely that Professor Lowi could not see that the rationality celebrated in them (if any rationality is celebrated at all) is a weak, muddled, bounded rationality that is rejected out of hand by the economists who espouse public choice and neoclassical laissez-faire theory? From whence derive Professor Lowi's errors? First, he does not understand the so-called revolution that reshaped political science in the 1930s and 1940s, and its relation to the much later, and unrelated, attempt of economists to colonize political science. Second, he does not have the slightest clue to my own relation, or that of the other behavioralists in political science and economics, to the dominant neoclassical orthodoxy in the discipline of economics or to public choice. In short, his essay is bad social history. The behavioralist revolution in political science was a celebration, not of reason but of real human behavior, as earlier described in The Federalist and by such commentators as de Tocqueville and Bryce. It was closely allied (as Professor Lowi correctly perceives) with American Progressivism. It aimed at replacing the legalism and traditional theorizing that still flourished in the discipline with empirical evidence (including observation) and theory based on evidence. It was quantitative when quantities were relevant and could be measured, but was not obsessed with equations or numbers. (Has Professor Lowi counted the number of equations in my books, listed above, or in the works of the major behavioralists?) Although most of the behavioralists of that (and perhaps this) time were New Dealers, they generally believed that understanding must precede advocacy, and to a limited extent were able to separate their roles as scientists from their roles as citizens, a separation that is still eminently desirable if clear thought is to prevail in the discipline. Behavioralism flowered in the during Charles Merriam's chairmanship there (see Chapter 4 of my autobiography, Models of My Lifes). The for several decades provided half of Professor Lowi's distinguished predecessors as presidents of the American Political Science Association. This Chicago School had not the slightest resemblance to the present of neoclassical economics, whose forefathers (e.g., Frank Knight, Henry Simons, von Hayek) were barely on speaking terms with Merriam and his colleagues. Perusal of recent issues of the American Political Science Review, including the one in which Professor Lowi's essay appears, will show that behavioralism still