Can the Study of Politics Be Scientific? 1 страница
Although it is accepted that the study of politics should be scientific in the broad sense of being rigorous and critical, some have argued, as has been pointed out, that it can be scientific in a stricter sense, that is, that it can use the methodology of the natural sciences. This claim has been advanced by Marxists and by positivist social scientists, and it was central to the 'behavioural revolution' of the 1950s. The attraction of a science of politics is clear. It promises an impartial and reliable means of distinguishing 'truth' from 'falsehood', thereby giving us access to objective knowledge about the political world. The key achieving this is to distinguish between 'facts' (empirical evidence) and 'values' (normative or ethical beliefs). Facts are objective in the sense that they can be demonstrated reliably and consistently; they can be proved. Values, by contract, are inherently subjective, a matter of opinion.
However, any attempt to construct a science of politics must confront three difficulties. The first of these is the problem of data. For better or worse, human beings are not tadpoles that can be taken into a laboratory or cells that can be observed under a microscope. We cannot get 'inside' a human being, or carry out repeatable experiments on human behaviour. What we can learn about individual behaviour is therefore limited and superficial. In the absence
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of exact data, we have no reliable means of testing our hypotheses. The only way round the problem is to ignore the thinking subject altogether by subscribing to the doctrine of determinism. One example would be behaviourism (as opposed to behaviouralism), the school of psychology associated with John B. Watson (1878-1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904-90). This holds that human behaviour can ultimately be explained in terms of conditioned reactions or reflexes. Another example is 'dialectical materialism', the crude form of Marxism that dominated intellectual enquiry
in the USSR.
Secondly, there are difficulties that stem from the existence of hidden values. The idea that models and theories of politics are entirely value-free is difficult to sustain when examined closely. Facts and values are so closely intertwined that it is often impossible to prize them apart. This is because theories are invariably constructed on the basis of assumptions about human nature, human society, the role of the state and so on that have hidden political and ideological implications. A conservative value bias, for example, can be identified in behaviouralism rational-choice theories and systems theory. Similarly, feminist political theories are rooted in assumptions about the nature and significance of gender divisions.
Thirdly, there is the myth of neutrality in the social sciences. Whereas natural scientists may be able to approach their studies in an objective and impartial manner, holding no presuppositions about what they are going to discover, this is difficult and perhaps impossible to achieve in politics. However politics is defined, it addresses questions relating to the structure and functioning of the society in which we live and have grown up. Family background, social experience, economic position, personal sympathies and so on thus build into each and every one of us a set of preconceptions about politics and the world around us. This means that scientific objectivity, in the sense of absolute
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impartiality or neutrality, must always remain an unachievable goal in political analysis however rigorous our research methods may be. Perhaps the greatest threat to the accumulation of reliable knowledge thus comes not from bias as such, but from the failure to acknowledge bias, reflected in bogus claims to political neutrality.
II. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS.
1. What is the reason of the attraction of a science of
politics?
2. Do any scientists question the claim that politics can
be scientific in a stricter sense?
3. Where do they see the key to achieving objective
knowledge about politics?
4. Who believes that politics can be scientific?
5. What difficulties do political scientists face?
6. Why does the problem of data arise?
7. Where do the scientists see the way round the problem?
8. Where does the second difficulty stem from?
9. What is the third difficulty?
10. When does the author see the greatest threat to the
accumulation of reliable knowledge about politics?
III. CONTRADICT THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS:
1. The study of politics has nothing to do with the
methodology of the natural sciences.
2. The science of politics gives an access to subjective
knowledge about the political world.
3. While constructing a science of politics one never
confronts any difficulties.
4. The doctrine of determinism is the only rational theory
whenever we treat the problems of political science.
5. The models and theories of politics are entirely value-
free.
6. The idea of neutrality very ideally pertains to politi
cal science.
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Part
IV. FIND IN THE TEXT SOME FACTS TO PROVE
THAT:
1. The study of politics can be scientific in a stricter
sense.
2. Any attempt to construct a science of politics must
confront three difficulties.
3. Politics addresses questions relating to the structure
and functioning of the society.
V. DIVIDE THE TEXT INTO LOGICAL PARTS AND
MAKE UP AN OUTLINE OF THE TEXT.
VI. FIND IN THE TEXT PARTICIPLES AND GERUNDS
AND TRANSLATE THE SENTENCES INTO RUSSIAN.
VII. TRANSLATE THE FOLLOWING DEFINITION OF
«DETERMINISM» INTO ENGLISH.
Determinism— убеждение, что действия человека и его выбор полностью обусловлены внешними факторами. Детерминизм полагает, что свободная воля — это миф.
WORD STUDY
I. GIVE RUSSIAN EQUIVALENTS FOR:
To sustain; vigorous; inherent; to intertwine; strict; superficial; to subscribe to; consistent; crude; claim; access; implication; presupposition; background, preconception; bogus.
II. GIVE ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS FOR:
В широком смысле; выдвигать идею; надежный способ; отделить; ценности; сталкиваться; надёжное средство; проверить гипотезу; тесно переплестись; неизменно; жизненный опыт; личная симпатия; недостижимая цель.
III. MAKE UP WORD-COMBINATIONS FROM THE
WORDS GIVEN:
Reliable — knowledge; means; method; experience; position; facts; data; source of information.
To accept - views; opinions; notions; theories; hypotheses; ideas; politics.
To give access to — objective knowledge; recent data; current events; scientific constructs.
To distinguish between — facts and values; truth and falsehood; normative and ethic beliefs; subjective and objective evidence; determinism and behaviuorism.
To demonstrate — reliably and consistently; clearly and accurately; in a broad and narrow sense; deliberately and freely; brightly and vividly; for better or worse.
The only way is — to ignore the thinking subject; to confront these difficulties; to carry out repeatable experiments; to test this hypothesis; to distinguish truth from falsehood; to observe in detail; to explain by means of a new approach.
IV. TRANSLATE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES INTO RUSSIAN. PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO THE WORDS «FAIL» AND «FAILURE»
1.He failedhis driving test and I have to drive every
where.
2. You have failedto bring up your son properly. You
are just a failure.
3. The participants of the conference failedto come to
any agreement on the problem.
4. Perhaps the greatest threat to the accumulation of
reliable knowledge thus comes not from bias as such, but
from the failureto acknowledge bias, reflected in bogus
claims to political neutrality.
5. His attempt to distinguish between empirical evidence
and ethical beliefs failedcompletely.
6. He has never been in such an awkward situation, it
was almost a failure.
7. They demonstrated their unwillingness to accept his
ideas and failed,nobody supported them.
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V. DISCUSSION
Give a short summary of the text.
VI. LOOK THROUGH THE TEXT AND GIVE THE
DEFINITIONS OF THESE WORDS: CONCEPTS, MODELS,
THEORIES, PARADIGMS.
Concepts, models and theories
Concepts, models and theories are the tools of political analysis. A concept is a general idea about something, usually expressed in a single word or a short phrase. A concept is more than a proper noun or the name of a thing.
What, then, is the value of concepts? Concepts are the tools with which we think, criticize, argue, explain and analyze. Merely perceiving the external world does not in itself give us knowledge about it. In order to make sense of the world we must, in a sense, impose meaning upon it, and this we do through the construction of concepts. Quite simply, to treat a cat as a cat, we must first have a concept of what it is. Concepts also help us classify objects by recognizing that they have similar forms or similar
properties.
A cat, for instance, is a member of the class of 'cats'.
Concepts are therefore 'general'; they can relate to a number of objects, indeed to any object that complies with the characteristics of the general idea itself .It is no exaggeration to say that our knowledge of the political world is built up through developing and refining concepts which help us make sense of that world. Concepts, in that sense, are the building blocks of human knowledge.
Models and theories are broader than concepts; they comprise a range of ideas rather than a single idea. A modelis usually thought of as a representation of something, usually on a smaller scale. In this sense, the purpose of the model is to resemble the original object as faithfully as possible. However, conceptual models need not in any way resemble an object.
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The terms theoryand modelare often used interchangeably in politics. Theories and models are both conceptual constructs used as tools of political analysis. However, strictly speaking, a theory is proposition. It offers a systematic explanation of a body of empirical data. In contrast, a model is merely an explanatory device; it is more like a hypothesis that has yet to be tested. In that sense, in politics, while theories can be said to be more or less 'true', models can only be said to be more or less 'useful'. Analytical devices, such as models and microtheories, are constructed on the basis of broader macrotheories. These major theoretical tools of political analysis are those which address the issues of power and the role of the state: pluralism, elitism, class analysis, and so on.
At a still deeper level, however, many of these macrotheories reflect the assumptions and beliefs of one or other of the major ideological traditions. These traditions operate rather like what Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) called paradigms. A paradigm is a related set of principles, doctrines and theories that help to structure the process of intellectual enquiry. In effect, a paradigm constitutes the framework within which the search for knowledge is conducted.
VII. READ THE TEXT AGAIN AND RENDER ITS CONTENTS IN RUSSIAN. MAKE USE OF THE DIAGRAM BELOW.
| Concepts | |||||
| Models or microtheories | |||||
| Macrotheories | |||||
| Ideological traditions / paradigms |
Examples: power, social class, rights, law
Examples: systems analysis, public choice, game theory
Examples: pluralism, elitism, functionalism
Examples: liberalism, Marxism, feminism
 |
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♦ Politics is the activity through which people make,
preserve and amend the general rules under which they
live. As such, it is an essentially social activity, inextrica
bly linked, on the one hand, to the existence of diversity
and conflict, and on the other to a willingness to cooperate
and act collectively. Politics is better seen as a search for
conflict resolution than as its achievement, as not all con
flicts are, or can be, resolved.
♦ Politics has been understood differently by different
thinkers and within different traditions. Politics has been
viewed as the art of government or as 'what concerns the
state', as the conduct and management of public affairs, as
the resolution of conflict through debate and compromise,
and as the production, distribution and use of resources in
the course of social existence.
♦ There is considerable debate about the realm of 'the
political'. Conventionally, politics has narrowly been seen
as embracing institutions and actors operating in a 'public'
sphere concerned with the collective organization of social
existence. However, when politics is understood in terms of
power-structured relationships, it may be seen to operate in
the 'private' sphere as well.
♦ A variety of approaches have been adopted to the study
of politics as an academic discipline. These include political
philosophy or the analysis of normative theory, an empiri
cal tradition particularly concerned with the study of insti
tutions and structures, attempts to introduce scientific
rigour through behavioural analysis, and a variety of modern
approaches including the use of rational-choice theory.
♦ The study of politics is scientific to the extent that it
is possible to gain objective knowledge about the political
world by distinguishing between facts and values. This task
is nevertheless hampered by the difficulty of gaining access
to reliable data, by values that are implicit j**litical models
and theories, and by biases that operate within all students
of politics.
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♦ Concepts, models and theories are the tools of political analysis, providing the building blocks of knowledge. However, they are only analytical devices. Although they help to advance understanding, they are more rounded and coherent than the unshapely and complex realities they seek to describe. Ultimately, all political and social enquiry is conducted within a particular intellectual framework or ideological paradigm.
VIII. DISCUSSION Questions for discussion:
— If politics is essentially social, why is not all social
activity political?
— Why has politics so often carried negative associa
tions?
—How could you defend politics as a worthwhile and ennobling activity?
—Is politics inevitable? Could politics ever be brought to an end?
— Why has the idea of a science of politics been so
attractive?
—Is it possible to study politics objectively and without bias?
—What are the new political issues on the global agenda?
—Is politics an ideology?
—Can all the political disagreements be solved on the
peaceful grounds?
—What attracts you in studying politics?
—Can we say that politics is the queen of social sciences?
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I. READ AND TRANSLATE THE TEXT:
TAMING THE STATE
For more than 2,000 years, a dominant question in political thought has been how to limit the powers of the
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state. The nature of the problem seems clear enough. The state must exist. This means that the state will always have the potential to use its coercive powers to exploit and repress its citizens. How can the abuse of these coercive powers be limited without weakening the ability of the state to fulfil its necessary functions?
The Greek philosopher Plato thought the solution was creating a special class of philosopher-kings: persons who were trained to be fair and restrained in their use of state power. However, it seems too much to expect people who have been placed in positions of immense power to practice self-restraint. Indeed, as Lord Acton claimed in a widely quoted maxim, «Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.»
Rejecting hopes that the state could be tamed by putting people of high character in power, political theorists searched for social arrangements that would limit the power of leadership positions, regardless of the character of the leaders. By the eighteenth century, political thinkers had concluded that two things were necessary to tame the state. First, a clear set of rules (procedures and laws) had to be established that defined the limits of state power and the manner in which that power could and could not be exercised. But rules by themselves mean nothing. Some of the most repressive regimes on earth have model constitutions that guarantee all sorts of rights and freedoms to citizens. Such guarantees do not mean anything unless they are embodied in a structure designed to ensure that the rules are observed. What kind of structure can this effect?
This leads to the second requirement for taming the state: a structure in which power is widely dispersed among many powerful groups. In this way, no one group can pursue its own interests without regulation; every group is checked by the other powerful groups acting to preserve their own interests. This aspect of taming the state was not so much discovered as it was something that just slowly evolved by trial and error. In fact, only after a considerable
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dispersal of power had occurred in England political theorists recognize the principle involved. So let's see what happened and how it works.
The Evolution of Pluralism
English democracy evolved from a single principle, the right to private property. The English believed that the essential feature of state repression was the use of coercion to deprive people of their property. If this could be prevented, then the state could be brought under control. In particular, if the king could be prohibited from taking any person's property without that person's permission, then the king could not squeeze all the economic surplus out of the people to provide for his luxuries. Nor could the king afford to go to war unless he had the support of the people, for he would lack the needed funds. Thus, the English believed that the state could be tamed if taxes could be imposed or collected without the approval of those being taxed.
How could property right be protected from the state? The solution is not simply a law or a constitution, but a particular kind of social structure in which a number of powerful elites restrict one another's ability to use the state's coercive power. The state can be tamed only when political power is dispersed among groups with diverse interests. Such a situation is described as pluralism.
Pluralism developed in England partly by accident. In 1215 King John found himself unable to control the nobility. To remain on the throne, he was forced to sign the Magna Carta, a contract in which he agreed to impose no taxes on the nobility except when they freely agreed to be taxed. This led to the creation of the House of Lords, wherein the nobility gathered periodically to vote on tax requests from the king.
In time, the right to have one's property secure against seizure by the king was extended to property owners who were not members of the nobility. They began to send elected representatives to the House of Commons, where they also gave or withheld approval of the king's tax requests. The
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power to control the king's revenues proved to be the power to control the government. If the House of Lords or the House of Commons did not like a policy, it could withhold funds until it was changed.
Moreover, neither house of Parliament was dominated by a single group with identical interests. Policies favourable to some nobles often affected others adversely; policies good for merchants were often bad for shopowners or farmers. Thus, besides English kings having to depend on the two houses for their revenues, decisions within each house required a coalition of groups and therefore a compromise of competing interests. Governmental decision-making processes involved increasingly diverse groups and interests.
Of course, English rulers occasionally attempted to destroy these limits on their power and restore the absolute power of the throne. However, these efforts were always thwarted because too many people had too much to lose, should the king regain control. Therefore, if one faction of nobles wanted to restore an unlimited monarchy, others combined to block them.
It has been noted that the existence of the English Channel also played an important role in weakening the powers of English monarchs. The channel prevented European wars from extending into England. Thus, the king could not use external military threats as grounds to create and maintain a large, professional army that then could be used to repress anyone who opposed him. Indeed, England's defense was based on maintaining a powerful navy to control the English Channel — and a navy cannot be used for internal repression.
II. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:
1. What has been the dominant question for more than
2,000 years?
2. What solution did the Greek philosopher Plato propose?
3. How did he characterize these philosopher-kings?
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4. Did it seem possible or impossible? Why not?
5. What did Lord Acton claim in this respect?
6. What two things did political thinkers start speaking
about, necessary to tame the state?
7. Does their principle of taming the state work?
8. What did English democracy evolve?
9. How could the state be tamed, as the English be
lieved?
10. What is understood by pluralism?
11. Pluralism developed in England by accident. What
does it mean?
12. So the House of Lords was set up, wasn't it?
13. What did the English kings depend on in their deci
sion-making?
14. Did the English rulers attempt to destroy the limits
on their power?
15. What role did the English Channel play in weaken
ing the powers of English monarchs?
16. What is your personal opinion of taming the state?
III. COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES:
1. How to limit the powers of the state was of particu
lar interest in ... .
2. Plato invented the solution in creating a special class
of ... .
3. A clear set of rules has to be established to define ....
4. The second requirement for taming the state was ....
5. No one group can pursue its interests without ....
6. Every group is checked by ... .
7. The solution of taming the state was found by the
principle of .....
8. The English believed that the essential feature of
state repression was ....
9. The state can be tamed only when ....
10. The creation of the House of Lords was accidental
as ... .
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11. The power to control the king's revenues proved to
be
IV. MAKE UP DISJUNCTIVE QUESTIONS AND ASK YOUR FRIEND TO ANSWER THEM:
1. The state has always been able to use its powers to
repress its citizens.
2. The philosopher-kings were trained to be fair.
3. To tame the state a clear set of rules had to be estab
lished.
4. Power should be dispersed among many powerful
groups.
5. English democracy evolved from the right to private
property.
6. Pluralism developed in England at the very begin
ning of the 13th century.
7. Now Great Britain is a parliamentary monarchy.
V. MAKE UP AN OUTLINE OF THE TEXT AND SPEAK
ON THE CONTENTS OF THE TEXT.
VI. READ THE SECOND PART OF THE TEXT:
Once free of English rule, the Americans had to create their own system of government. By this time, however, political philosophers, especially the Scottish rationalists, had analyzed why and how the English system worked. Thus, the men who wrote the US Constitution did so with considerable understanding of the essential issues.
James Madison, the principal designer of the US Constitution, believed that democracy always faces two threats. The first is a tyranny of the minority: the historical danger that a privileged few would capture the state and use its coercive powers to repress and exploit the many. This classic
problem of taming the state had given rise to the English
form of democracy.
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But Madison was also concerned about a tyranny of the majority: the danger that a majority of citizens would use the machinery of representative government to exploit and abuse minorities. Here, Madison was mindful that even the English democracy persecuted religious dissenters and that coalitions of interest groups sometimes exploited weaker groups. Indeed, Madison was concerned that people who achieved great wealth be as secure in their property rights as anyone else, and he feared that the mass of citizens might use their superior numbers to impose discriminatory taxes on the rich and thereby escape paying taxes themselves. Put another way, Madison believed the poor could be as selfish as the rich.
To block both kinds of tyranny, Madison developed a system of government in which powers were widely distributed and procedures made somewhat cumbersome. Each of the three branches of the federal government — executive, legislative, and judicial — has the power to nullify actions taken by the other two. This is called the system of checks and balances in government. Madison hoped to make it possible for minorities to block actions against them, at least for a long period, and for substantial majorities to be required to take any action, thereby blocking minorities from controlling the government.
The system of checks and balances has dominated the American political process for more than 200 years. It has not always produced ideal results, and sometimes the United States has been less democratic than Madison had hoped. Despite these defects, the state has remained relatively tame. Moreover, many of the worst violations of individual liberty have been corrected within the system.