Review: Social Science: Abstractions, Applications and Abuses Author(s): Richard B. Finnegan Source: The Review of Politics, Vol.

35, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 276-280 Published by: Cambridge University Press for the University of Notre Dame du lac on behalf of Review of Politics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1406175 . Accessed: 10/02/2011 15:02
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THE REVIEW OF POLITICS SOCIAL SCIENCE: ABSTRACTIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ABUSES*

Faced with the difficulty of keeping up with all the different questions of integration among the social sciences, the scholar has a series of options. The first option is to simply ignore the crucial issues and proceed with one's work; this, by the way, is the general route of the area study specialists. The second option is a progressive shift from one's substantive work to commentary and analysis of the larger questions, a path frequently chosen by leading scholars, especially sociologists, who in their maturity become commentators on their disciplines instead of practitioners of them. The third and most popular option is to continue doing substantive work while keeping up with the larger questions as much as possible. The inevitable consequence of the third choice is too little familiarity with the myriad issues and perspectives in the literature. There is no reason to suspect that reviewers of books are any less subject to this difficulty; in fact, I am sure, many authors feel that too many reviewers are plagued with such difficulty. Stephen Potter once noted that reviewership is the art of conveying the impression that the reviewer knows more about a subject than the man who has just written a book about it. With respect to the books considered here, this reviewer in an un-Potterlike act of honesty admits to an inability to convey such an impression. The three books to be considered offer such sharply different perspectives on social science that it is difficult for one person's view to do justice to them all. 1. The Horowitz volume deals with a fundamental question of social science: how can we use it? In marked contrast Paul Kress explores the impact of process, as expressed by Arthur F. Bentley, on modern political and sociological analysis. Kress deals in the "shadowy area which lies between the philosophical and methodological realms" (p. xii). Finally, Ilchmann and Uphoff offer a model of politics which attempts to introduce the concept of economic exchange into the analysis of the developing nations. Taking each book in turn, we find Horowitz editing a second volume after The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot which also studies the implications of national policy making and social science research. While the Camelot volume was quite good, words of praise for the present work come with more difficulty. The papers in the book are New JerBehavioral Science and National Policy-making.(New Brunswick,
sey: Transaction Books, 1971. Pp. x, 350. $8.95. Paper, $3.95.) Legacy of Arthur F. Bentley. (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Pp. xiv, 260. $8.95.) 3. Warren F. Ilchmann and Norman Thomas Uphoff: The Political Economy of Change. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1971. Pp. xvi, 316. Paper, $3.25.) *1. Irving Louis Horowitz, editor: The Use and Abuse of Social Science:

2. Paul F. Kress: SocialScienceand the Idea of Process:The Ambiguous

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the result of a conference held at Rutgers University in 1969. The aim of the conference was to consider how social science and public policy relate to each other and "how social scientists working in public policy agencies perceive that relationship" (p. v). Horowitz, however, offers the caveat that all of the papers did not live up to the goal of the conference. I could not agree more. In fact, one wonders why Horowitz included some of them, since they are far removed from the "use and abuse" of the social sciences. Horowitz leaves himself open to the perennial criticism of edited works that the book is a nonbook because the material is either unrelated to the central theme or, worse, the readings are repetitive. Weak selections which abound in cliches are not excised by Horowitz and should have been. The valuable selections in the book include those by Kenneth E. Boulding, Jerome H. Skolnick, Pio D. Uliassi and Alvin L. Schorr. Boulding in his typical crisp fashion lays out several problems in the rational allocation of intellectual resources. Citing the power structure, "old men usually have the power while young men have the ideas" (p. 37), the fashions among grantors and the monopolistic power of grantors, Boulding hopes for the further study of the "scientific study of science." Schorr and Skolnick, using case studies of different social science research commissioned by the government, demonstrate the political pressures involved in this type of project. In one way or another, each of these selections raises the fundamental question of vested power interests, policy making and implementation as a political process. We can conclude consideration of the Horowitz volume by imagining the book being read by a government official, a scholar and a layman. The government official would find himself awash in generalities, excoriated, patronized and would probably become cynical about the utility of the whole enterprise. The scholar would find a plethora of cliches, irrelevancy and an avoidance of the crucial questions of political interests. The layman would be more than ever convinced that academia is the biggest con job around and would write his representative urging him to cut the budget at the state university. All would agree that Yehezkel Dror should be awarded the Talcott Parson's Academic Jargon Prize. The Camelot volume says more about the whole issue and says it better. Sharper editing by Horowitz, resulting in a smaller book, would have made a more valuable contribution. 2. From applied social science research, we jump to the completely different perspective of Paul Kress and his first-class work on Arthur F. Bentley. Kress has a dual purpose in the book, to locate Bentley in the intellectual and philosophical currents at the turn of the century and to examine the impact of Bentley's thinking on the conceptual development of the idea of process in American social thought. This ambitious task brings Kress in contact with the major social thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bentley's influence is ambiguous since he is often cited as the father of group orientation politics through this is not, as Kress persuasively argues, the full im-

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portance of his work. Thus Bentley ends up as a touchstone for everyone but a building block for no one. Kress contends that all have absorbed Bentley at the empirical level, that is, a focus on groups, but not at a philosophical level, that is, a focus on process. The notion of process developed by Bentley is far removed from the common sense of the term, as in legislative process, and is in fact a revolutionary shift in epistemology and scientific method. Kress develops the full range of Bentley's thought in a series of chapters which are a rigorous but fulfilling intellectual journey. Kress next considers contemporary political and sociological theorists such as Easton, Parsons, Levy and Merton. He juxtaposes the thrust of Bentley's thinking and the misinterpretation of Bentley by moder system theorists. Essentially Kress argues that neither equilibrium analysis nor reified group analysis is "compatible with Bentley's vision of full transactional analysis and the process universe" (p. 206). Kress has produced a solid important work at the abstract level of political and social thought. Kress not only explicates Bentley and reintroduces his importance but also exposes the philosophical roots of a large amount of modern theorizing. Few sociologists and political scientists would not benefit from reading this book. 3. Horowitz and his applied social science are a distant valley when viewed from the cool abstract heights of Kress. However, between the two levels Ilchmann and Uphoff offer us a perspective which draws upon abstract economic theory but is intended for application by the prince. Basically Ilchmann and Uphoff attempt to create a model of politics which can be empirically verified and can be of prescriptive value to the statesman. The model is interesting since it incorporates the major economic concepts of exchange, supply and demand, inflation and deflation and so on. The key feature of their model is an emphasis on choice concerning the allocation of scarce political resources. Wise choices can turn political resources such as economic goods and services, authority, status, information and coercion into political productivity. The regime makes choices in the realms of social and economic change and the maintenance of authority in order to retain core sectors and mobilize other sectors into the core area. Sectors represent major groups within the society such as bureaucrats, intellectuals, labor and businessmen. The regime bargains with the various sectors for support in various markets at exchange rates or prices. Political inflation occurs when the demand for regime resources exceeds the supply, political deflation occurs when the available authority of the regime is not demanded and sectors achieve their goals through private intersectoral exchange. The efforts of the regime should be directed not only at the effective management of resources but also the accumulation of resources or political capital formation. Methods of capital formation include: mobilization of sectors into regime support; savings, the withholding of political resources for future use; interest, the accrual of value to a

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resource as a result of favorable decisions or exchanges; investment, expenditures of resources in anticipation of future gains as in infrastructure, stability and legitimacy; entrepreneurship, the art of political management. The ultimate goal of their efforts according to Ilchmann and Uphoff is the use of policy research for the verification of social science theory. Thus the aim of policy research is "the development of increasingly reliable models of social change and social control" (p. 259). The strengths of the Ilchmann-Uphoff model are many. In emphasizing choice and bargaining, they have rescued students of political development from the large amount of configurative work in the field. Political culture, for example, is to the study of politics as geography is to the study of economics. Knowing the limits of an economy in terms of, say, mineral resources is a long way from Keynesian economic theory. The Political Economy of Change does not emphasize the typological analysis as does the great bulk of work done today in comparative politics. The emphasis on the regime as an actor-trading, bargaining and manipulating-shifts the focus from the regime as processor or converter, a view utilized in the works of Almond and Easton. The impression this reviewer has in reading this book is that it renders a great service in illustrating the degree to which the political process can be expressed in terms of economic concepts. Now what? Does it really aid the statesman? Can prescriptive precepts be drawn from this model any more than from the Almond and Powell model? Urging a statesman to bargain wisely with "core" sectors in many ways seems no more, or less, useful than an Almondian precept to improve symbolic capability or improve extra-active capability. Ilchmann and Uphoff argue that policy analysis drawn from their model would ultimately have more utility for the statesman than the structural-functional model of Almond. In that they may be correct but it remains to be seen, and at present their model has primarily heuristic utility-a utility, however, which is of admirable significance. No doubt this swift journey through three volumes does not do any of them justice. That is perhaps the point. The perspectives and issues raised by these books are of crucial magnitude, especially the questions of the policy use of social science and the policy prescriptive capacity of models. Complete knowledge of these questions is important for every social scientist, yet we are faced with such a plethora of issues, problems and perspectives that we cannot acquire the needed expertise. Application of social science research in an age of mass communication and ever-growing centralization of bureaucracy looms as an Orwellian problem. The ethics of research sponsorship, the politics of grantsmanship, the morality of prescriptive analysis, all are crucial questions. Ilchmann and Uphoffs reference to "social control" raises the specter of manipulation of social change devoid of a concept of social justice. Project Camelot and others serve as a

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reminder of the pitfalls in the realm of applied social science. We could well heed Zbigniew Brzezinski'swarning: "The largely humanistic-oriented occasionally ideologically minded intellectual dissenter, who saw his role in terms of proferring social critiques, is rapidly being displaced either by experts or specialists who become involved in special government undertakings or by a generalist-integrator who becomes in effect the house-ideologue for those in power" (Encounter, January, 1968, p. 22).
-RICHARD B. FINNEGAN

PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEARCH FOR POLITICAL MAN* Serious observers of politics have recently felt an increasing obligation to ground their studies in an explicit philosophical anthropology. This development has resulted in a building of bridges back to the roots of political science within the classical tradition where the questions of human and social order were intimately interwoven. 1. Lane's study draws both its strength and displays its limitations in a comparison with the classical models. The book, a collection of 15 essays, 10 of which were previously published, is characterized by a common theme; the effort is to "place man and his beliefs at the center of the political stage." Organizing this approach according to the "concepts and methods of the social sciences," Lane subdivides the questions of philosophical anthropology into chapters which discuss the concepts of political personality, political socialization, core belief systems, the effects of affluence and knowledge on belief systems and the notion of the good citizen. Lane's arguments generally involve the use of survey data and the interpretation of selected case studies. Thus, the adequacy of any particular analysis can only be checked through an examination of the individual items. On a theoretical level, however, there exists throughout the work an underlying presupposition whose validity is questionable and whose presence, therefore, qualifies the value of the work as a study of "political man." In its most general form this presupposition is reflected in Lane's facile assumption that the traditional concept of "human nature" can be equated with the moder terms "political personality" or "political character." This assumption leads Lane to suggest that Plato and Aristotle were actually dealing in psychology and it reduces their symbolization of the psyche (and their arguments for its proper form) to categorizations which allegedly sought to define "the enduring, organized dynamic response sets habitually aroused by political stimuli."
*1 Robert E. Lane: Political Man. (New York: The Free Press, 1972. Pp. 328. $10.95.) 2 Hannah Arendt: Crises of the Republic. '(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1972. Pp. 240. $6.95, $2.95, paperback edition.)