2

Political science is suspicious and skeptical toward the ill-informed prejudices of ordinary
citizens. Not only academic but also American, political science cannot take a neutral normative
view on the civic and political education of Americans

=> despairing view on the rationality and educability of the citizenry.

 A science’s primary role is to educate and enlighten the citizenry. => Deweyan view
 Political science, however, should serve as a tool for social control through training a
specialized administration. => Wilsonian view

- incapacity of the American citizens to govern themselves.

1. With Wilson, PS became fixated on the science of administration and on leadership,

distrusting civic education and democracy. By 1900, PS broke all ties with moral sciences
and sought to become a descriptive science via natural selection, proclaiming an
“evolutionary” view of political progress (Henry Ford’s Homo democraticus)
2. The Progressive period studied the irrational and unconscious impulses of the citizens.
Conceptions of “public opinion” were seen as malleable and manufacturable, incapable of
addressing public interest.
3. The thin view of democracy is thinned further in the Behavioral Revolution with the rise of
totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia and other authoritarian regimes.

An 18th century view of political science (Jefferson and later Dewey) views it as a “moral
science”, with a responsibility to educate the citizens. This kind of view was influenced by the
masses of immigrants coming to the young USA, all in need of being educated in democracy
and civic life.

The other view (influenced by Foucault) sees PS as a “discipline”, a tool of the state used for
civic control and training specialists (Woodrow Wilson). By 1900, statesmen lacked Jefferson’s
faith in education. The progressive period was moving in. If social sciences generally, and PS
especially, were unable to educate the citizenry, they might aspire to control them in order to
save American democracy from itself (the poor from the “bosses”).

Wilson believed in the so-called “imperial presidency”, that is a strong executive and a stronger
president that embodies the popular will better than a band of congressmen, thus breaking
from traditional republican politics. Wilson acted as a professor, containing the “enthusiasm” of
the citizenry and preparing a new “Administration”.

The Progressives followed, noting that the citizens are not up to the task of governing
themselves and that their representatives are corrupt demagogues. As a result, American
democracy must be saved from itself. Progressives incorporated in their thought the Darwinian
theory of evolution, theories of group psychologies and aspects of individual and collective
behavior.

Most people, most of the time, are motivated by irrational impulses, drives, fears and phobias
of which they are wholly unaware. And when such creatures act collectively or in concert, as
citizens, they are incapable of the kind of calm, cool rational deliberation required by classical
republican or democratic theory. As American society becomes more complex and the
administrative apparatus of the state more technical, government must be guided less by
ordinary citizens and more by experts. (Lowell, then Lippman)

The Great Depression and WW2 pave the way to the postwar Behavioral Revolution. Ball
considers that American political science as an academic discipline was never much enamored
of participatory democracy. A deeply divided but highly mobilized populace was, as Weimar
showed, dangerous to democracy. Too much democracy – in the form of intense ideological
division and high rates of participation – could destroy a democracy, so behavioralists stressed
“stability”. (Berelson)

Boorstin and Hartz continued, giving birth to the “end of ideology” – by stating that the genius
of America was in its apathy toward theoretical politics. Thus, unlike USSR, it had no ideology
to export and that “nothing could be more un-American than to encourage countries to imitate
America”, stressing the importance of American consensus at home. America was a pluralistic
society characterized not by conflicting ideologies but by competing interests. This led Almond
and Verba to claim American civic culture as the ideal type, considering its low levels of class
conflict, the existence and legitimacy of competing parties, widespread consensus regarding
the “rules of the game” and so on.