Practical English Usage

David Easton: Reflections on an American Scholar
Author(s): Tracy B. Strong

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Jun., 1998), pp. 267-280
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/191836
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DAVID EASTON
Reflections on an American Scholar
TRACY B. STRONG
University of California, San Diego
I do not for these defects despair of our republic.
R. W Emerson, Politics
DAVID EASTON HAS LONG BEEN a slight source of guilt to my

intellectual conscience. He was required reading in graduate school. In the
1960s, "required reading" meant pretty much what one was going to reject.
And so I did. I remember, however, a touch of guilt in doing so, as if I were
not allowing him his due. Thus Henrik Bang's essay afforded me the occasion
to reread Easton and to take this opportunity to set myself straight. Bang reads
Easton as a European (with the doubleness intended) and as, at least at the
beginning, a precursor to (inter alia) Foucault, Lyotard, and Connolly. I want
below to complement this by placing Easton in the context of American
thought and by investigating the normal science that Easton proposes in
relation to his demand for moral clarification. I hope that this in turn sets off
a context for Bang's claims about Easton's (premature?) postmodernism.
In 1953, David Easton, then a young professor of thirty-five at the
University of Chicago, published The Political System: An Inquiry in the
State of Political Science.1 The point of the book was that the two parts of his
title were related to one another: the health of the Republic had something to
do with that of political science. Setting political science to health, or at least
on the path to health, would be to assist the cause ofjustice. Explicitly, Easton
set out to find a practical and central place for political theory ("moral and
causal") in the study of political society. Such a return of political theory to
the political world would constitute its "rejuvenation" (p. 314; chap. 4
throughout). The book is written in deceptively simple prose, without ruffles
and flourishes, the equivalent in social science, one might say, of the Ameri-
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 26 No. 3, June 1998 267-280

?D 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.
267
268 POLITICAL THEORY / June 1998
can plain style. It gives the sense of being all so obvious that no one might
find anything to gainsay in what was there.
Indeed, with what could one disagree in this vision of the responsible
intellectual, morally engaged and self-conscious, one aware of the realities
of power? The role in which Easton casts himself appears not dissimilar to
that which, say, Jurgen Habermas has claimed over the last two decades.
Consider: Habermas writes that the role of the philosopher is to be the
"guardian of rationality."2 "What moral theory can do and should be trusted
to do," he writes, "is to clarify the universal core of our moral intuitions and
thereby refute value skepticism."3 The philosopher is not privileged to know
answers; he (or she) has only a responsibility to maintain the understanding
that answers must have the quality of rationality and that rationality be
available. Rationality-"humane values"-is in this vision something that
humans need to have kept for them. How can one object to this? I think one
might.
I belong to a fragment of a generation for whom Easton's book was, if not
the enemy, at least the standard of that against which we defined ourselves.
From the present, this judgment looks not so much unfair as incomplete. It
is unawares of the place of Easton's project in the context of American
thought, and it fails to acknowledge the ways in which Easton continues the
American Emersonian project of focusing on action and movement, looking
(albeit unconsciously) only at the ways in which he departs from it. So I want
to look now at what Easton was trying to do when he wrote The Political
System. I recognize the presumption in that statement: it means only that I
want to try and set out what the book actually does.
It is clear that The Political System sought to be a self-consciously
contemporary American book. Each of its twelve chapters carried an epigraph
from an American political scientist. Only one of them, a kind of Pascalian
wager on preferring hope to despair from Jefferson, was from the great figures
of the American past. The rest were from political scientists, American ones.
The book explicitly wants not to recover past political theory but to do
political theory like past greats did it, as "complete social scientists." We are
not to worship at the altar of past wisdom; we are to do our own deeds and
will possibly surpass the ancients in heroic wisdom.
Not only were the epigraphs sourced in America, but, as things developed
later on, they were well chosen for the purposes of the book. Six of the eleven
(Bentley is cited twice) were or went on to become presidents of the American
Political Science Association, and, indeed, if one leaves out Jefferson and the
philosophers (Dewey and Cohen and Bentley), Catlin-whom Easton la-
ments as underappreciated-is the only political scientist not to be so recog-
nized. The footnotes are furthermore focused in their sense of who would
Strong / REFLECTIONS ON AN AMERICAN SCHOLAR 269
become important in the profession in the 1950s and 1960s: V. 0. Key, Me

Fainsod, E. E. Schattschneider, Pendleton Herring, and Philip Selznick are
but a few of those who appear here, their early reputation already established
and soon to be confirmed by the work of their early maturity. Most of the
sources in Easton's book become the establishment of American political
science in the 1950s and 1960s. His sense of what would count as first-rate
work was unerring.
But the motivation for the book was far more grandiose than the simple
establishment of professional credentials and the promotion of an extraordi-
nary group of young scholars. The general epigraph to the book placed the
author himself under a compulsion, one given to him by Charles Beard.
No one can deny [Easton selects large bold type] that the idea is fascinating-the idea
of subduing the phenomenon of politics to the laws of causation, of penetrating to the
mystery of its transformation, of symbolizing, the trajectory of its future; in a word of
grasping destiny by the forelock and bringing it prostrate to earth. The very idea is worthy
of the immortal gods.... If nothing ever comes of it, its very existence will fertilize
thought and enrich imagination.
"Worthy of the immortal gods." Easton's book places itself under the
compulsion of original sin and boldly takes that sin up as its vocation. But
his sin as a scholar is Promethean, not Adamic: Easton knows what he intends
to do, and will do it, because humanity is entitled to its performance. Indeed,
as it turns out, the reasons that Easton offers for writing his book set so much
at stake in our world that they require his intervention. Note also that Easton's
intent is to make politics our own by bringing it to its knees, rather than
allowing it to roam unfettered through the world, as it presumably had been
doing for the previous two decades. Bringing politics to earth will make us
like gods, master of a world that is now, perhaps for the first time, our own.
The first sentence of the book reminds us that politics is the master science.
("But this is just an epigraph. Surely you exaggerate Easton's intent?"-On
the contrary: Easton urges us to be "fearless" [p. 348] for "the crisis of our
times spares no group" [p. 345]; he finds that we are "compelled to engage"
in this enterprise [p. 320].)
I wish my sentences here to be without irony for I find it moving that
Easton would so naturally place himself under such compulsions. And why?
There is, he warns, "a growing disillusionment [in the West] about the whole
of scientific reason." We are quite possibly standing "at the beginning of a
long period of the decline of man's faith in reason." Common popular
experience has been such-here he mentions the Hiroshima explosion-that
"we no longer trust ourselves." There is a loss of "consensus and harmony,"
a mood of disillusionment that can be seen not only in society at large but
even in intellectuals. Easton will cite Michael Oakeshott's "Rationalism in

Politics," delivered as his Inaugural Lecture at the London School of Eco-
nomics in 1957, as an example of a claim that "reason must yield to prejudice"
(pp. 5, 7, 16).
It is clear that Easton thought himself to be standing at a kind of turning
point of history, a moment of crisis, in which philosophy and science were
called to preserve Western values from crumbling.4
To each generation its crucial political problems seem never to have been matched
before; nevertheless, by any measure, a civilization has seldom been faced with a crisis
weighted with graver consequences than that confronting us today. (P. 40)
I write the above because when many in my generation gained the ground
under their own feet, we, or at least I, did not hear sentences like those I have
just cited. We were taught by and from writers like David Easton. But Easton
represented to us what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science," that is, the
assurance that one knew one's way about the world of knowledge. The
apparently quiet complacency of the 1950s and early 1960s seemed embodied
in the work of Easton and others. Whether one attached oneself to the normal
science that Easton and his footnotes had come to represent by the middle of
the 1960s, or resisted the apparent hegemony of his claims for science,5 the
sense was that Easton and his fellows were comfortably wedded to politics
as usual. More important, the sense was that scientific knowledge confirmed
the moral and social necessity of "politics as usual." "Political Science is for
the first time," wrote Easton in 1966, "arriving at a full appreciation of itself
as a discipline with the theoretical status equivalent to those of the other social
sciences."6
What we missed was that in 1953 "politics as usual" was precisely what
Easton sought to establish, not what he was celebrating. And to accomplish
this, Easton conceived of the role of the social sciences and of political science
in particular in heroic terms. If a "fact was an ordering of reality in terms of
a theoretical interest" (p. 53), then the important thing was to get your
theoretical interests set up properly. This, however, had not happened, and
"political research still has to penetrate to the hard core of political power in
society" (p. 45).
Why had political science not yet penetrated to the "hard core of power"?
Easton looks to the practices of the world around him-the immediate
postwar world of America-and does not find all the necessary resources in
American practice and thought. The American orientation toward policy and
action was congenial to him, but there was little else to meet the demands of
the postwar crisis he saw around him. He cites Emerson's essay, "Politics,"
for instance, to the effect that, in Emerson's words, "the State is a trick,
to conclude that such is the case in all societies and does not constitute a
barrier against the deeper investigation of the nature of the political system.7
Indeed, Easton seems to quietly associate himself with Emerson's apparent
claim about the State. Easton's concern with the "political system" is a
concern with the fluidity of power relations in the actualization of competing
policy preferences. There is no State, because the political system is no one
thing.
Flux, however, can be read in different ways. Easton is here more literal
minded than Emerson. Emerson does note that "the old statesman knows that
society is fluid," but he goes on to treat the relationship between the illusion
of givenness and the reality of fluidity as the essence of politics.8 Easton, on
the other hand, insists the political research must be only into what he
understands as real, namely, the systematic interactions of policy pursuits.
But for both Emerson and Easton, the reality of politics is flux. However, for
Emerson this flux is in dialogue with "youth," with those who hold to the
"illusion" that politics is "aboriginal," that is, given. It is the dialectic between
illusion and becoming that is the Emersonian subject of the study of politics.
For Easton, what may stand outside the flux of the reality of politics is not
illusion but rather the possibility of a morally serious and self-conscious
political scientist. Since most people are simply caught within the illusion,
nothing can be done for them except to develop a better science of politics.
Easton thus goes to some length to establish not only what political research
is research into, but also that any systematic theoretical achievement will
"normally be related to the moral views of the theorist" (p. 232). While it is
not clear what "related" means in this context, it is clear that Easton cannot
claim to exempt himself from this conclusion (nor, I should think, would he
want to). It is because of this tension that Easton can think that it is the task
of the intellectual to preserve the humane values of the civilization. Therefore
we must ask what the moral views of Easton are such that they require that
he delineate theoretically "the political system."
Some of this we have seen already. For Easton, in the aftermath of the
dynamics of the Second World War, Western civilization and the culture of
rationality are at stake. The challenge is to provide it with a foundation that
will allow it to understand itself. Easton's fear is that it does not want to
understand itself. It is absolutely central to read Easton here against many of
the others who participated in the "behavioral revolution." This is not the
Sorcerer's Apprentice with a blind insouciance about the moral situation of
the Western World. Easton really is trying to make the world safe for
democracy. But he is also, by playing out how values are embodied in a
political system, trying to make democracy safe for the world.
Three elements inform his task. The first is that to accomplish the task of
political science, "We need to know how to orient ourselves towards the
things we have learned to call political. Where does the political begin and
how is it distinguishable from all other kinds of data?" (p. 92). This is what
I might call a "quasi-transcendental" question. Easton's move here is bold:
politics refers to those choices presented to them that people think they
morally should or should not do, insofar as those choices are presented to the
society as a whole. Not all choices of value are political choices, Easton insists
again and again; choices are political insofar as they manifest the attachment
(positively or negatively) of the chooser to society as a whole. One cannot
from this identify anything in particular as political (Easton is at pains to
reject two major contenders, the State and Power)-the substance of the
political is learned in any particular society. A society is thus defined as the
largest group that attends to all of its needs for "survival and perpetuation"
(p. 135). What is learned from (Easton's example) the Logoli and Vigusu
tribes in Kenya will be a process of what he calls the "authoritative allocation
of value" for their society-it will be a process rather than a substance.
Before addressing the question of authoritative allocation, I must attend
to the two other elements of Easton's enterprise. Precisely because the
political process starts from moral concerns as to what a society should and
should not do, his next move is an anxiety about our learning process, about
"the things we have learned to call the political." It immediately appears that
most of the lessons available to be learned from present science are in fact
too vague and too confusing to admit of science. Concepts such as "dictator-
ship," "class," "sovereignty," "responsibility," and the like convey such broad
meanings, Easton notes, that it is possible for a number of students to use
them apparently with reference to the same social phenomena but in fact with
reference to considerably different things (p. 45). The present state of political
science makes a mess of the realities of political life. It renders us uncritical
about our political life. It is important to see here that our uncriticalness can
be cured by science. For Easton, these concepts are "vague" rather than
essentially contestable; thus clarity is a virtue.
The final move is a claim that one can achieve the aims of the first point
and avoid the pitfalls of point two by starting from "the common sense idea
of political life" (p. 126). As Easton develops this point, we find that it is
threefold. Politics is inspired by the question of what the good life is; it is
pervasive in society; and it is concerned with decisions that affect "the kind
of authoritative policy adopted for a society and the way it is put into
practice." By a society, as we have seen, Easton means the broadest group
for whom policies simultaneously authoritatively allocate values. Although
he does not say it, it would seem that politics is a dialogue between the
"common sense idea of political life" and the authoritative allocation of
values.
The "common sense idea of political life" has a clear sense to it. It refers
to the fact that politics is a response to actions, demands, questions, needs,
angers, and affections that ordinary people pose and know that they pose.
Easton thus starts from a very different position than that of those political
scientists who elaborated what came to be called the "elitist theory of
democracy."9 These writers held that democracy was, as it were, a profes-
sional sport and should thus be composed of vocationally dedicated and
skilled politicians, on one hand, and fans (voters) on the other. Easton is not
committed to this position. His notion of politics as the authoritative alloca-
tion of value clearly means that politics is more than a question of which ball
park is most filled.
It is here, however, that matters seem to me to go wrong, or flat. Of all of
his discussions, the briefest and least satisfactory is that of "authoritative."
Policies are "authoritative," Easton tells us, when they are "accepted as
binding" (p. 132). Easton's language here recognizes only a passive relation
("accepted") of the populace to authority ("binding"). The central behavioral
question is that of acceptance; "acceptance" is not primarily a critical fac-
ulty-it tends to mean "belief." Since Easton thinks that the proper under-
standing of value allocation must be left to the morally self-conscious
scientist/theorist (in this he is like Habermas-see above), he is not concerned
with the activity of popular evaluation. (Note that this does not say that the
scientist/theorist allocates value, only that he understands it). This is not an
unusual position: it is implicit or explicit in numerous other writers of the
time. And it is generally authoritatively referenced, as Easton does, with a
citation to what Weber has to say about authority. 't
Weber is generally taken to mean that from the point of view of social
science, the legitimacy of authority is simply a matter of acceptance on the
part of the populace. The conditions or reasons for that acceptance play no
part in its understanding. That understanding is purely formal; famously,
authority can be rational-legal, bureaucratic, or traditional.
There are two things to note here about Easton's appeal to Weber. First,
Weber's focus on belief is in fact extended beyond this position elsewhere in
his work. In Economy and Society, he writes that authority occurs in
the situation in which the manifested will of the ruler or rules is meant to influence the
conduct of one or more others (the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way
that their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs as ifthe ruled had made the content
of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake."1
The difference is slight, but it is important. Weber stresses the im

of the fact that the belief has in fact become part of the makeup, as
of those who act in accordance with it. They act "as if the content
command" were the "maxim." Weber echoes Kantian discourse her
acts in accord with the Categorical Imperative when one acts "as if' the
"maxim" of one's act were a universal law). Kant had shown that the
categories of moral judgment had to be understood as inherent in the human
mind, even if one could not demonstratively show that they were there. The
Herrschaft of which Weber speaks-the authoritative value-is thus for
Weber part of the makeup of each individual who acts in accordance with it.
It is recognized as one's own in the experience of Herrschaft. It becomes part
of one's operational grammar and is far deeper than something "accepted."
Easton rather more simply refers to a situation in which policies are "accepted
as binding." The question that Easton-but not Weber-raises for us, but not
(at least explicitly) for himself, is then "why is it that values will be accepted
as binding?" Easton's work, in other words, requires, but does not give us, a
theory of political legitimacy.
Second, Easton notably does not make reference here to the Weberian ideal
types of rational-legal, charismatic and traditional authority or Herrschaft.
He is not after a sociology of authority, but rather a theory of authority that
makes it the core of the political realm. This theory is displayed in the concern
with which Easton addresses the matter of "authoritative." Authoritative
means for Easton that there be someone or rather some body who must
"intervene in the name of society . . . to decide how valued things are to be
allocated" (p. 136). This concern reflects both Easton's politics (he opposes
this position to the "nineteenth century liberal dream") and his epistemologi-
cal sense that politics is made by human beings for human beings and thus
the analysis of it must deal with human action. The necessity for such
intervention is said by Easton to be consequent to the ever-increasing com-
plexity of human society. It is worth noting that Easton is, in his prose style,
uneasy about his position here. He uncharacteristically uses the passive mode:
when there are disputes in such a society, then "a policy is enunciated with
the authority of society behind it" (p. 137). I take him to make the move to
the passive here because it is not central to him who enunciates the policy,
only that it is enunciated.
A pattern begins to emerge from these considerations. Easton is not
directly concerned by what values the populace accepts that which is allo-
cated; nor is he immediately concerned with the values by which the alloca-
tors allocate. He knows that to understand the process, he will have to make
clear those values. And he knows that the intellectual cannot in this century
help but be responsibly involved in the allocation of societal values. But
Easton spends little time telling us what makes a policy authoritative, o

that there are such policies and that they are the stuff of politics. The
authoritative allocation of values is for Easton the equivalent of the "pursuit
of the good life," and we can rest with this "psychological" definition of
authority because political science is to be concerned with how values are
allocated for the society as a whole. (Easton will investigate the "moral
dimension" later on, but he thinks it conceptually separable from, although
consequent to, the other pursuit.) This is a significant matter in that authori-
tativeness is what Easton assumed. Or, more precisely, he assumes it in
relation to what he hopes that political science can become.
To get an idea of what this commits him to, I want to contrast here Easton's
understanding of the authoritativeness of authority with that of a "nineteenth-
century liberal," with that of Emerson. The idea of authority in Emerson is
to be found not in the image of some voice coming from the outside, the force
of which we cannot deny, but in what Emerson calls "provocation." "Truly
speaking," writes Emerson in "The Divinity School Address," "it is not
instruction, but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he
announces I must find true in me, or wholly reject." Emerson goes on to assert
that without this reality-he suggests it might be called "faith"-"then
falls ... state, art, letters, life."'2 There is not the space here, nor is it the place,
to develop fully this contrast. I wish only to point out that there are two
possible models for that which is authoritative-the one is an authority that
comes to humans from the outside, be this outside God, political science, or
even rationality and philosophy. The other is an authority that comes to
human beings in their interaction with each other, which each finds in her-
or himself, as it is found in the other. Easton works from the first. The link
of the authority to society is the moral commitments and self-consciousness
of the scientist, on one hand, and, on the other, the belief or acceptance on
the part of the society. It is noteworthy in this context that Easton selected
Oakeshott as a theorist of irrationalism: Oakeshott is, I should think, much
more the theorist of conversation, closer thus to Emerson, and has now,
interestingly, been appropriated as much by the Left as by the Right.
I have looked above at Easton's expectations for the central role he thinks
cast for science by the disastrous political developments of this century. I
wish now to look more closely here at Easton's understanding of the impor-
tance of acceptance. It is clear, from the citation above, that Easton thinks
that "what we call" the political is something learned. (And Easton will, with
Jack Dennis, write a book on children's political beliefs.)'3 And since it is
something learned, it is of utmost importance that it be taught and taught well.
This means that the responsibility of political scientists is to be able to teach
true and accurate knowledge of the political system.
The first matter relevant to the question of acceptance can be found in

what Easton thinks has happened to political theory. The short answer is that
it has lost the only way that was properly its way. The true function of political
theory was to be a "vehicle whereby articulate and intelligent individuals
conveyed their thoughts on the actual direction of affairs ... and ... revealed
to us the full meaning of their moral frame of reference" (p. 234). Today the
"valuational frame of reference" has disappeared under a "decline into
historicism," and "political theory has become little more than the history of
ideas."
Despite the somewhat disingenuous "us" to whom meaning is revealed,
it is important to see here how traditional and grandiose a role for political
theory Easton holds. Political theory has failed its task in recent decades in
that it has allowed people to commit themselves to systems of value that they
did not fully comprehend-one might almost say to live an unexamined life.
Indeed, the task failed by political theory today is that of "moral clarification."
A consequence is "moral conformity" mostly to the "values of Western
civilization," and this encourages us to passively allow history to place a
"stamp of approval" on what we do. This passivity, Easton goes on to say, is
particularly dangerous in the contemporary world where the fact that people
can act on the basis of "highly divergent ethical standards ... reinforced by
almost irreconcilable power relations" has become apparent (p. 264).
What is wondrous-and distressing-here is the tone, the sense of scope.
Some years ago, I argued for a parochial vision of theory, that theory need
not be thought to solve all our (our system's?) problems, that it properly gave
only first words and never the last ones.14 I tried to raise questions about the
claim to immaculateness implied in the theoretical stance. Easton is aware of
these problems-they provoke his concern with morality. But he does think
that one can get clear about oneself and that clarity is a virtue.
Easton is aware that "value clarification" cannot be achieved by simply
announcing one's values, as if wearing your heart on your sleeve were the
emblem of self-knowledge. Instead he urges that the political scientist can
only come to know his or her values by elaborating an understanding of a
whole political system and seeing how those values that will necessarily be
embodied in that system play themselves out in a real world. Only by knowing
the world can the social scientist make clear to him- or herself what the values
are that he or she necessarily brings to the study of society and politics. There
is no presumption in Easton that one can be "value-free." Knowing yourself
is the first demand of doing good work. The reason for this is that "morals,"
as Easton uses the term, function as inevitable filters to what seems of
importance to us in the world. The reason to become self-conscious about
one's morals is so as not to allow the inevitable selection that one must make
of data ("we cannot study everything") to become an unconscious limitat

Easton refers to the "error caused by the limitations imposed by the r
worker's moral outlook."'15
The demand of self-knowledge is coupled with another imperative. Easton
is interested in the political system. A system for him is an integrated pattern
of allocating values in an authoritative manner. The presumption behind
Easton's endeavor is that knowledge can be adequate to the system. In other
words, we live in a framework that distributes values in a manner that it
teaches us to accept (that is the prerequisite for it being able to allocate
values), and we can know it (or we could if our theory were adequate).
Where does Easton think that (such scientific) knowledge comes from?
He is not clear or at least not explicit on this matter, but a clue is given by his
repeated use of locutions such as "we use the word in [a given] sense," "we
have in mind," "what we mean," "we know quite naturally." But it is also
clear from his comments about the crisis in civilization that much of what
people think they know is flawed or not available. At this point, a number of
elements come together: politics is about the authoritative allocation of values
in a society; our very idea of what counts as politics is learned; the starting
point of our science of politics is in the common sense of the ordinary use of
words about politics. Putting this together, it would attribute the present sorry
state of political science to two things: first, an inadequate understanding of
what the realities of politics are, that is, a failure for whatever reason of what
passes for our learned concepts; second, as the concepts that are adequate are
no longer clearly available in/from ordinary life, they must be uncovered and
taught by scientists.
The paradox in this is that Easton is trying to bring about precisely what
later writers think is the problem. Take, for instance, Michel Foucault's
understanding of the idea of the disciplinary society. The disciplinary society
is for Foucault society understood as the closer and closer adherence of
citizens to the roles that that society requires for its ordering of the world.
Thus it is the case that society both teaches its members to learn how to pay
taxes, but it also engenders a tax code so complex that most of its members
are more or less conscious minor tax evaders. This petty criminality is, in a
Foucauldian analysis, useful to the society for it also teaches people to accept
the tax system and to keep a low profile in relation to it. 16
Foucault's analysis, however, does not stop with the simple assertion that
humans are shaped and limited by the structures of society. (It is worth noting
that Foucault does not claim that this is a plot-he indicates that it is part of
the nature or logic of [at least] modern societies.) It is also the case that society
engenders precisely the kind of individual that it requires in order to have its
members believe that they are in resistance to such forces. The normalized
modern self is for Foucault a self that thinks of itself as unified natur
that such unity entitles it to considerations (such as rights) that transcend
shaping forces of society. The modern individual is thus a rights-claimer
Foucault, as well as an interest-knower, an ends-pursuer, and so forth, but
each of these activities is in fact the result of a more thorough incorporation
of society's discipline. Discipline does not just limit, it also constructs. It
allocates, we should say, systemic value.
I do not wish here to go on at length about Foucault except to make the
point above. What is worth noting, however, is that the unified self-the
disciplined and disciplinary soul"7-that Foucault worries about is precisely
what Easton thinks is lacking. It is here that a question must be raised about
Easton's notion of the "system." He developed the sense of the importance
of the systems approach, I argued above, in response to the chaos and
value-relativism that led to and emerged from the events around the Second
World War. A system was needed precisely to bring rational and self-con-
scious order to the values by which society could be organized.
The system was to be constructed by knowledge, by science. One must
ask oneself why it is that Easton thought that the science that might help put
the world right, or at least keep it from decaying further into parochiality and
relativism, was particularly American. It would be easy to put this down as
another manifestation of American imperialism, or at least of manifest
destiny. There is perhaps a bit of that in Easton. He shares concerns with
others of that time about the inability of European thought, at least in its
dominant twentieth century manifestations, to resist the temptations of the
century. Easton sensed in America the possibility of a truly democratic
science, one that would not simply acquiesce to the machines of power, but
might make the burdens of the "Lords of Life," as Emerson called the chains
of society, less other.
So the question to Easton's achievement has to be if the chains of society
can be made other than other, can be made truly ours. This has been the dream
of democrats from Hobbes to Kant: if it can be, whether it can be realized is
the question raised by the juxtaposition of Foucault to Easton. Foucault
thought (at least in much of his work) that society could only be made our
own in and by our resistance to it. One might not have to go as far as this.
One could still argue though that it is in the nature of a truly human society
not to be systematic, to allow for contradictions, irrationalities, multiplicities.
When I and others resisted Easton's claims a quarter of a century ago, we did
so in the name of the vision of an alternate system. That now appears a
mistake. To complete this argument, however, one would have to show that
the alternative to a "system" is a form of what has been called "pluralistic
agonism,"'" where the conflict is at the level of values. But then politic
no longer be the matter of authoritative allocation.
NOTES
1. (Chicago, 1953, 1966).

2. Jurgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1991), 20. For a full discussion of Habermas on these and related issues, see Tracy B.
Strong and Frank A. Sposito, "Habermas' Significant Other," in Cambridge Companion to
Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263-89.
3. Ibid., 211; my italics.
4. It is interesting to speculate here on the influence that Leo Strauss may have had on
Easton. They were colleagues at Chicago. Strauss is cited favorably on p. 126 and thanked in
the acknowledgments.
5. Easton is, for instance, a major target in Charles Taylor's classic "Neutrality in Political
Science," now republished in volume 2 of his Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
6. David Easton, "Alternative Strategies in Theoretical Research," in Varieties of Political
Theory, ed. D. Easton (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 5.
7. Ibid., 127. The citation from Emerson may be found in R. W. Emerson, Essays and
Lectures (New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1995), 563.
8. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 559.
9. For a discussion, see William Connolly, ed., The Bias of Pluralism (New York: Atherton,
1959); Jack Walker, "The Elite Theory of Democracy," American Political Science Review (June
1966), 285.
10. For a critical discussion, see John H. Schaar, "Legitimacy in the Modern State," in Power
and Community, ed. Philip Green and Sanford Levinson (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 276-328.
Easton is discussed on p. 319. Schaar sees Weber also as the source of this position.
11. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1978), 946; my italics.
12. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 79. I cannot but help hear in the cadence of these phrases
a notice that we live without the world of degree, the loss of which Ulysses mourns in Troilius
and Cressida and which was of concern to Emerson's friend Carlyle.
13. D. Easton and J. Dennis, Children in the Political System: Origins ofPolitical Legitimacy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
14. In The Idea of Political Theory: Reflections on the Self in Political Time and Space (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), chap. 5. See J. L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses,"
Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 183.
15. Ibid., 319.
16. I steal the example from William Connolly, "Discipline, Politics and Ambiguity,"
reprinted in The Self and the Political Order, ed. Tracy Strong (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 145.
17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), 29; see also his
"Pour defendre la socit " [Lectures au College de France, 1975] (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), esp.
the last chap.
18. By William Connolly. See Connolly's chapter on Tocqueville in his recent The Ethos of
Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) for some reflections on a
parallel change from his earlier work. See also the work of Richard Flathman, George Kateb,
Bonnie Honig, Dana Villa, as well as my own and that of others.
Tracy B. Strong is the author, most recently, of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Politics
of the Ordinary (Sage, 1994).

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David Easton: Reflections on an American Scholar

Author(s): Tracy B. Strong

Reflections on an American Scholar

I do not for these defects despair of our republic.

DAVID EASTON HAS LONG BEEN a slight source of guilt to my

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 26 No. 3, June 1998 267-280

become important in the profession in the 1950s and 1960s: V. 0. Key, Me

even in intellectuals. Easton will cite Michael Oakeshott's "Rationalism in

The difference is slight, but it is important. Weber stresses the im

Easton spends little time telling us what makes a policy authoritative, o

The first matter relevant to the question of acceptance can be found in

of data ("we cannot study everything") to become an unconscious limitat

1. (Chicago, 1953, 1966).

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