Political Science in the United States

Political Science: Recent Trends

Introduction to Political Science

During the late 20th century the American practice of the discipline has become dominant worldwide. The analytical methods favored by the behaviorists continue to influence political scientists, who have developed rational choice theory to predict and explain the behavior of people when they interact in a political context. Political scientists have also reconsidered some of the most basic building blocks of society, such as the state and the institutions it comprises.” (1)

Resources

Notes and References

• Information about Political Science in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia

Guide to Political Science

Political Science in 1899 (United States)

The following information about Political Science is from the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States by the Best American and European Writers.

POLITICAL SCIENCE is that part of social science which treats of the foundations of the state and of the principles of government. It is closely connected with political economy, or, as it is sometimes called, the science of wealth; with law, be it natural or positive, which has principally to do with the relations of citizens to one another; with history, which furnishes it with the facts of which it has need; with philosophy, and, above all, with morality, which supply it with a part of its principles. Political science is either theoretical or applied. In theory it establishes general laws, which it draws either from experience or from reason, and which are as much the generalized expression of facts as the pure conception of an ideal more or less possible of realization. As applied science, it seeks the means of reducing to practice these general principles, taking into consideration time, place, manners, resources, in a word, circumstances. We shall speak here only of theoretical political science, and our intention is not to propound any particular doctrine, but to give a summary, following the order of time, of the principal theories which the history of the science has preserved to us.

-We may divide the history of political ideas into five periods: 1, the oriental period; 2, the Græco-Latin period; 3, the middle ages and the renaissance; 4, the modern period, which extends from the sixteenth century to the time of the French revolution; 5, the contemporaneous period.

-I. The East. We may say that the east (if we except China) was never acquainted with political science. Among most eastern nations, India, Persia, Judea, politics never succeeded in separating itself from theology. But if we discard the forms which are peculiar to oriental thought, we shall find in the religious books of the east social and political theories of the highest importance. For example, the system of caste and the theocratic system; such are the two principal ideas to which Indian politics, or, to use a better expression, Brahminical politics, may be reduced. We find, in the sacred book of the Laws of Mann, a very striking expression of these two ideas. It is said there that the four castes, into which, from all antiquity, Indian society was divided, issued from Brahma, who produced them each from a different part of his own body; the Brahmins, or priests, from his mouth; the kshatryas, or warriors, from his arm; the vaisyas, or merchants, and laborers, from his thigh; and, finally, the sudras, or servants, from his foot. The theocratic theory appears in the same book in its most insolent form.

The Brahmin, it is said there, is the lord of all beings; all that exists is his property; it is by the generosity of the Brahmin that other men enjoy the goods of this world.

The book of Manu admits, indeed, the existence of royalty, and even, with oriental hyperbole, the monarch is called therein a great divinity; but this divinity is the slave of the Brahmins; he is obliged to communicate to them all his affairs, and overwhelm them with benefactions and wealth.

One sole fact describes this ignominious dependence in a very striking manner:

If the king finds a treasure, it is written, he owes half of it to the Brahmins; if the Brahmin finds one, he keeps it for himself alone, without dividing it with the king.

-The Buddhist reformation profoundly changed this social system, not because in the beginning (as Burnouf has well shown) Buddha, or Sakyamuni, attacked the system of caste; but by proclaiming religious equality, he evidently gave it a mortal blow.

My law is a law of grace for all, he said. He called, above all, beggars and vagabonds to a religious life. These principles bore their fruits. In one of the oldest Buddhist legends, the system of caste is strongly and deeply attacked:

There is not between the Brahmin and a man of another caste the difference which exists between a stone and gold, between light and darkness. The Brahmin, in fact, did not spring from the ether or the wind; he did not rend the earth to appear in the light of day; he was born from the matrix of a woman, like the chandala (the vilest of creatures, inferior to the sudra).

By its hostility to caste, Buddhism has been able to extend everywhere in Asia, and principally in China, where the people appear never to have known this system; even where castes exist still, as in Ceylon, Buddhism has destroyed the theocratic character which the system had in India, and has changed it into a military and feudal system.

-I shall say nothing of Persia, of which we know so little, except that in the Zendavesta the system of caste appears in a singularly mild form; that the priests are there rather councilors of the king than his masters; and especially [258] that, as this religion recommended above all agriculture as a sacred duty, there resulted a noticeable change of condition for the class of laborers; for the latter were ranked among the atharnés, that is to say, great.

-It is chiefly in China that we find something analogous to what we call in the west political science; not because Confucius, the most celebrated of Chinese sages, was much engrossed with this science; but his disciple, or rather the reformer of his doctrine, two centuries after him, Mencius, was an ingenious and liberal publicist, as the following anecdote proves. He was conversing with the king of Tsi.

What must be done, he asked him, with a friend who has badly administered our affairs? Break with him, said the king.

And with a magistrate who has not well fulfilled his functions? Remove him, said the king.

And if the provinces are badly governed, what must be done? The king, feigning not to understand him, glanced to the right and to the left, and spoke of something else. The political theory of Mencius consisted in a sort of conciliation between divine right and the sovereignty of the people. The emperor, according to him, does not appoint his successor, but he presents him to the acceptance of Heaven and of the people; a doctrine conformable to the traditions of the sacred books of China. We know, doubtless, what becomes, in the politics of absolute governments, of this pretended acceptance by the people; it is most generally a fiction. But what is not a fiction, is the right, recognized to exist in the people by Mencius, to rid themselves of the kings with whom they are dissatisfied; a right which the Chinese people seem to have exercised more than once, if we can judge by the number of their dynasties. More
over, Mencius himself exercised a very bold right of censure at the courts of the different princes he frequented. He attacked tyranny under all its forms, and particularly because it was a burden upon property. He showed great sagacity in pointing out the bond which united order with property; in him there was no vestige of caste or of aristocracy. He divided society into two classes: those who work with the head, and those who work with their hands, and, which is indeed the sign of a laborious and industrial society, he endeavored chiefly to show that intelligence is itself labor, and that manual labor can not be exacted from all; a manifest proof that the latter was not despised nor sacrificed, since a wise man was obliged to apologize for the former.

-However curious and new the study of the political theories of the east may be for science, these theories have had so little influence upon our destinies, or at least an influence so indirect and so little apparent, that we must pass on to Greece, that is to say, to the cradle of western civilization.

-II. Græco-Roman Period. The little space which we have at our disposal forces us to reduce political science in antiquity to three names Plato, Aristotle and Cicero.

More about Political Science in the Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States

-Nothing is more common than to consider Plato as a political dreamer, who was deceived because he did not take experience into consideration, and because he wished to construct society on an impossible basis. An important distinction must be drawn here, one without which we can not understand Plato, nor do his genius the justice which it deserves. A distinction must be drawn between utopian politics and ideal politics. The first consists in combining artificially, and by means of the imagination, the elements of which all society is composed, and thus creating an arbitrary mechanism, which has no life, no reality, no possible application, either present or future. Such are the utopias of Sir Thomas More, of Campanella, and of some of our modern reformers. Ideal politics, on the contrary, consists in forming a true idea of the state, in conceiving it in its perfection (as much so, of course, as the limits of the human mind permit), finally, in presenting to societies a model, as morality presents one to individuals. No state will ever reach that perfection, any more than any hero or any saint has ever attained or will ever attain moral perfection. But if we do not forbid morality to propose an ideal to men, why should we forbid politics to present one to peoples and to governments? Now, there is in the politics of Plato a utopian part and an ideal part. The first is dead, and will not revive; the second is eternal. It is utopism, in Plato, to consider society as divided into four stereotyped classes, like the Indian or Egyptian castes; it is utopism to believe that the state will have more unity, more harmony, more patriotism, because you have suppressed the family and property; it is utopism to have considered woman as like to man, and as capable of the same functions as man, for instance, of bearing arms and of governing the state; it is utopism to suppress the laws in the state, and to replace them by education alone; it is utopism to make philosophers the governing class, and thus to confound speculation with practice; finally, it is utopism to exclude poetry from the republic, to reduce music and the fine arts to the servile obedience of a fixed type, protected by tyranny, jealous of its arbitrary censure. But what is not utopism in Plato, is to have conceived justice as the true end of society, and to have made justice consist in the concord and harmony of the citizens. What is not utopism, whatever the politics of Machiavellism may say to the contrary, is to have asserted that the true strength of the state is virtue, and that the true principle of virtue is education. Education can not, then, replace the laws, but it is education that gives soul and spirit to the laws. For what is the use of a law which is not observed? And what can sustain the laws, if not morals? What is not utopism, moreover, in Plato, is to have perceived, before Aristotle, that it was in a well-moderated and well-balanced constitution that the only guarantee of liberty resided; to have exacted of legislators that they should give the reasons for their laws when they promulgated them; finally, to have demanded for criminals not only punishment, but amendment and amelioration.

[259] -Still, an important element is lacking in the Platonic ideal; it is the idea of liberty. In his Republic, Plato gives liberty no place; and if, in his dialogue of the Laws, much wiser, as we know, if he gives it a place, it is in a certain manner despite himself and against his real feelings. This is easy of explanation. Plato had witnessed at Athens the excesses of liberty, and he had suffered from those excesses. By a natural illusion, which we have often seen again, he considered the sovereign good to lie in the very opposite of what he had witnessed near at hand, and he idealized Sparta, Crete and even Egypt, rather than appear to consider the laws and customs of his own country right; a kind of blindness habitual with the school of Socrates, and of which Xenophon is still more culpable than Plato.

-If Plato founded ideal politics (not without an admixture of utopism), Aristotle founded experimental politics. Not that there are no facts in Plato, and that Aristotle is destitute of ideality; but we must characterize each of them by his most striking traits. What there is newer and absolutely lasting in the politics of Aristotle is, first, his method; that is, the analysis of facts, the reduction of a complex whole to its elements. For example, the state is the object of politics. Now, the state is evidently a whole composed of a very great number of elements. The analysis of this whole, of its integral parts, of its divers forms, of its successive phases, is political science. Such is the method of Aristotle; it is the most rigorous, the most scientific, that can be employed. It is that which, later, all the great publicists of the experimental school followed-Machiavelli, Bodin, Montesquieu, Locke and de Tocqueville. Aristotle took so much into account the conditions of the experimental method applied to politics, that, before writing his great work, he had collected, we are told, the constitutions of 360 republics or governments, and had analyzed them in a book unfortunately lost. In them he found the materials for his political doctrine; from them he took his examples; from them, doubtless, he drew his admirable analyses of the constitutions of Sparta, of Crete and of Carthage, models of political judgment.

-We may say, also, that it is Aristotle who has fixed the frame, the great lines, the principal divisions, the principal problems, of political philosophy. The theory of sovereignty, the division of governments, the analysis and criticism of their different kinds, the theory of execution, the theory of revolutions: such are the different matters which the Republic of Aristotle treats of, after an introduction devoted to some questions of natural law and to a criticism of the most celebrated constitutions, real or imaginary. It is the strong sentiment of reality and the observation of the nature of things which led Aristotle to discover all the falseness of Platonic utopias, and in particular of that vain fraternity, which made of all citizens the indistinct children of unknown fathers and mothers.

It is better, says Aristotle, wittily, to be a cousin in the actual system, than a brother in the system of Plato.

He said, further, that the affections were lost in a community, like a few drops of honey in a vast extent of water.

No modern economist has recognized better than Aristotle the emptiness of that abstract and chimerical unity which absorbs the individual in the state.

It is wishing to draw harmony, say
s Aristotle again, from one single chord, to have rhythm with a single measure.

He shows that the suppression of property would not suppress quarrels and trials at law. There are as many quarrels between owners of goods in common as between those who have personal goods. Besides, the greatest crimes are not occasioned by the absence of possession.

Tyranny does not usurp anything for the purpose of guaranteeing itself from the inclemencies of the air.

-It is the same lively feeling of the reality and the observation of the nature of things which caused Aristotle to discover this great truth, that man is naturally born for society, or, as has been so often said, is a political animal. Without society, man would be either a god or a beast. Society is composed of families. The family is distinguished from the state, in that the state is composed of men free and equal, while the family rests upon inequality. But it is a delicate achievement of Aristotle that he distinguished conjugal power from paternal power, the first of which is, he says, more like republican power, and the second more like royal power.

-In politics, properly so called, Aristotle admirably grasped the principle of the responsibility of power.

It is not the cook, he says it is the guest who judges the banquet.

He prefers the guaranty of the law to that which rests only in the wisdom of a prince.

To demand the absolute sovereignty of a king, he says, is to declare sovereigns both the man and the beast.

While appreciating with the utmost correctness the strength and the weakness of the different governments, he pronounces, as far as he himself is concerned, in favor of government by the middle classes. According to him, the great do not know how to obey, and the low do not know how to command. Both always wish to be tyrants. The middle classes, leaning as much to one side as to the other, hold alternately in check these two natural enemies, the nobility and the people. It is here, in fact, in the natural hostility of the rich and the poor, of the strong and the weak, of the great and the people, that Aristotle sees the principle of all revolution. The one party desires inequality everywhere, even where it is unjust; the other wishes equality everywhere, even where it is absurd and impossible; and hence all states toss about between arbitrary inequality and a violent equality. Hence, the revolts of the people in aristocracies and of the great in democracies. The advice given by Aristotle, to escape these dangers, is that no government should abuse its principle. Democracy perishes by the excess of democratic institutions. And so with monarchy and oligarchy. On the [260] contrary, the people, in democracies, should appear occupied only with the interest of the rich; and, in oligarchies, the great should have in view only the interest of the people. Even in tyrannies, power can not exist, except on the condition of its being moderate. All these principles, so sensible, so practical, so frequently proven, are summed up in the excellent maxim of eternal application, Authority is more lasting in proportion as it is less extended.

More information about Political Science

-But if the method of observation and of experience revealed to Aristotle so many remarkable and profound laws, it unfortunately also contributed to close his eyes to one of the greatest injustices of ancient society, to slavery. Always preoccupied with the finding of the reason of facts, and much less with weighing the justice of them, Aristotle sought to explain slavery; and in explaining it, he justified it. He was rather inclined to extend than to restrain the practice of it, for he lays it down as a principle that there are two classes of men; one made to obey, and the other to command. The former are the slaves, the latter freemen. It is not war, nor law, nor covenant, which makes slavery; it is nature. And if we ask Aristotle who are the men that nature has thus condemned to slavery, he answers that they are those who are good only for manual labor; he seems to believe that nature herself designed them to be slaves by giving them an entirely material vigor, necessary for the coarser work of society, while she reserved for freemen nobility and beauty. It often happens, however, that there are men who have only the body of the freeman, while others have only his soul. It is easy, therefore, to be deceived.

-Contempt for manual labor is the greatest prejudice we meet with in the politics of Aristotle. He even goes so far that he has attempted to confound the laborer with the slave, and in more than one place he divides society into two classes: the freemen, who have the necessary leisure to devote themselves to war, politics and philosophy; and the artisans, or slaves, who produce the means of subsistence for the former. A free society, that is to say, an imperceptible oligarchy, maintained by a slave society, that is to say, by the mass of men-such is Aristotle’s ideal. Nevertheless, if we compare the politics of the latter with Plato’s, it can not be denied that it is more true, more sensible and more practical than Plato’s.

-Cicero is not an original publicist; and the Romans, great politicians in practice as they were, did not produce in this respect great theorizers. Still, it is in Cicero that we find best developed that great idea of a mixed government which was the hope and the desire of many sages, until it found realization in the English constitution. After having set forth and compared the advantages and inconveniences of the different forms of government, Cicero decides in favor of a mixed government, or of a supreme and royal power, united to the authority of a distinguished class, and to a certain liberty of the people, which satisfies both the demands of order and those of equality that exist together in human nature. This government would be the most stable of all, because of its moderation and temperament. It is the condition of all that is temperate to last a long time, and extremes are readily changed to their contraries.

Cicero, following the example of Polybius, believed that the Roman government was an example of a mixed and temperate government. The government at Rome was at first monarchical. Royalty, overthrown by the revolution of Brutus, reappeared, divided and diminished, under the name of the consulate. In this second period, the constitution was wholly aristocratic. A new revolution, that of Virginius, introduced the people into the government. Henceforth, the consulate, the senate, and the tribuneship of the people, accompanied by many other institutions, some aristocratic, and some popular, represented, in their union, that form of temperate government, a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and republic, which Cicero extols as the best and most secure of all forms of government. Without contesting his opinion upon this point, we content ourselves with observing that it is only by twisting the sense of the words, that we can make the consulate pass for a monarchical institution; and that, in reality, the Roman government was never anything but an aristocratic constitution, slowly transforming itself into a democracy.

-III. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The period which extends from the end of antiquity to the middle of the middle ages, that is, to the thirteenth century, that period so great in the religious history of the human mind, has not the same importance in politics; it is only necessary to call attention, in its beginning, to Christian politics, by comparing it with Hebrew politics.

-The politics of the Hebrews, in the beginning, or at least from the time of Moses, was theocratic politics, although not sacerdotal. God was the only king, the only lord, the only proprietor of the land. It was with him that the people covenanted through the mediation of Moses. But the priests were not, as in India, the governing class. The tribe of Levi was excluded from a share in land, with the exception of certain cities wh
ich had been given to them. The priests were a family, not a caste. The priesthood extended through all the tribes, and was an instrument of unity. It had, moreover, considerable political influence, serving as an intermediary between God and the people. After Moses, power appears to have been patriarchal and democratic, concentrated only in critical moments in the hands of a military chief. The disorders which resulted from this state of things led the Hebrews to desire a monarchical government. It is probable that the priesthood little favored this institution; for we see Samuel strongly reproving the people upon this occasion, and threatening them, on the part of God, with the most frightful despotism. Still, in becoming monarchical, the government did not entirely lose its theocratic character. Consecration and anointment sufficiently [261] prove this. The sacerdotal power continued to remain powerful; finally, outside of the established church, there were always immediate envoys of God, who, without any other title than divine inspiration, admonished the kings and held their ambition in check. These were the prophets, a sort of popular opposition, which was, however, as often directed against the people themselves as against the royal authority.

-Such were the sources at which, later, Christian politics drank. But in the beginning, like all great religious doctrines, Christianity was not political. It was an entirely moral kingdom that it wished to found; it was in this moral kingdom that the first were the last and the last first. Christ meant by this, not that it was necessary to change the social order, but that the social and political order was as nothing compared with the true order, the moral and religious order of things. But he did not ask to change anything here below. His kingdom was not of this world. The apostle Paul sums up the same ideas in these celebrated words:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be, are ordained of God.

Christian politics was, therefore, in the earliest times, only the politics of obedience and of submission to the established powers. The only revolution of which it thought was the reform of souls.

-It is not our province to investigate here the social consequences of Christianity. We know the great influence it had in the greatest social fact of modern times, the abolition of slavery. We shall limit ourselves here to political doctrines. Now, one of the questions that Christian politics gave rise to, is that of the relations of church and state. We know how that question is solved in the Gospel:

Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

All the primitive church remained faithful to this maxim, tempered by these words of the apostle:

We ought to obey God rather than men.

Later, when the state became Christian, the church showed very great power of resistance and very great ambition. We know that the whole of the middle ages was the struggle of these two powers. This struggle, which fills up history, fills up, also, all the writings of the time; on the one side the writings of the theologians, and on the other of the jurisconsults. We can scarcely give a summary of such a controversy, which has filled vast numbers of books, but we can point out the principles involved in it. It is to be remarked that in this struggle, in which were appealed to in turn the principle of the divine right of kings and the principle of the sovereignty of the people, it was chiefly the laymen or jurisconsults who appealed to the former, and the theologians to the latter. The partisans of the civil power were interested in making the origin of power flow directly from God, in order that they might not appear to hold it from the hands of the church. The church, on the contrary, was interested in demonstrating the human origin of this power, in order to rule more easily. Hinkmar, Gregory VII., Innocent III., John of Salisbury, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Giles of Rome, were the defenders of the ecclesiastical power in the middle ages. The jurisconsults Dante, Occam, and Mariel of Padua, were the principal defenders of the civil power. The thirteenth century witnessed the triumph of the theocratic school. The fourteenth century witnessed its ruin.

More about Political Science in the Cyclopaedia

-But new ideas and new light are spread among the people. The reading of ancient writers, now resumed, freed the mind in every sphere. Scholasticism drooped and died; more experience, more reflection, more curiosity, gave birth to new methods and to a new language. Politics was the first of the sciences to profit by this revolution, but not without injury to morality. We have met Machiavelli.

-Machiavelli substituted in politics, for the wholly syllogistic method of the schools, the method of observation and of experience, such as we have already seen it in Aristotle. Still, there is a difference in the methods of these two great minds. In Machiavelli the method was rather empirical than really experimental. To explain: the great experimental method, as understood by Aristotle and Montesquieu, consists in gathering together, on a very large scale, the most general facts of the political order and converting them into laws. The division of governments, the division of powers, the forms and conditions of sovereignty, the laws according to which governments are formed, grow and decay-such are the objects of political science; and experience is the method which serves to discover them. Machiavelli did not seek such general results. His end was much nearer home, and was always reduced to this practical problem: How is it necessary to act under such and such circumstances? Politics, as he understood it, is less a science than an art; he gathers together tentatively certain examples, and he advises us to act after certain models, whose acts he relates. Hence, instead of general laws, founded upon the analysis of facts, he gives us precepts, founded upon examples: this is empiricism, not science.

-We know, too, what an indifference to good and evil, to justice and injustice, Machiavelli introduced into politics. Cruelty and bad faith, those weapons so familiar to the Italian politics of the fifteenth century, seemed to him most innocent, and he recommended them with the most perfect indifference. It has been said that these criminal counsels which fill the book of the Prince were only a feint, whose object was to render tyranny odious. But it is difficult to admit such a theory. For, in the first place, the Prince has by no means the character which is ascribed to it; and, besides, we find the same maxims both in the correspondence of Machiavelli and in his discourse on Titus Livius, a work infinitely superior to the Prince in its political bearing, and in the elevation of its ideas. Finally, Machiavellism was not only the doctrine of a man, but of a century. Machiavelli disclosed the secret of his age; and it must be [262] avowed that there is always more or less of Machiavellism in the politics of all times. (See MACHIAVELLISM.)

-From the purely political point of view, Machiavelli seems to have two doctrines: the one popular and republican, in his Discourse; the other tyrannical and monarchical, in the Prince.

This contradiction is explained by the empiricism of Machiavelli, who was more occupied with studying facts and explaining ways and means, than with exposing principles. In one of these works he studies popular governments; in the other, princely governments, and particularly that of new princes. He points out what experience has taught him in regard to the means of elevating and making prosperous these two forms of government. It has been conjectured that in the book of the Prince he advises tyranny only in the interest of liberty: tyranny would be to him only a democratic dictatorship. It is difficult to discern this idea in the Prince, though some passages of the D
iscourse may authorize it. Let us add that the more popular and more liberal politics of the Discourse appear much more conformable to the real thoughts of Machiavelli than the politics of the Prince.

-The sixteenth century was especially a century of politics. The great religious reformation, excited by Luther, was of profit to the science of the state. When the foundations of religious belief had been submitted to examination, the time was not far off when political beliefs would have to undergo the same examination. Hence nothing is more interesting in this respect than the political writings of the sixteenth century; for the first time a bold examination was made of the foundations of the right of sovereignty; those rights of the people and of kings, which, according to Cardinal de Retz, never accorded so well with one another as in silence, were laid bare. The Protestant schools gave the signal. Hotman in his Franco-Gallia, Hubert Languet in his Vindiciœ contra tyrannos, Buchanan in his De jure regni apud Scotos, propounded the principles of a system of politics holdly revolutionary and democratic. Hubert Languet, in particular, first brought to light the principle of contract, which was later to become so famous in the hands of another Protestant and republican, J. J.

Author of this text: Paul Janet.