Beyond the mumbo jumbo: A drop-out’s view of political science

Commentary: Beyond the mumbo jumbo: A drop-out's view of political science LLOYD STANFORD Early in November 1968 I listened to a presentation involving the application of systems analysis to the study of political parties at a colloquium on political parties staged at the University of Otta\va. The paper presented at that session involved basically a reworking of David Easton's ideas into French. The "communication" as well as most of the commentary and discussion which followed provoked me to remark on the potential danger of what :Max Beloff has called the "Americanization of intellectual life" and on the verbal gymnastics which I dubbed the "new scholasticism."1 I do not want to reopen the debate about the large number of American professors in Canadian universities which, by a strange coincidence, took place at Carleton University only a few days after the colloque mentioned above. However, I want to comment on how the evolution of political science in Canada might be affected hy what seems to be the general state of some aspects of fhe discipline in the United States. Whether Americans outnumber Canadians, Frenchmen or Jamaicans in given departments of political science is perhaps not terribly important . \Vhat is significant, it seems to me, is that some 90% of the "card-carrying" political scientists in the world are in the United States.2 It would follow from these statistics that American political scientists are likely to dominate the field. By dint of sheer numbers it is most understandable that the hypotheses and theories which are most researched and discussed would be those of Americans. In addition they have the disposition and means to express their ideas.3 It is clear therefore that, willy-nilly, most political scientists elsewhere in the world will be engulfed by this rising tide of literature. It should also be evident that a time lag results bet\veen the stagifig of specific research projects by American scholars, the generation of hypotheses and so54 called theory by them and Canadian attempts to imitate such research (or British and French attempts for that matter). Another consequence of such dominance is that the teaching of political science in other countries could become largely a regurgitation of American material to various classes of students. The higher illiteracy One of the highlights of research in political science during the last 12 or 15 years is supposed to be the so-called behavioural revolution. This in essence has been an attempt to debunk traditional speculative political philosophy (or theory) as well as the alleged institutional approach to politics while drawing on the insights of sister dis~iplines like sociology, psychology and anthropology, to discover what actually takes place in the political process. :\1ost observers have welcomed the basic idea of an attempt to develop "empirical theory." Hardly anybody disputes the merits of interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary studies of politics . Hmvever, one gets the impression that many of the political scientists of the "behavioural persuasion " assume that individual political scientists should appear to be inter-disciplinary. They do not seem to understand that it is often enough, if indeed not preferable, for the research team to be inter-disciplinary. I do not mean by all this that it is not ideal to have a number of "broadgauged " social scientists working on political problems. It must be recognized, nevertheless, that such people \Vill always constitute a very small group. In any event, if it is thought desirable that political scientists should be well grounded in one or more of the social sciences, . then such training should be very thorough. It is not enough for them to have slight exposure to allied disciplines and therefore remain interdisciplinary at the merely verbal level. To put it more directly, I must say that most of the behavioural political scientists I have listened to or read in Canada sound as if they don't really know what they are talking about.4 After a while they begin to sound like bad sociologists, psychologists or anthropologists. It might be that, given the nature of contemporary Revue d'etudes canadiennes research in the social sciences, political science as a distinct discipline will disappear.5 But until then...