positive law, and one who is simply finding the positive law obscure and
exercising such discretion.
Positivism
Positivism is a term found generally in the social sciences to indicate a
particular approach to the methodology of study. Broadly it indicates a
‘scientific’ approach in which human behaviour is to be treated as an objective
phenomenon to be studied in conditions ofvalue freedom. At its crudest this
means that beliefs, attitudes and values of human actors are to be dismissed as
insufficiently concrete or objective to become data for scientific study. Thus
Durkheim, the leading exponent of positivist social science, would not accept
that what an actor thought he was doing was a relevant part of any social
science description. Even so personal an act as suicide could only be measured
‘externally’, and suicide rates, as statistics, rather than the accounts of would-be
suicides, were the appropriate subject matter. Although there is no logical
necessity, positivism tends to go hand-in-hand with a preference for statistical
and mathematical techniques, and with theories which stress the ‘system’rather
than the individual in explaining political phenomena. Positivism sees as its
enemy those who would study political values, either as political philosophers
or as, say, political psychologists, the first because their approach is ‘metaphy-
sical’, the second because they are concerned with individuals and their
perceptions, rather than with systems and the externally measurable. Though
very popular in the immediate post-war development of political science, few
today hold to such an extreme position, and the label is increasingly a vague
and general way of indicating the main thrust, rather than the detailed
methodology, of a social scientist. This is partly because the naı ̈ve view of
what it is to be a ‘scientist’, or the attraction of being one, has declined
considerably with the development of more subtle philosophies and socio-
logies of scientific activity, and partly because anyone interested in empiricism
and its related theoretical and research techniques has had a more obvious
refuge in identifying withMarxistsin the fundamental split with non-Marx-
ists which at one time seemed to dominate social science.
Post-Industrial Society
This was a term popular, though with widely varying connotations, during the
second half of the 20th century. The variance was particularly marked when
comparing North American to European usages, though in both cases the aim
was the same. Post-industrial, never an apposite label, was an attempt to grasp
the fundamental differences between the societies of the classic industrial age,
(from the Industrial Revolution to the middle of the 20th century) and later
Positivism