chapter 37
...................................................................................................................................................THINKING
INSTITUTIONALLY
...................................................................................................................................................hugh heclo
By the mid-twentieth century, intellectual and cultural currents were taking an
increasingly dim view of institutions.
My Wrst introduction to this fact came courtesy of Yale University’s splendid
graduate department of political science in the mid- 1960 s. Sitting at the head of our
seminar tables were leading lights in political science’s version of the ‘‘behavioral
revolution:’’ Robert Dahl, Karl Deutsch, Robert Lane, Charles Lindblom, David
Danelski, James Barber, and even the aged Harold Laswell. There we dutifully read
Truman, Key, Schattsneider, all of whom we learned were drawing on the much earlier
insights of the mysterious Arthur Bentley. Government was the process of adjustment
among groups. With that insight, institutions faded into the background and process
came to the fore. Corwin on the presidency’s powers was out; Neustadt on presidential
power was in. At best, the formal legal framework represented by institutions oVered
an insuYcient picture of reality. A more accurate understanding of an institution’s
reality had to be built up from observation of the interactions of people participating in
it. One gets ‘‘nowhere’’ by taking an institution for what it purports to be. The norms
of oYcial behavior had the quality of myth, of values that were professed
but not necessarily practiced (Truman 1963 , 263 , 351 ). From here, our impatient
young minds nimbly jumped to the conclusion that professed values were of no value.
I soon learned that behind the social science of the time lay much deeper cultural
currents. As the various liberation movements of the 1960 s swept through Yale