We Have a Firm Foundation 55David Easton, for example, political science ‘has never been behaviouristic’ (Easton
in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) 1993: 294; see also Farr in Farr, Dryzek, and Leonard
(eds.) 1995: 202). For Easton,behaviourism‘refers to a theory in psychology about
human behaviour’, as embodied in the work of psychologists such as J. B. Watson and
B. F. Skinner, the founder of operant conditioning. There is a form of physiological
reductionism in behaviourism, which behaviouralists found uncongenial. Politics in
terms of attitudes, meanings, and beliefs could not be reduced in this manner. How-
ever, political theory critics of behaviouralism, such as Dante Germino, were quite
clear that there was little to choose between the two empiricisms and the distinction
was merely rhetorical (see Germino 1967: 193–5).
David Easton, in a retrospective article, saw seven main themes withinbehavioural-
ism: a concern with discoverable uniformities in political behaviour; to be able to test
and verify empirical generalizations; to focus on techniques for acquiring and inter-
preting empirical data (i.e. questionnaires, interviews, sampling, regression analysis,
factor analysis, and rational modelling); the precise quantification and measurement
of empirical data; the analytical separation of values or evaluative concerns from fac-
tual data^41 ; the concern to systematize the relation between research and theory; and,
finally, the aim to engage, as far as possible, in pure science, but with an eventual eye
to ‘utilize political knowledge in the solution of practical problems of society’ (see also
David Easton in Monroe (ed.) 1997: 14). The central preoccupations thus became
the recording and quantifying of political behaviour. Political systems with input and
output functions replaced the study of states; the study of democracy became electoral
behaviour and public opinion quantification and surveys; pressure or interest group
behaviour replaced the study of societies.
The behavioural movement of the 1950s coincided with other important develop-
ments. There was, first, the coincidence with the end-of-ideology movement, which
repudiated both normative political theory and political ideology (in some cases
the two terms were regarded as synonymous). This involved some degree of self-
satisfaction with the role and achievements of liberal democracy in practice. Ideology
and normative theory had thus both become redundant (see Vincent 1995, ch. 1).
There was, in addition, a clear belief in the 1950s, amongst a generation that had
lived through the 1930s and 1940s, with the wars, Gulags, show trials, Nazism, Jewish
pogroms, and Stalinism, that ideological or normative-based politics embodied dan-
gerous delusions. Ideologies might serve a function in developing immature societies,
yet in industrialized democratic societies they no longer served anything more than a
decorative role. Consensus and convergence on basic aims had been achieved in lib-
eral democracies. Most of the major parties in industrialized societies had achieved,
in the welfare mixed economy structure, the majority of their reformist aims. The
left had accepted the dangers of excessive state power and the right had accepted the
necessity of the welfare state and the rights of working people. As Seymour Martin
Lipset remarked, ‘This very triumph of the democratic social revolution of the West
ends domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to
motivate them to political action’ (Lipset 1969a: 406; see also Bell 1965). With basic
agreement on political values achieved, politics became focused on more peripheral