56 The Nature of Political Theorypragmatic adjustment, GNP, prices, wages, the public-sector borrowing requirement.
All else was gesture and froth. As Lipset commented ‘The democratic struggle will
continue, but it will be a fight without ideologies’ (Lipset 1969a: 408).
The ‘end of ideology’ also coincided with the heroic age of sociology—a science free
from all superstition and yet embodying commitments to freedom and liberal demo-
cracy. Inthesocialsciencesofthe1950s, ideologywastheforemostsuperstition, which
needed unravelling. The development of empirical social science therefore demanded
a value-free rigour, scepticism, empirical verification, or falsification, unsullied by
the emotional appeals of ideological or normative political theory. A positivistic sep-
aration of facts and values lurked beneath all these judgements. In addition, the end
of ideology coincided with the ‘death of political philosophy’ movement (which will
be discussed in Part Two), consensus politics in Britain, and finally with the more
disturbing phenomenon McCarthyite anti-communist purges in North America.
Apart from some extreme adherents of behaviourism, positivistic political science
did not always demand the complete elimination of normative theory and ideology.
There were those who would have liked to see this elimination, or, at least, trans-
mutation into rigorous empirical political theory. However many political scientists,
such as David Easton, Robert Lasswell, Robert Dahl, Karl Deutsch, and Heinz Eulau,
had been trained initially as more traditional political theorists. They did not there-
fore construe political theory as a total waste of time. The historical and normative
vision could offer hypotheses for empirical testing. In this sense, the hard contrast,
which occasionally appears between political theorists and political scientists can be
misleading.^42
For John Gunnell, the crucial factor defining the stance of behavioural theory,
was tied to the political theory writings of the 1920s and 1930s émigré generation,
including figures such as Strauss, Arendt, Brecht, Adorno, and many others, who
adopted a deeply-critical stance to political science, associating it with individualistic
liberalism, relativism, potential nihilism, and social crisis. In this critical context,
political scientists, for Gunnell, ‘eventually felt constrained to make a choice’ (Gunnell
1993 b: 220). In the end, this was not so much a debate about method, as about the
culture of liberalism and democracy. Gunnell thus notes that by ‘the early 1960s, the
conflict was not simply one between individuals such as Easton and Strauss. It had
been passed to a new generation of scholars who had been trained in the new ways
of political theory, denied by the émigrés and by the founders of the behavioural
movement, and who had already begun to lose sight of the roots of the conflict
between the paradigms into which they had been initiated’ (Gunnell 1993b: 250).^43
The intellectual background to behavioural political science lay in the popularity of
what might loosely be termed positivism in the twentieth century. One of the leading
philosophers of Viennese positivism, Carnap, was teaching in Chicago during the
1950s. A new generation of political scientists became familiar with this philosophical
position. Positivism gelled with the idea of a genuine ‘empirical political theory’.
Positivism was essentially though a broader programme tied up with a more general
conception of science. Theories in the natural sciences were viewed as unified systems
of explanation, incorporating laws, which were ‘controllable by factual evidence’