78 The Nature of Political Theory
really established. It also later figured in debates about the nature of republicanism, see
James Farr in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) (1993: 66–8).
- Political economy was developed in the writings of François Quesnay and A. R. J. Turgot.
Yet, even within political economy, science was still equated with practical reform and social
utility. Further, many eighteenth century theorists commonly associated ‘social rules’ and
‘sociological generalizations’. Social rule-following was linked in such writers with a loose
idea of empirical causal laws. Whereas, in the twentieth century, the two domains would
be commonly demarcated, in these earlier writers, maxims of government always hovered
betweensocial rules and empirical laws. ‘Is’ and ‘ought’ were therefore linked in these early
views of political science. It is worth reminding ourselves immediately that, at this stage,
political theory was indistinguishable from political science.
- Discussed under the ‘first wave’ of the history and theory section. Strauss, for example,
accused behavioural political science of fiddling ‘while Rome burns’, Strauss in Storing
(ed.) (1962: 327).
- In 1923 the North American Social Science Research Council was formed as a loose
umbrella organization, see Ross in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) (1993: 82). Political science
was part of this more general ‘scientific aspiration’.
- David Easton saw four stages: first, a formal legal stage, followed second, by a combination
of traditional and informal approaches, then, third, the full-blown behavioural phase, and
finally, the postbehavioural, see David Easton in Monroe (ed.) (1997: 12).
- As David Ricci remarked ‘The 1920s and 1930s came to be marked...byasteadyflowof
empirical research and descriptive studies, designed to enlighten first political scientists,
and then their students and the public, as to the condition of American politics’, see David
Ricci in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) 166. See also the programme for politics study laid down
by Charles Merriam ‘Recent Advances in Political Methods’ (1923), in Farr and Seidelman
(eds.) (1993: 131ff.).
- Not all are so complementary here. One North American commentator noted that ‘At one
extreme, the use of “empirical” is almost more of a benediction than a denotation. To be
“empirical” is to be virtuous in procedure and realistic in outlook, and not to be empirical
is to stray from the narrow and true path’, (see Spragens 1973: 19).
- As Easton puts it in another article ‘behaviouralism adopted the original positivist assump-
tion (as developed by the Vienna Circle of the positivism early in this century) that
value-free or value-neutral research was possible’, Easton ‘Political Science in the United
States: Past and Present’ in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) (1993: 295).
- As Gunnell comments ‘Few of the behaviouralists understood themselves as antitheoret-
ical, and probably few initially understood their concern with scientific political theory
as a rejection of their earlier education [in political theory]’. It was only later that they
‘eventually felt constrained to make a choice between scientist and theorist as a primary
identity’, Gunnell (1993: p. 220).
- For Gunnell, Strauss, Arendt, Morgenthau, Adorno, Voegelin, Neumann, Brecht,
Horkheimer, Marcuse, and others ‘reshaped the discourse of political theory’. He con-
tinues that ‘they all propagated the thesis that liberalism, either inherently or because of
its degenerate condition, was at the core of a modern crisis and implicated in the rise of
totalitarianism’ (see Gunnell in Farr and Seidelman (eds.) 1993: 182).
- As Ernest Nagel comments: ‘the sciences seek to discover and to formulate in general
terms the conditions under which events of various sorts occur, the statements of such
determining conditions being the explanations of the corresponding happenings. The goal
