political science

(Wang) #1

innuendo by which the great soul makes its enormous claim?’’ I like Miloscz’


concise summary:


For me, therefore, everything has a double existence,
Both in time and when time shall be no more.


This cosmology makes sense of human purpose. The whole cannot exist without
the parts. InWnitesimal as they are in that cosmic scheme, human eVorts to make
the temporal world less imperfect are not lost. Followed to its aYrmation of such a


saving order, the doctrine is robustly aYrmative. Immunized against pessimism
and despair by its critique of reason, it aYrms the value of human aspiration


regardless of any temporal disaster and fortiWes the will to understand and advance
human freedom. So I was ready to go to work as political activist and political


scientist.


2 Liberal Democracy
.........................................................................................................................................................................................


By the early postwar years, thanks to academic study and personal experience, I
had got a pretty good hold on the rudiments of a liberal philosophy of politics. Its


major premise was the autonomy of the mind and its principal working hypothesis
was the powerful inXuence of ideas on political behavior. It lacked a developed view


of the interaction between ideas and behavior, in other words, an empirically
grounded view of political institutions. Working toward an institutional approach
took me through a struggle with the way some of my colleagues looked at the


process of government. Comparison of the process of government in Britain and
the United States helped me with that task.



  1. 1 Escape from Group Theory


At Harvard, as generally in American political science in these years, group
theory—later known as interest group pluralism—dominated the discipline,


inspiring splendid empirical research in American politics as displayed in the
work of Pendleton Herring, Peter Odegard, and David Truman. When, however,


the perspectives of the leading work of theory, Arthur Bentley’s Process of


698 samuel h. beer

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