Human Nature in Politics: the Dialogue of Psychology with Political Science

This article is concerned with the nature of

human reason and the implications of contemporary

cognitive psychology for political science

research that employs the concept of rational

behavior. I shall begin with a bit of history, written

from a rather personal viewpoint, to provide a

setting for the discussion.

The older and/or more scholarly among you

will recognize the essay's title as having been

plagiarized from Graham Wallas, whose seminal

book, Human Nature in Politics, appeared in

1908. When I began graduate study, in the middle

1930s, that book, along with Walter Lippmann's

Public Opinion, was still wholly fresh, and both

stood out as harbingers of the "behavioral revolution"

that was then just getting under way at the

University of Chicago.

Not that we graduate students thought of ourselves

as participants in a scientific revolution.

The realities of the political process had long since

replaced the formal legal structure of political institutions

as the main subject for study in political

science-at least at the University of Chicago.

Merriam's studies of power, Gosnell's quantitative

methods, Lasswell's psychoanalytic probes

seemed to us merely (paraphrasing Clausewitz)

"the continuation of political realism by other

means.'''

The present essay is a slightly revised version of the

James Madison lecture presented by the author at the

Annual Meeting of the American Political Science

Association in Washington, D.C., 1984.

'See David Eastman's perceptive account of this history

in his article on political science in the International

Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968).

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I was little prepared, therefore, for the violence

of the polemic pro and con "behavioralism" that

echoed over the land in the first two decades after

World War 11. Nowadays, my periodic soundings

in TheAmerican PoliticalScience Review reassure

me that this civil strife in the profession is largely

over, and that the behavioral revolution...