Submitted by: Submitted by Mackydees
Views: 275
Words: 9596
Pages: 39
Category: Philosophy and Psychology
Date Submitted: 04/21/2013 11:32 PM
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).
293
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...