The Behavioral Sciences and the Study of Political Things: The Case of Christian Bay's The Structure of Freedom *

Walter Berns

American Political Science Review, 1961, vol. 55, issue 3, 550-559

Abstract: One result of the advent of the behavioral sciences in political science is that political things are now being studied, to an ever increasing extent, by men with little or no training in political science. Of the 27 authors of essays in the Burdick and Brodbeck volume, American Voting Behavior, for example, only six are political scientists, the others being mainly sociologists, social psychiatrists, and, to a surprising extent, psychiatrists; so that if people were once thought to vote for political reasons, and if a decade ago they were said to vote for sociological reasons, we are now told that in fact votes are expressions of “individual needs to secure gratification of repressed wishes for a certain type of parental image ….” I use the example of voting studies because it is in this area that the approach and the research techniques of modern behavioral science are said to have had the greatest impact. There would be no disposition to resist this development—certainly it would be indefensible for political science to cut itself off from the insights provided by other social sciences—were it not for the tendency in such works for the political to be reduced to the sub-political and the danger that in this process the political will disappear altogether, so that we will have a political science that refuses to address itself to political questions. This is not a remote possibility. The basic premise of modern social science is the so-called distinction between facts and values.

Date: 1961
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