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Prematurity in Scientific Discovery: On Resistance and Neglect

By: Ernest B. Hook | Book details

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Prematurity of “Prematurity”
in Political Science
George Von der Muhll

Shortly after the Second World War, the “Behavioral Revolution” swept through the academic study of politics.1 From that point onward, professional students of the subject have searched for a single organizing paradigm that would provide their field with the shared concepts and established propositional canon they see in the natural sciences. None has yet emerged. Instead, several proposed theoretical perspectives have competed for attention within the various disciplinary subfields of political “science. ” Their proliferation has so far served mainly to emphasize a conspicuous deficiency of logical integration within the discipline.

In such a setting, it is impossible to say that any one paradigm has displaced another. Nor can one say that an important finding is ignored because it appears anomalous within a currently accepted framework. Instead, various proposed models of inquiry—frequently drawn by analogy from the much more logically integrated field of economics or from one or another of the natural sciences—compete for attention, enjoy a brief half-life of attention as their theoretical architecture

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1
See, among the numerous proclamations from this period, Eulau 1963 for a concise statement of its widely shared premises. The term “Behavioral Revolution” became commonly adopted in the 1950s as a means of drawing attention to several coterminous and loosely intercorrelated developments— some innovative, some a marked acceleration in previous trends—that had come to characterize the systematic study of politics after the World War. The most distinctive features of this “revolution” included (1) the call for replacing a disciplinary focus on historically unique governmental configurations by an identification of those properties of human behavior in politics that, through their simplicity, universality, and frequent recurrence, better lent themselves to analytic modeling and statistical generalization; (2) a corresponding shift of attention from salient actors within manifest political structures (most preeminently, the state) to the more anonymous fields of social forces conditioning outcomes in overtly “political” arenas; and (3) explicit acknowledgement of the need to turn to the other, more generic “behavioral” social sciences, especially sociology and psychology, for propositions and evidence concerning the key characteristics and determinants of such behavior.

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