Suchergebnisse

Our present discontents have evoked many earnest words on the subject of "social planning." We are told that "capital can be defended only by constructive programs based on the consideration of social responsibility;" that we are headed for "a frightful cataclysm" unless we adopt "a national plan that will control and guide the basic industries, govern the investment of capital, and keep purchasing power in step with production;" that if we are to avoid revolution, "we dare not sit indefinitely in contemplative inaction;" that "we require a leadership that will help us think less about the theories of individualism and more about the tragedies to individuals," inasmuch as "men cannot eat words … cannot wear words … cannot trust their old age to words." In brief, if we are to avoid something worse, we must take some thought for the morrow.

Everyone has heard the gibe that the specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less, while a sociologist is one who knows less and less about more and more. Another quip has it that while psychology is all data and no conclusions, sociology is all conclusions and no data. Political science itself has not escaped a certain amount of cheap disparagement from those who know little or nothing about it. Thus a political scientist has been described as one who among politicians is reckoned a scientist, and among scientists is reckoned a politician; or, indeed, as one who is called a political scientist because he is neither—an obvious paraphrase of Voltaire's famous sarcasm regarding the Holy Roman Empire. At any rate, the time has come when a certain group of political scientists have wearied of such gibes, to say nothing of that condescension which they think they detect in the attitude of laboratory scientists toward them; and they have registered a vow to convert political science from a "normative" or "telic" science, as it has been variously called, into a natural science, into a science which will hereafter be printed in lower case instead of in upper, and will, moreover (the height of ambition of all true sciences) be able to predict the future just as astronomy, physics, and chemistry are able to do—not to mention astrology, alchemy, and palmistry. Nor is this newly conceived ambition the product merely of discontent; it is rather more, perhaps, response to the beckoning of opportunity—the opportunity spelled by the rise of the behavioristic psychology.