Suchergebnisse

In a valuable recent article, Brian Barry has given us an extended commentary on the logic of Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which Barry rightly regards as a good example of that phenomenon of American political science,

The main characteristics of democratic theory in the US in the thirty years following 1776 are compared to those of the three decades before 1976. The ideas of the founding fathers were based on the theory of popular sovereignty & the theory of pluralism. These were both accepted in the US mainly due to the widespread belief that most political leaders were basically untrustworthy. Each theory was seen as a means of protecting the populace from such leaders. Currently, these themes are still discussed but with a different emphasis. Popular sovereignty has changed from referring to the sovereignty of the people to emphasizing the virtues of public participation. Sectional & geographic pluralism has been replaced by pressure group pluralism; pluralism in general has been discredited by events such as ideological conflicts & race riots. Political scientists are adopting a more radical stance as exemplified by the work of H. Kariel, P. Bachrach, & T. Lowi. M. Migalski.

Messrs Dennis, Lindberg and McCrone have written an interesting article 1 in which they draw the conclusion that those of us who have written textbooks about British politics should modify some of our generalizations about British attitudes and traditions. But before we all rush to revise our next editions, I should like to raise some critical questions about thearticle. I will enumerate these to meet the editor's request for brevity, (i) Why are we not told anything about the composition of the sample? It has been shown that political attitudes among British children are related both to the social class of their parents and to the type of school attended, 2 and without any indication of the class background or schools of the children interviewed it is rather difficult to assess the results. It would also be helpful to know exactly when the survey was conducted.

MY STARTING POINT IS THE RATHER PLATITUDINOUS PROPOSITION that political science is a branch of scholarship which can be defined in terms of the activity studied but not in terms of the method adopted, which is to say that it is not a discipline like history or physics. To say that these subjects are disciplines is to indicate that historians and physicists are committed both to a certain method of acquiring data and to a certain mode of explanation. Because political scientists are not so committed they are inevitably involved in controversies about method and explanation, and the view I propose to discuss here is the view that, although several modes of explanation are open to students of politics, only the historical mode, and on a different level the philosophical mode, are appropriate. Those who hold this view lean heavily on the writings of Professor Michael Oakeshott and I shall begin with a very brief reference to Oakeshott's account of the main modes of experience and explanation. Subsequent sections will discuss the relevance of this account to students of politics, the nature of historical explanation, and the possibility of alternatives such as sociological explanation.

Presidential address presented to the Society for the Study of Soc Problems, Washington, DC, Aug, 1970, which, in the light of anti-war riots on the U campus & the subsequent repression by the instit's of the free 'ability to inquire,' discusses 'applying sociol to the policy of governing the academic community.' The anti-war feelings of the students are discussed with reference to the student power movement which focusses on 2 issues: sharing the authority, is, allowing students to take part in the decisions which affect their lives, & 'restructuring the U so that students have responsibility commensurate with their power.' The author points out that in the weeks following the campus disruptions of May 1970 when about 760 campuses across the country had strikes or demonstrations, the students were involving themselves with discussion, the holding of meetings, & the creation of new courses of action. These are the real functions of an academic community. In another sense the students are very revolutionary in that 'for a privileged class to seek responsibility is surely revolutionary.' It is for the U's to encourage this trend, to recreate the 'ivory tower' in the sense of the U as a place to work on improving the quality of human life. H. Lachs.