Chapter 1

Introduction

I. Policy and Polity

If your friend in a gesture of fury turned and walked away from you in the street, what would you do? Would you run after him, hasten to ask reconciliation, stay where you are and wait for him to return, call to him, walk back to your home and telephone him, write him, or wait for him to call or write? Would you contact a mutual friend for advice and help? Decision-making is in process, and your decision and its results will depend on a number of factors, among them the subject of the dispute, your temperament and that of your friend, how well you know each other, the nature of your relations, your environmental conditions and upbringing, and your acceptance of social rules of conduct. Of course, despite your analysis of the factors involved, you may make the wrong decision. You may be weak and ask for pardon where you should have been strong (aggressive), or you may be stubborn and, when going after him and reasoning with him would solve the problem, you too walk away in fury. Indeed, you may have waited for the occasion as an excuse to break up the relationship. It all depends on how well you control the factors involved to attain your goal. Similarly, a candidate running for office or a general plotting a coup d'etat, when one of his supporters walks out on him, must make a decision. The supporter may be the secretary general of the labor union whose action will affect the politician's relations with the entire union. What will his policy be?

At every level of social relations decisions are made. Decisions constitute policy-making in so far as they affect the relations among members of the society and their present and future behavior. We know through biology that behavioral phenomena such as fear, anger, sorrow, depression or disgust stimulate the autonomic system in the brain and produce glandular secretions. The twinge in the stomach after a quarrel with a friend and that following a confrontation with a political rival are of the same physiological nature. Each friend who walks away in anger, each who stands in despair, each member of the trade union who feels satisfied or frustrated will have his future behavioral pattern affected by the consequences of that moment, and that will as a result be reflected within his group.

Beyond policies made in the context of personal relations, there are policies that more directly concern the group and are more consequential in time and space. A policy establishes a line of conduct. We speak of foreign policy, national policy, communal policy. But we also speak of educational, economic, or parental policy. When parents contract an insurance policy which secures their child's future education, they are adopting a certain line of conduct--itself the result of certain social philosophies and behavioral patterns--which does influence the development of society, and not necessarily in the way the parents who contracted the policy had viewed it.

The mayor, the governor, the president, the dictator, the member of a legislative body, in their official functions, do not simply make independent decisions in particular situations resulting in or from given policies. In the multitude of particular and general situations, they influence and are influenced by the continuum which is the group wherein they function. The assembly which draws up a constitution is doing more than policy-making. Each of its members may follow a certain policy and try to influence the assembly toward his own ends and ideas. But, as part of the whole, he is also participating in the creation of a polity or a political entity. The political structure and behavior of this entity which we have called a polity and which involves the social organization and evolution of a group is the business of political science. Political science deals not only with the description and analysis of political institutions, but also with their dynamics within the living body of society. We see, then, where the "political" part of our study comes from. But what do we mean by "science"?

II. The Perspective

A body of knowledge must meet certain criteria in order to qualify as a science. Collection and systematic arrangement of data are only the very first steps toward that qualification. To initiate a disciple into the complexities of political life, it is not enough to give him a set of facts pertaining to the structure and official functions of government and political organisms within a state or a few states, or to show him the chronological development of events within those states. At the most, such a course is informative rather than scientific. Science involves further exploration into the collected and systematized data to discover wider perspectives leading to the understanding of the nature as well as the functions of the phenomena under consideration. In pure scientific mechanics, if the wider perspectives should reveal general laws and concepts they ought to be based at least on verificable premises, if not repeatable situations. Beyond the direct results of an inquiry, conclusions drawn from it can project new theories concerning the evolution of the phenomenon or its application to like circumstances. Such theories in turn encourage new hypotheses and further the development of science. We must also note, however, that the strict scientific requirement for general laws and concepts to be repeatable, and/or verifiable can clip the corners of a perspective. While it may thus secure the rigor of observations, experiments and formulations, it may restrict the scientist's use of his vision and imagination in analyzing phenomena.

The motivation for collecting and analyzing certain data may originally have been ignited by curiosity or a hypothesis, itself the result of pure scientific inquiry. But it may also have been initiated to support a preconceived norm or value. Sometimes a scientific process undertaken on the basis of a preconceived value not only becomes futile, but even proves dangerous. It may be conducted so subjectively as to provide the desired norms, regardless of their scientific objectivity. This normative approach places primary importance on values rather than on the restricted evaluation of the analyzed data and may, by supplementing an inquiry or an observation with speculations beyond their plausible results, draw conclusions not rationally defensible. It can, in the highs and lows of scientific progress through periods of enlightenment and retrogression, influence the very approaches and techniques of scientific inquiry. Galileo was refuting not only a scientific theory, but also the Establishment of his day which, having based itself on and justified itself by a scientific concept, was dictating to the scientist a certain line of conduct. The astronomers Galileo was challenging were not even prepared to look into his telescope.^[1]  More recently, the biological observations of heredity suffered years of stagnation and even retrogression in the Soviet Union due to Lysenko's position which, while scientifically debatable, was adopted as the official theory of Soviet biology because its author kowtowed to the Stalinist cult.^[2]

Political science is more prone to suffer from Lysenkoism than are other sciences because it is directly related to the Establishment. The more the Establishment demands conformity, the more it is difficult for the political scientist to be objective towards his science and the analysis of social phenomena. Conformity may result not only from the rigidity of a totalitarian government which demands the political scientist to prove that the prevailing regime is the best form of social organization, but also from a chauvinistic undercurrent within any given society. Recent tendencies in the West to measure government by the yardstick of democracy have sometimes handicapped students of political science in their comprehension of other political cultures. The value charge of a normative approach may, of course, also work in the opposite direction, i.e., ignite revolt against the established order and sometimes bring about change, for better or worse. In his fervor and impulse the normativist may mistake his desires and ideals for reality or realizable concepts. Utopians are many.

The purpose here is not to discard the informative and the normative approaches, but rather to draw from both to build a formative approach wherein the student of political science is exposed, as far as possible, to rational and plausible perspectives. We say "as far as possible" because even conscious objectivity is not free from value judgments. As Easton says, "Whatever effort is exerted, in undertaking research we cannot shed our values in the way we remove our coats."^[3]  Indeed, conscious objectivity is the stage where we recognize that a judgment is necessarily subjective-subject to one's self and social conditioning. The scientific approach involves recognizing that a judgment is subjective and, when possible, realizing to what elements it is subject. The normative approach can thus claim to show its colors and proceed beyond the simple presentation of data. An author's declared values, whether elaborated at the outset or candidly made transparent in the course of an inquiry, should allow the reader to filter out the facts of an argument. But hidden value commitments--sometimes not even consciously perceived by the inquirer--may bias an inquiry: not only its outcome but its whole process from the formulation and selection of the problem, the formation of the concepts and selection of data, to their interpretation and the formulation of theories as well as their verification.^[4]  However, even the scientific treatment of a subject, in the strict sense of the term, is not without pitfalls. One may write an Almagest^[5] of meticulous scientific observations, creating a set of verifiable (by the instruments of the time, then or now) formulae which may be workable, yet be postulating false premises.

On the other hand, observation without tabulation and experience without experimentation can reach conclusions as valid as statistical and laboratory analyses. In such a case the same process has actually taken place in other forms. Aristotle did not know of the protein and vitamin contents of milk, yet he did recognize it as the most convenient food for the body.^[6]  It is true that the same Aristotle advanced the postulate of primum mobile, that of the spheric source of motion turning the stars around the earth, which later misled Ptolemy in the elaboration of his Almagest. Perhaps here lies the difference between stars and man. Man's observation of man has been firsthand, starting with himself--although often times awry, because he does not always dare look at himself as he really is. Man's knowledge of his environment, for the far larger part of his existence, has been embryonic and only relative to himself, with few scientific tools for experimentation and measurement. Thus, the knowledge of human behavior developed through observation and experience from within the inquirer and around him through the ages, supplying man with some understanding of himself and his fellows beyond the limits of scientific methodology. A science dealing with man can hardly afford to ignore this dimension of accumulated knowledge, the greater part of which has reached us in the form of normative and speculative thoughts. Of course, from our earlier discussion, we should be aware that preconceived notions may have influenced various inquiries into the nature of man.

To bridge the gap between the informative and the normative approaches in constructing a formative framework for the understanding of political phenomena, we will have to look at man and human groups in time and space. Are there, in the maze of data which the evolutions of different human groups have supplied and continue to supply, constants which can provide us with a perspective for understanding political phenomena? If so, how are they distinguishable from the variables, and how constant are they? In other words, how scientific is political science?

III. Scope of Political Science

In order to keep A and B in Fig. 1.01 in balance, we must make sure that A's weight times its distance from the fulcrum is equal to B's weight times its distance from the fulcrum. This is a simple formula of physics: A x af = B x bf.

Fig. 1.01

Can we with equal accuracy, following the postulates of Montesquieu or John Adams on separation of powers and checks and balances, construct a formula to determine how many judges we should put in the supreme judicial body of a country with an executive branch composed of a prime minister and 16 ministers and a bicameral legislative branch of 120 and 250 members in the upper and lower houses respectively? The answer is no. The formula for balance in physics is a scientific fact, and its application renders the predicted result. It deals with known substances, measurable weights, forces and characteristics. In political science the basic element is man, and man harbors a certain amount of unpredictability which cannot be measured by our present scientific tools.

Separation of powers cannot be reduced to a single formula. There is no set proportion for a given group of legislators, a body of judges, and a number of administrators to secure justice and order for any human society. The arrangements depend on the nature of man: of those occupying the positions, whose inner thoughts and possible future changes once in office cannot be thoroughly known and predicted, and of YOU, who may have a say in their choice and whose choice is conditioned by your personal interests. In general, man's primary concern is not a value judgment in the abstract but one in relation to himself. The question for the voter is not only whether the candidate will be an intrinsically objective legislator or an impartial judge, but also whether he will defend the voter's particular interests and values and whether he belongs to certain groups--political, economic, ethnic, religious, ideological, philosophical, or others--with which the voter identifies or which he trusts and is loyal to.

There is more to scientific inquiry, however, than the construction of a single formula. In the words of Einstein, "The object of all science is to coordinate our experiences and bring them into a logical system." If that is so, then political science is as much of a science as other sciences. But because of its subject of inquiry, the human species, it demands greater abstraction. In exact sciences, other conditions being equal, it may be true that the particular can be engrossed quid pro quo into the general and the general can be reduced to the particular. In political science, while the general may represent the particular and the particular may indicate the general, simple conversion of one into the other is not free of risks.

In physics the thermal expansion coefficient for platinum is equally applic­able to a platinum rod containing five million atoms as to a fraction of the same rod containing five thousand atoms. In political science, while the electoral behavior of a district can be predicted with a small margin of error by a sampling of early votes, the percentage derived does not auto­matically apply in the case of any random fraction of that district's population. This may appear to deny the scientific status of politics. But such an appearance results from the fact that we are not comparing the basic raw materials of physics and political science at the same levels. The platinum atom is the smallest identifiable particle recognizable as platinum and has the same characteristics as all other platinum particles. In the case of electoral behavior, we took an agglomeration of human beings, whose behavior could be predicted as an agglomeration. The components of this collective behavior are not the individual beings composing that agglomera­tion but the combination of their particular behavioral patterns. In other words, individual human beings as such are not the final unit of political science. The last indivisible unit of our science is not the individual, physiologically considered, but the behavioral variables within each individual. And indeed, if we go into the details of those behaviors, we do come up with formulae of predictability. Thus, if we choose not just a section of five thousand individuals, but five thousand individuals with behaviors representative of the population, we could apply our general percentage of probability to them as well. The more we have perfected our formula of sampling, that is, the more we have taken into account all the behavioral patterns of the population and included them in our sampling, the smaller our margin of error.

Inversely, in physics the behavior of an atom can be used, by and large, as the basis for ascertaining the behavior of a group of atoms of the same matter. Again in political science, if we erroneously take the individual as the final unit, we will not be able to generalize about the group (be it homogeneous or heterogeneous, although we may hit nearer for a homogeneous group). Each individual has his particular characteristics which we may be able to analyze at length and even use for prediction of, for example, his voting behavior. But by observing only one individual we may not be led to group characteristics. In political science, in order to come to any generalization from particulars, we need, as we said, sufficient sampling. And the stereotype established on the basis of such research may correspond to no real individual within the group under consideration.^[7]

In their dealings with phenomena in general, both exact sciences and social sciences can, within limits, establish broad rules. When a chemist is faced with a new phenomenon, before he has discovered terms of reference for it, he calls it chaos. As he proceeds to discover certain patterns, he sets them down as rules pertaining to that phenomenon without having necessarily found all the relevant facts about it. The political analyst can sample the behavioral pattern of a group on a given issue, and set a rule predicting the outcome of that behavior on that issue, but not on all issues. In observing the particular, the physical scientist may have to admit Heisen­berg's "Uncertainty Principle" which reveals that it is not possible to establish accurately the position and the momentum of an electron simultaneously. The political scientist may predict, with reasonable accuracy, the reaction of a militant member of a minority group to a range of issues. But he is well advised to work into his prediction some uncer­tainty principle.

In their treatment of general inquiry and particular observations, then, exact sciences and social sciences share scientific certainties and uncertainties which permit political science to qualify for a place among other sciences. But let us not extend analogies too far. The basic differences, at this stage of scientific development, are crucial, namely the difficulty in political science to transfer the validity of general data to the particular and vice versa, and the fact that exact sciences deal with matter while political science deals with man. Further, we study man not as a single personal unit but in the complex of his behavior within the social and cultural context: political science cannot get to the basic unit, a specific behavioral pattern in isolation. That is why Wilson, devising the sociobiological analysis of man, suggests that "only when the machinery can be torn down on paper at the level of the cell and put together again will the properties of emotion and ethical judgement come clear."^[8]  In the meantime, however, the social scientist will have to proceed with what is available to him, including sociobiology, while taking care not to get bogged down in traditional speculation nor to be railroaded onto scientific bandwagons, remembering that in terms of proportionality constants political phenomena are affected by the conditions of the experiment. In political science there are no simple propositions, for no matter at how elementary a stare it begins its inquiry, it is dealing with a complex--man--and relations among men. Whether in any other sphere objects and simples exist, in political terms there are none.^[9]

IV. Political Science and Other Sciences

Sagan, commenting on the R-complex--the reptilian part of our brain--which MacLean suggests is instrumental in our aggressiveness, territoriality and establishment of rituals and social hierarchy,^[10] notes that "despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior."^[11]  He goes on to assure us that the human brain can suppress the reptilian inclinations and produce the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. There is a wide span of interconnected knowledge between the reptilian complex and the Bill of Rights. Indeed, as we began this chapter it looked as if political science starts by studying the glandular secretions of one individual in his encounter with another. Would that be far-fetched? It depends, of course, on how you look at it. We may argue that political science, dealing with man and his behavior within his group, should concern itself with whatever concerns man. But everything concerns man. Inversely, we may say that political science is, in the stricter sense, a study of government and its functions, and therefore the study of social organization and little more than a different angle of sociology.

Whichever way we look at it, whether we call it the master science, as Aristotle did, and make it overarch other sciences, or whether we dilute it into the other sciences, and label it the dismal science as Carlyle did, political science is inextricably involved in all the sciences which help us understand man. A science which studies social organization has to inquire into the different components of that organization in order to comprehend it. We may well agree with Montesquieu and Austin that political power necessarily implies the union of several families. We should, therefore, not indulge in examining household policy as pertaining to our science. Yet the ingredients of political power have had a breeding ground, so to speak, composed of the first contacts, impacts and associations of human beings. A good deal of socialization takes place within kinship ties. Do traditional patriarchal families influence the political structure of their society differently than the modern Western nuclear family does? Maybe we should leave it to social psychology and anthropology to find out. But the political scientist who ignores that question will be handicapped.

Rather than integrating and synthesizing the contents of other sciences into a coherent discipline, modern political science has often simply imitated their methods and techniques--a fact which has contributed to its fragmentation into "schools." Quantitative analysis, for example, has opened many vistas in political science. But as Gordon Hilton, bringing political sophistication to statistical regression analysis, points out in his preface "Politometric techniques are an aid to, not a replacement for, theoretical thinking."^[12]  Many schools, however, by confining themselves to particular approaches have, more often than not, confronted rather than complemented -each other. While confrontation has provided some mutual stimulation, it has also produced "scientific" isms devoted to perpetuating their angles of vision which, to begin with, have been based on original thoughts in other branches of science. Aristotle, Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Mill and Marx were not only philosophers but also original political thinkers. Today our political thoughts are inspired by psychologists John B. Watson, and Jean Piaget, philosophers Edmund Husserl and Hanna Arendt, anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude LeviStrauss, sociologists Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, mathematicians John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern and Norbert Wiener ...The fact of the matter is, of course, that these are partly political thinkers as well, while some political scientists profess to be "specialists."

Institutionalism, structuralism, functionalism, behavioralism, developmentalism or transactionalism have been fashionable approaches, yet in reality they are the intertwined and complementary dimensions of the complex whole of political science.^[13]  If we get to the sources--the basic concepts--of their inspiration, we may find the unifying thread of the discipline. Thus, the basic concepts of political science are not voting behavior, political socialization, pressure groups, political values, political power or political institutions, but behavior, socialization, groups, values, power and institutions in the continuity of time and space, hence within the comparative and historical context. Such an interdisciplinary approach will take us, of course, to other branches of knowledge as they have evolved, and upstream of their evolution to their common source. In his analysis the political scientist has to look beyond the times when social psychology was first identified as a branch of the social sciences. Not only must he know Disraeli as a statesman, but also read his Sybil,^[14] because his novel was a study in social psychology. The Declaration of Human Rights may well be supplemented by William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Still further, the political scientist should look at avant-garde manifestations in art, science and philosophy to find clues to the future of society.  Artists, poets, composers and philosophers, who are often disapproved of, misunderstood, or labeled fanciful by their contemporaries, may well be those whose perceptions are ahead of their times. Rousseau and Locke were preparing the American and French revolutions; Hegel, Wagner, and Nietzsche, the German Reich; Marx and Engels, the socialist revolutions; Jules Verne, the landing on the moon. Beware of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.

V. The Art

If, as we have noted, the subject of its inquiry puts some limitations on the "scientific" endeavors in political science, the encompassing embrace we claim for it may qualify it for another branch of human sublimation: art.

Is it not true that art frees man's intuition and genius to create unique works according to his aesthetic sensitivity and personality, using basic common ingredients such as paint or acrylic, marble or reinforced concrete, the Pythagorean. or the twelve-tone scale, words or gestures? If so, then there is art in politics. In the exact sciences, any novelty or discovery can be admitted into the corpus only if it can be established so as to be rationally understood, systematically followed on the basis of scientific proof, and generally repeated. But the artist invests his imagination and talent to produce a work hardly, if ever, repeatable. The political scientist or practitioner who uses his knowledge and observation of human behavior only as a tool of his trade in the strict sense remains an artisan. Colors are colors. They are used by wall painters. It is the genius of the artist that makes them into a masterpiece. In the course of history many statesmen have turned apparently limited political potentials into landmarks of human achievement. Cyrus, Alexander, Ch'in Shih-huang-ti, Ashoka, Charlemagne, Richelieu, Jefferson, Bismarck, Lenin, Gandhi, Churchill, de Gaulle and Mao Tse-Tung had at their disposal what the next man could have had. It is true that they were in given positions at given times in particular social circumstances, and these factors had much to do in making them what they were. But what they gave of themselves elevated their feats into masterpieces of political achievement. The political arena, however, more than any other field of human endeavor, can suffer from achievers posing as geniuses.

VI. The Sermon

We saw that since it has to do with human behavior, political science requires broad knowledge about man and his environment. The political scientist or practitioner needs not only an intimate knowledge of other social sciences, but also an understanding of other sciences and their possible impact on his field. He should be familiar with tools of quantitative measurement, such as statistical and computer analysis, but go beyond the data they supply. Yet he should go beyond them only when he is objective or at least conscious of his value-judgment handicaps. He should be sensitive, exercising intuition and feelings. Only by identifying and working with the subjects of his study can the political scientist or practitioner be effective. The physicist may isolate himself in his lab and still be a good specialist. The lab of a political scientist or practitioner is human society.

Those who want to get directly involved in political science or politics should feel it is their calling. It is more than a mere profession and should not be embraced only to satisfy ambition or material considerations. The fact that the profession is often chosen for such spurious reasons may account for many political and social problems. People who lack the calling for a certain field often enter it anyway, make it their profession and become mediocre or even harmful practitioners. Of all careers, politics can be the most dangerous. A bad medical doctor may number his victims in the hundreds. A bad chemist's product can be detected and withdrawn before its victims have passed thousands. But the victims of bad politicians number in the millions.

While both the political scientist and the practitioner of politics, or the politician are concerned with policy and polity, their orientations are different. The political scientist approaches his field basically to learn. Learning for him is an end in itself. He may amass knowledge which he may not use in practice; and often, on his way, he investigates sidetracks merely to find out where they lead. The practitioner, in the strict sense of the term, collects knowledge as a tool to achieve a political goal. He may discard what does not appear useful for his purpose. Both the scientist's pursuit of the sidetracks and the practitioner's discarding of what seems useless are arbitrary and may, in the long run, render the political scientist less expedient and the practitioner narrower in his vision.

While many sidetracks in science have led to new areas of knowledge, many limitations of politicians have ended in catastrophe. The politician is not expected to be a scientist at the same time, but he can make use of political science. If he does, it benefits everyone because, in addition to its common goal with other sciences in search of truth, political science is the science of human truth--not in the metaphysical sense, but in the practical sense that you cannot fool all the people all the time.^[15]  The dedicated political scientist can hardly avoid scrutinizing his own prejudices. More than any other scientist, he should know that his truth is relative. And while honest about what he may hold as truth, he should not exclude doubt and possibilities of error. It is this humility of the scientist and his attitude of eternally searching for truth rather than trying to define it which may be helpful to the practitioner. The practitioner--the politician--should also be conscious of this truth prerequisite for politics, for his sincerity will bring vigor to his policies. And while his talent in the art of politics may provide him with the flexibility and diplomacy of telling the truth differently if he must, he should recognize the line where the shaky grounds of lying and dishonesty begin. Watergate still stands as a glaring example of the failure to respect that boundary.

A wrong theory in physics, when put to practice, does not work. In politics, due to, man's pliability, it may be made to work. But what is a wrong theory in political science? What criteria distinguish a good political scientist, a good politician, a good policy, or a good polity? Matter does not question the physicist; man does question the social or political scientist. Politics is everybody's business. Ask your neighbor in the bus or the restaurant about the last elections and he will give you his opinion; ask him about the role of the enzyme in the protein-producing function of ribonucleic acids and, unless he is a biochemist, he will probably decline to comment. Human beings are the actors in the political arena. Yet numerous as they are, the weight of their numbers can conceal and breed laxity and lack of perseverence to scrutinize the depth of political issues, often producing vocal pawns. The more people are politically educated and aware, the more they can supply good political scientists and practitioners, and the more they can guide and assist the political scientist or the politician to choose plausible formulae. Thus, whether or not the members of the society have inclinations to pursue political science or to get directly involved in politics, it is both their interest and their social duty to expose themselves to some basic concepts underlying life's everyday political dimensions. The purpose of my present endeavor is to examine, together with my readers, some of these dimensions.

As the present study is tapered to explaining the whys of political phenomena more than the hows, at times concepts presented may seem unwonted. These concepts should be understood in the context of the whole work. Compared to the work of a painter, written expression has the disadvantage that the writer cannot present his readers with the completed work instantly and impress upon them, as the painter does with his canvas, the relationship of shades and patterns as he visualizes them in his mind. The reader is therefore asked to be patient until he has read the whole picture!