Political Science and Political Theory

Jessica Kuper

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032808062
• eBook ISBN: 9781000706628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1987. The key issues, concepts and figures relevant to the study of political science and theory today are covered in this volume, and useful suggestions for further reading are included. In political science, topics range from the analysis of voting to decision making; philosophical issues from anarchism through human rights to utopianism; and the biographies deal with major thinkers such as Arendt, Burke, Hobbes, Marx and Rousseau.

Administration

Administration is an aspect of organizational institutionalization or establishment. Its job is to avoid crucial challenges so as to keep institutions going. The administrator can establish and maintain any organization by imposing a process of compartmentalization. This requires the establishment of four sets of rules: the rules of satisficing, simplication, simulation and jurisdiction. Following these rules means that administration keeps things going by finding satisfactory means, by admitting only selected data and labelled categories and case applicants, by not trying to deal with a chaos of raw and unordered life and, finally, by dealing only with certain issues, and then only in particular ways and via specified officials – not with anything by anyone in any way. Overall, there is a departmental line or philosophy, an agenda. In short, the job of administration is to control the agenda, and the formulation of data, and to determine what and who can enter the discussion about policy, and how the discussion is then conducted.

However disguised, administration is political, partly because keeping organizations going demands the management of endogenous relations, legitimation and the creation of loyalty, and more generally because it is an inescapable part of any state apparatus. Administration allows the balance in state politics to be tilted to organization rather than coercion, so that in consequence politicians kill people less often than they might otherwise.

Administration is not confined to modern political organizations, but however common, old and various, administration seems to require certain conditions:

(1) Administration does not work well where decision making is weakly ordered. It requires an interest in keeping the organization going, because of loyalty or organizational slack. The favoured administrative ecology fosters political, constitutional or consensual mutual adjustment, rather than economistic, market-like or warlike adaptations.

(2) The administrator works best where each case needs to be referred through the hierarchy for minuting about precedents. Where this sort of expert supervision is carried out, it creates steep and highly pyramidical organizations.

(3) Another condition of administration is the establishment of a distinction between administrators and political officeholders. The distinction has, not surprisingly, been variously pursued through the history of administrative reforms and administrative sciences and among political systems. The Westminster model is peculiar. It provides for an elected and partisan minister who is at once a member of a collectively responsible cabinet and an amateur and changing extrinsic chief of a specific type of administrative organization. However, there have been politically significant variations in ministerialization, in recruitment and formation, and in the professional and legal status of administrative performances as between the generalistic Oxbridge anglophonic ideal, the Napoleonic codification of schools, service and administrative law, and the American Jeffersonian ambivalence about spoils, appointments and business or academic careers.

Politics and administration, however, are always in a necessary alliance in order to secure resources, foster institutional legitimation, manage conflicts, facilitate the delivery of services, and invent policy themes. Therefore, administration is not quite bureaucracy in Palmers ton’ s sense of government by appointed officeholders. Yet it is bureaucratic in the sort of organizations it institutionalizes, in those peculiar methods of work and, above all, in its justifications by equity of process rather than substantive outcomes.

While it is common, culturally specific and non-cosmopolitan, administrative behaviour always provokes similar concerns: as in the search for other ways of doing it, like pretences that there could be a development administration different from the (colonial) ‘hearing cases and collecting taxes’, however ill-served development could be if cases were unheard and taxes uncollected; and in sterile discussions about professional, scientific or technical status.

Administration is inescapably present save in the abundance of Utopia, but however instrumentally therapeutic, it is also exclusive, punitive, privileged and dominant. Consequently, it lends itself to a legalistic, depoliticized and reductionist treatment in Marxist, economistic or managerial traditions of analysis.

Bernard Schaffer
University of Sussex

Further Reading

Dunsore, A. (1978), Implementation in a Bureaucracy: The Execution Process, Oxford.

Ham, C. and Hill, M. (1983), The Policy Process in the Modern Capitalist State, Brighton.

Heclo, H. and Wildavsky, A. (1980), The Private Government of Public Money, London.

Schaffer, B. B. (1973), The Administrative Factor, London.

Simon, H. A. (1945), Administrative Behavior, New York (2nd edn in 1957).

See also: bureaucracy; decision making; policy sciences.

Anarchism

Anarchism is a political philosophy which holds that societies can and should exist without rulers. Anarchists believe that this will not, as is commonly supposed, lead to chaos – ‘anarchy’ in the popular sense – but on the contrary to an increase in social order. Anarchists see the state as the decisive source of corruption and disorder in the body politic. They point to many examples where people freely co-operate, without coercion, to achieve common purposes. Among traditional societies they find much to interest them in the ‘ordered anarchies’ of certain African tribes such as the Nuer, as well as in the workings of autonomous peasant communities such as the Russian mir and the self-governing cities of medieval Europe. In modern times they have hailed the anarchist experiments of the German Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Münster; the Diggers and Fifth Monarchists of the English Civil War; the popular clubs and societies of the French Revolution; the Paris Commune of 1871; the Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917; and the anarchist ventures in Catalonia and Andalusia during the Spanish Civil War.

Christ and Buddha have been claimed among earlier anarchists; and there were many social movements in both medieval Europe and medieval China which drew a fundamentally anarchist inspiration from Christianity and Buddhism. Religious anarchism continued into modern times with Tolstoy and Gandhi. But the modern phase of anarchism proper opens with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and can be traced equally from Rousseau’s romanticism and William Godwin’s rationalism. An early exponent was Godwin’s son-in-law, the poet Shelley. Later advocates included the French socialist Proudhon, the German philosopher of egoism Max Stirner, the American individualist Thoreau, and the Russian aristocratic rebels Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Anarchism was a strong current during the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath; the suppression of the Kronstadt rising in 1921 and the emasculation of the soviets signalled its defeat. But the ideas lived on, to surface not only in Spain in the 1930s, but in Hungary in 1956, and in Paris in 1968, where the student radicals achieved a dazzling blend of anarchism and surrealism.

Krishan Kumar
University of Kent

Further Reading

Joll, J. (1964), The Anarchists, London.

Miller, D. (1984), Anarchism, London.

Ritter, A. (1980), Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis, Cambridge.

Woodcock, G. (1963), Anarchism, London.

Arendt, Hannah (1906–75)

Hannah Arendt was one of the outstanding students of politics of our century, making major contributions both as a political historian and as a political philosopher. Born in Germany in 1906, she attended the universities of Marburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg, where she completed a doctoral thesis on St Augustine under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. After fleeing Germany in the 1930s she worked with Zionist organizations in France, then moved to the United States where she lectured at many universities, principally the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. She was the recipient of many distinguished prizes and honours for her contribution to contemporary thought and culture. She died in New York City in 1975.

Arendt first gained prominence as an analyst of the totalitarian form of government, with the publication in 1951 of her monumental three-part study, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her most important philosophical work is The Human Condition (1958), in which she argues that there is a ‘hierarchy within the vita activa itself, where the acting of the statesman occupies the highest position, the making of the craftsman and artist an intermediary, and the labouring which provides the necessities for the functioning of the human organism the lowest’. On the basis of her division of worldly activities into labour, work and action, Arendt affirms that freedom and autonomy can only be fully realized in the context of a politicized existence, and that only by fulfilling the public dimension of life can we give meaning to human affairs. This comprehensive theoretical understanding of politics is further developed in On Revolution (1963) and in the essays in Between Past and Future (1961; enlarged edition, 1968).

All of Hannah Arendt’ s works generated intense controversy, from her early writings on Zionism of the 1940s to her essays on the American republic of the 1960s and 1970s. The fiercest of these controversies was provoked by her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she argued that the real evil of Eichmann’s deeds lay in the bureaucratic shallowness that allowed the monstrous to appear ordinary – Eichmann’s mindless banality. This raises the question of whether thoughtlessness is somehow essential to political evil, or whether the active exercise of man’s mental abilities actually makes us abstain from evil-doing, and it is to questions such as these that Arendt devoted her last, unfinished work on The Life of the Mind (posthumously published in 1978).

Ronald Beiner
University of Southampton and Queen’s University,
Kingston, Ontario

Further Reading

Canovan, M. (1974), The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, New York.

Hill, M. A. (ed.) (1979), Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, New York.

Kateb, G. (1983), Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil, Totowa, N.J.

Young-Bruehl, E. (1982), Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, New Haven.

Authority

Six distinctions must be drawn in any account of the concept of authority (Friedman, 1973; Lukes, 1978):

(1) The failure to explain the unity and order of social life and the compliance of subjects solely in terms of coercion and/ or rational agreement opens a space for the concept of authority. Authority refers to a distinctive form of compliance in social life (see 2). Three accounts exist of the basis of this special compliance. One sees authoritative institutions as reflecting the common beliefs, values, traditions and practices of members of society (Parsons, 1960; Arendt, 1963); a second sees political authority as offering a co-ordination solution to a Hobbesian state of nature, or a lack of shared values (Hobbes, 1651); and a third view argues that although social order is imposed by force, it derives its permanence and stability through techniques of legitimation, ideology, hegemony, mobilization of bias, false consensus and so on, which secure the willing compliance of citizens through the manipulation of their beliefs (Weber, 1978 [1922]; Lukes, 1978).

(2) What is special about the compliance B renders A which marks off authority from coercion and rational agreement? Coercion secures B’s compliance by the use of force or threats; persuasion convinces B by appeal to arguments that an action is in B’s interests, is, for example, morally right, or prudent; but B complies with authority when B recognizes A’s right to command him in a certain sphere. B voluntarily surrenders the right to make compliance contingent on an evaluation of the content of A’s command, and obeys because A’s order comes from an appropriate person and falls within the appropriate range. Where authority exists there will be ‘rules of recognition’ (Hart, 1961) or ‘marks’ by which to identify those eligible to exercise it.

(3) We must also distinguish between de facto and de jure authority (Peters, 1967; Winch, 1967). De facto authority is evidenced whenever B complies with A in the appropriate manner; de jure authority exists where A has a right to B’s compliance in a given area which derives from a set of institutional rules. That A has one form of authority in no way entails that he will also have the other.

(4) Many writers have referred to authority as ‘legitimate power’. This may mean (i) that coercion is exercised by someone with de jure authority, although the coerced agent is not responding to A’ s authority; or (ii) that A’ s orders in fact produce this distinctive form of non-coerced deferential obedience (A thus has de facto authority) – this being in sharp contrast to cases where compliance is based on fear.

(5) Authority is thus a two-tier concept: it refers to a mode of influence and compliance, and to a set of criteria which identify who is to exercise this influence. For this influence to take effect it must be exercised ‘within a certain kind of normative arrangement accepted by both parties’ (Friedman, 1973). This normative arrangement may be a common tradition, practice or set of beliefs (Winch, 1967; MacIntyre, 1967), or it may be simply a common acknowledgment that some set of rules is required to avoid chaos. B’s compliance with A’s authority may take two forms: it may be unquestioning (as with Weber’s ‘charismatic authority’) or B may be able to criticize A’s command, yet still complies because he recognizes A’s right to command, even if he privately disagrees with its content.

(6) A further important distinction is that between being an authority and being in authority. The former concerns matters of belief; the latter concerns A’s place in a normative order with recognized positions of de jure authority. When A is an authority, he is held to have, or successfully claims, special knowledge, insight, expertise, and so on, which justifies B’s deference to A’s judgement. When A ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributor List
• Political Science
• Political Theory
• Political Science and Political Theory: the entries