The Political Sciences

General Principles of Selection in Social Science and History

Hugh Stretton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135025854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social science is a social activity as well as a method of discovery. The researchers' values and politics colour their work and so do their choices of scientific method. This book is about both – the technical effects of values and the political effects of technique. The author reports what social scientists and historians actually do. He sorts out the scientific from the political content in a wide range of old and new work in history, sociology, political science and economics. The overall work is a detailed political and technical criticism of the 'scientistic' programme which would have researchers select for such qualities as objectivity, uniformity, and generality, cumulation and professional unanimity.

Part 1 – Use

This is a study of relations between the logical forms of explanations and their social uses. Plenty has been written about their forms, but their uses have to be studied by observation of cases.

Examples for comparison are sometimes hard to find. The same scientific question is seldom approached by enough different investigators, sufficiently various in their methods and politics. So to begin with, and to sketch some models, I resort to fiction. How (otherwise than by psychologists) are the social acts of individuals explained? Chapter 1 outlines some common methods of explaining them, and in Chapter 2, besides some genuine accounts of one politician’s act, other explanations of it are made up to fit the purposes of a variety of imaginary investigators, each looking for a different illumination of the same act.

The first chapter should therefore expound theory, but even that is done easier by example, so the example is introduced immediately. To keep things realistic it is a question posed by a real historian about an act of a real politician, but to keep things simple it is a minor act. The (dead) French historian’s view of the (forgotten) English event has little interest now, least perhaps for any American reader. It deserves the dozen lines some general histories spare it, and a dozen pages in the politician’s five-volume biography. But for his own comfort the reader is implored to raise more interest in it than that, because for the sake of science, here begin two whole chapters about it.

1

Why Men Act

1. A Question

In December 1899 Joseph Chamberlain, the best known protagonist of social reform then in the British cabinet, apparently changed his mind about old age pensions. Every historian of that act has thought that it required explanation. Why?

When the Unionists came into power in 1895, two or three years had passed since the attention of the working class had been drawn to the question [of pensions for aged workmen] by Charles Booth, the philanthropist, famous for his inquiries into social conditions. The scheme proposed by Booth was, it is true, completely different from Bismarck’s solution. He asserted the right of every man without exception to a pension in old age. Neither workmen nor employers were to contribute. He did not speak of insurance, but of relief. And Chamberlain had obtained the support of a group of Members of Parliament, belonging to both parties, for a carefully studied scheme, far more moderate than Booth’s proposal, or even Bismarck’s law – a system of optional insurance to be assisted by the State – and had again developed his proposals before a Royal Commission, appointed in 1893 to inquire into the question. The Commission, however, had in 1895 reached a purely negative conclusion. It was the same with a Parliamentary Committee appointed in 1896 which reported in 1898. But Booth’s proposal suddenly acquired an unexpected importance when the Government of one of the self-governing Colonies passed legislation, based on a principle similar to that which he had enunciated…. The New Zealand legislation was immediately explained to the British public by the agent-general of the colony in London, the Fabian, W. P. Reeves; and Booth made use of it to push his own scheme. He launched an extensive campaign throughout Great Britain, for which he obtained the support of the trade unions, the co-operative societies, the Nonconformist bodies, twenty-seven Anglican Bishops, and Cardinal Vaughan. Three months had not passed, and his National Committee of Organized Labour for Promoting Old Age Pensions for all had scarcely been formed, before Parliament was roused to action. A committee of seventeen members appointed by the House of Commons reported, after a rapid inquiry, in favour of the New Zealand system…. The movement had been well launched in the traditional English fashion. It enjoyed the support of the working classes. If in any party a statesman, inspired by Fabian principles, was prepared to adopt either Booth’s scheme, or the system which had been set up in New Zealand, he would have the country behind him. What was Chamberlain going to do?

He did nothing. At first sight his inaction is surprising. He was universally understood to have given an explicit pledge before the election of 1895 to provide the workers with old age pensions. From the zeal he had displayed in defending the Compensation Bill, when it was debated in 1897, one might expect that he would continue to advocate a bold policy of social reform. And surely his imperialism could not fail to be attracted by a reform which had originated in one of those self-governing Colonies whose bonds with the mother country it was his constant endeavour to draw closer. Nevertheless, he did nothing.¹

In the first of those two paragraphs, Halévy’s story may not be complete but it is not puzzling. It does not tell why Booth chose relief instead of insurance, or why the New Zealand government did what it did. There are such gaps in any narrative. No narrative is ‘complete’, in that it explains all its own parts. It must keep moving and a judgment to be explored later chooses which parts to take for granted. But when in 1900 Chamberlain ‘did nothing’ about pensions, Halévy will not permit a suspension of curiosity; here is not an omission, but a puzzle. Art helps life to make the puzzle: Halévy establishes explanations that would be satisfactory if they accounted for what Chamberlain did. The trouble is that they explain, instead, something which he did not do. Their form illustrates a conventional classification of explanations for individual acts.

First, Halévy gives Chamberlain the habits of a social reformer and an imperialist, just such habits as would dispose him to import a pension scheme from New Zealand. To have done so would have repeated a pattern of his past, would have been an act which his record shows him to have been disposed to do; and for the act, we would then have a dispositional explanation.

Second, Halévy confronts Chamberlain with a political opportunity, and we know how politicians usually respond to political opportunities. Chamberlain was a politician, and if he had behaved more like one on this occasion we would be satisfied; we would recognize a case of what experience has taught us to be a law of political behavior.^a

Third, Halévy might offer a more prevalent type of explanation – one that followed the working of Chamberlain’s mind, ‘empathized’ or ‘re-thought’ his thoughts, so that we might understand the passions or calculations which led him to act as he did. Explanations of this sort vary in the methods and evidence they use in penetrating other minds; they may cite intentions or reasons or emotions; we may lump them together as ‘understanding’ explanations, noticing that they appear to have few equivalents in the natural sciences.

But dispositional and law-based explanations do not explain Chamberlain’s change of mind in 1899, and the contents of his mind remain a mystery. More information is needed. Perhaps Halévy’s dispositional arguments were untrue, or incomplete, or irrelevant.

2. Disposition

Acts may be known more certainly than thoughts; what can be learned of his disposition from the outward and visible facts of Chamberlain’s career?

Chamberlain’s imperialist and reformist proclivities can scarcely be questioned. As Colonial Secretary he did more for the office, and for the good government of colonies, than any before him. He spoke incessantly of his own and his country’s imperial mission. He tried to join the self-governing colonies into various political, military and economic reunions. He was currently fighting to annex the Boer republics.

His radical record is just as consistent, and longer. He reformed his family’s fortunes and Mr. Nettlefold’s hardware business and several Sunday Schools. He worked for the reform of education first in Birmingham and then throughout the nation. His radical accomplishments in city government were famous. In national politics, his ‘unauthorised programmes’ were decades ahead of legislation. He reformed the structure of the Liberal party and, as far as he could, the social conscience of the Conservative party. He helped the reform of shipping safety, commercial law, local government, accident compensation, and the franchise itself. Three years after this change of mind about pensions, he was to attack the traditional foundations of public financial policy and private commercial liberty. At different times in earlier decades, he had menaced the House of Lords, the Established Church, and the institution of Monarchy.^b

But if these were causes he was disposed to advance, what were his habitual methods of advancing them? Did some trait of cowardice or incapacity betray his promise of pensions? We should look at another of his dispositions – what were his customary methods of getting what he wanted?

He spent his youth exploiting the British rights to an American screw-making patent. The patent would have enabled anyone to starve out the hand-ironmongers, but Chamberlain did more than that. He built one of the first and fastest of the great industrial monopolies; he beat imports out of the British market, and he beat competitors out of a wide foreign territory as well. He paid well when he bought out competitors, often hired them on good terms afterwards, and was himself a model employer. He fought competition itself as hard as he fought competitors, and he won a famous victory for consolidation, monopoly, high prices, and his famous ‘ransom’ to labour.

As in private so in public business. He set out to reform Birmingham’s schools. Beaten at first in the Birmingham School Board, he then established a control of the Town Council which enabled him to use its powers, illegally and successfully, to frustrate both the School Board and the Court of Queen’s Bench. Then he recaptured the School Board, giving Birmingham a lesson in caucus organization which he soon applied on a national scale. His personal control of the national liberal caucus and his personal following of midland, nonconformist and radical voters were wielded like weapons to win his seat in the Liberal cabinet and his share in its legislative programme. And when he finally split the liberal party, it remained ineffective for twenty years.

The same temper stiffened his foreign policies. He used rebellion, and South African and British arms, against the Boer republics. When the frontiers of British and Russian influence approached each other in southern and eastern Asia, it was the instinct of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to reach agreement with the Russians in order to avoid conflict, divide the spoils and exclude weaker contenders. It was Chamberlain’s instinct to acquire an army – any army – capable of beating the Russians, if we may so interpret his approaches within a single month of 1898 to Japanese, Americans and Germans.

So there is a pattern in his response to opposition. The thing to do with a competitor is not in the end to surrender, or compete, or compromise, or join, or split the spoils. The thing to do is to acquire him, or kill him. The method is to establish control of an organization capable of beating him, then to fight him – as the Boers and the Liberal party and the Birmingham School Board and dozens of bankrupt ironmongers had discovered.

This selection of traits omits an important one: what was Chamberlain’s way when personal ambition came into conflict with habitual policy or principle? Authorities disagree. Paul Cambon thought that

it would not do to forget that M. Chamberlain has no political principles whatsoever: he is a man of the moment, able to change his opinions with incredible ease, entirely untroubled by any earlier statements he may have made; a man who has never for a moment hesitated to contradict himself. He also has a very exact appreciation of the exigencies of public opinion, and excels in following all its fluctuations, while appearing to direct them. This is the secret of his popularity.²

But R. C. K. Ensor concluded that

an air of frustration clings round his record.… He was in politics for constructive aims – to ‘get things done’; yet outside the colonial office work it was little that he actually achieved. In all human relations his instincts were intensely loyal; yet he helped to wreck each of the great parties in succession. Both episodes were charged to his personal ambition; yet it is obvious that in both he was acting conscientiously, against and not for his own interest.³

These traits cannot explain why Chamberlain should betray his favorite causes. Even Cambon’s suspicion would have him sticking to those causes, if Halévy is right in thinking that in doing so ‘he would have the country behind him’. Before his dispositions can be related to the obstinate fact that he did change his mind, both the circumstances and the intention of that change of mind will have to be better understood.

‘Dispositional analysis is a kind of spectatorisn’.⁴ It relates an act to habits of action, rather than to motives or calculations. These distinctions, logically dubious, are common in the practice of historians. It may be true that the very notion of an act has to include something of its significance, and therefore of its context; but the fact that Chamberlain opposed various pension schemes in 1900 can be separated from a lot of knowledge about the circumstances in which he did so. To that extent it is possible to think separately about the act and about its context. In the same way, though it be some idea of its reason and intention that allows us to call it a political act at all, it may be well enough or badly enough understood to allow a working distinction between the act, and the thought that went with it. The dispositional explanation relates an act to a record of action, with minimal understanding of either. What use is such a device?

Historians have various uses for it. The commonest purpose is to calm curiosity or keep it at bay, rather than to satisfy it; this is a quick way to clear the narrative of interruptions, as if quite different facts had allowed Halévy to write

In 1900, Chamberlain repeated his customary annual evasion of the pension question

or

in that year pensions made no progress, because Booth’s political inexperience led him to concentrate his persuasions upon that impenetrable Tory, the Lord Chancellor.

‘Customary annual’, ‘political inexperience’ and ‘impenetrable Tory’ will give perfunctory satisfaction if the narrative has bigger business to be getting on with.

When such explanations are made to do more important duty, it is usually because no better ones can be constructed. A man’s reasons have such familiar relation to the world around him, and such familiar expression in speech, that they are often easier to reconstruct than are his passions or inconsistencies. When action is wild or irrational, the historian can seldom replace the detail of calculation with the equivalent detail of passionate feeling or impulse; he retreats instead to a general pattern of passionate or irrational conduct. Calculation is usually easier to follow than miscalculation.⁵

Wild action is only one case of the resort to dispositions whenever there is a lack of evidence about thought or intention. Historians must sometimes write of unrevealing acts, secretive persons, inscrutable systems. Less respectably, they may want to make plain acts obscure, or obscure acts unduly plain. Mistakes, sacrifices of persons to necessity, sacrifices of principle to personal loyalty, can be discredited by isolating acts from their intentions. A bald enough record of his actions, divorced even from the thread of reason that Cambon allowed them, could give Chamberlain the disposition of a chronic turncoat, and make his treachery to pensions an unsurprising instance of an invariable habit. A German Chancellor wrote of him:

There was hardly a British statesman who had changed so often in his political career, who had altered his standpoint so frequently and so suddenly, or with whom one must be so much prepared for surprises, for some unexpected divagation, as with Joseph Chamberlain. From a Radical democrat he changed to a Conservative Tory, from a republican to a loyal monarchist, from a pacifist to an imperialist, from an enthusiastic freetrader and follower of Bright and Cobden to a passionate protectionist.… There was hardly a political question in which he had not, like the Sicambrian king, burned what he had previously worshipped and worshipped what he had previously burned.⁶

This is dispositional explanation, pure in form if not in purpose. Its purpose is not always to smear – the German Chancellor was using it to predict. But whatever their uses, dispositions are very blunt instruments of explanation. Why did Chamberlain’s ‘disposition to change his mind frequently’ overcome, on this occasion, his dispositions to clever political calculation, to imperialism, to social reform, to popular rapport? How do we know whether he changed his mind (according to one disposition) or merely his tactics (according to some other disposition)? An act can seldom be identified as an instance of a habit, of a class of acts, without some understanding of its thought and its context; and even if it could, habits would still mislead. Except for Ensor’s, the foregoing notes of Chamberlain’s disposition stuck to the facts: to habits of action. From that behaviorist form they drew one deceiving bias. He was a skilful man, who generally tried only what he could accomplish; but from his record we all too easily infer that what he tried for was all he wanted, and that what he wanted, he usually got. His habitual acceptance of frustration, noticed by Ensor, is an equally important part of his history; but it cannot even be known, without an understanding of his thoughts. Perhaps, for the dispositional explanation which sets acts into patterns of habit, we should try to substitute an understanding explanation which sets understood acts into character: into patterns of thought and feeling and personality, as well as patterns of action.

3. Character

The delineation of character must depend on a selective interest, in history as in art. Chamberlain’s change of mind could be related to a dozen aspects of his persona...