Chapter 1: The Order of Politicality
In perceptual terms, the concept of the political has no precise, corporate image. Certainly, there are objective phenomena which we identify with the political because of association, but they are aspects or elements of it rather than its actual nature. Figures and institutionsâpresidents, congresses, bureaucracies, parties, armiesâcan be recognized as being of the nexus of the political, but they are by no means identical with it. These are not the substance of the political but its phenomenology: the objects which express the presence and influence of the political.
Yet the political seems to have as a characteristic the quality of arranging the relationship of things and of people within some form of society. It is an ordering principle, distinguishing the lawful or authorized order of things while itself being the origin of the regulation. We associate, then, the political with power, authority, order, law, the state, force, and violenceâall of these are phenomena which restrict the outcome, deflect the extraneous, limit the relevant forces. We speak of the political both as an instrument for ordering society and that order itself. It is both a general way of acting on things and the consequences which follows having acted upon things.
But further, as consequence, the political presupposes the possibility of continued action:
The political is always there, it would seem, absorbing and being itself absorbed, penetrating and being penetrated. It is a stratagem of behavior directed toward a certain consequence, an act founded on specific sociological presumptions, a pattern of role-interactions selectively scattering the existence of human beings by some estranged, arbitrary definition of the positivity. It is an active definition of the situation.
Yet there is no doubt that the political is a phenomenon of force and thus of significance. But what exactly is the nature of that force? What forms, what substances do its regularities assume? Where are they to be sought, how are they to be found?
If one were to reach toward the materials of contemporary political science in hopes of identifying that very force, one might withdraw with the secure insight that the force is in essence the phenomenon of governing and that political science was the record of the art, science, and/or failure of governing. Governing justly, unjustly, singly or by elite, âdemocraticallyâ or dictatorially, momentarily or for imperial durations, consensually or by force,2 wisely or wrongly, but nevertheless, governing.
But there could be seen, too, a more particular preoccupation evidenced by the science. One could come to the understanding that governing is realized through elements consisting of boundaries, rulers, administrations, decision-making apparatus, formal and informal parties, patterned negotiations, interest conflicts, executing, legitimating institutions, all mitigated by crises, creeds, ideologies, public opinion, conditioned and modeled responses, primary and idiosyncratic as well as quite literally the enigmatic and the extraordinary. Yet governing still. And governing, in turn, could be defined as the rule of some specified community by some form of authority. At a not much higher level of abstraction and distillation, our ambitious nominalist might subsequently decide that what he was discovering in the political was the habits, forms, histories, and characters of authority.
Such would surely be the mean result of a behavioral analysis of the field of contemporary American political science. With respectful consideration given to the antiquity and sociology of Aristotelian thought, our researcher would find that this science would present to him a âparadigmâ quite clearly the consummation of Aristotleâs declarations on political philosophy and artifact. Man is thus intended by nature to be a part of a political whole, and there is, therefore, an immanent impulse in all men toward an association of this order. âBut the man who first constructed such an association was none the less the greatest of benefactors.â3
But be certain, the question here of the meaning of the political is not one of antiquity or parentage, but one of relevance. It is not so much a question as to whether the foundations of modern political science can be discovered in the work of Aristotle as it is a question of whether modern political science consciously addresses the political. Sheldon Wolinâs assessment appears appropriate:
And so one would be led, finally, to the conclusion that one cannot resolve the question of the nature of the political by the process of distilling it from a science of politics. For, at some point, one would have to confront the science of politics in its epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological terms. That is, those terms themselves which would suggest that the first order of inquiry would be some close explication of the philosophy of science, since it is there that the relationship between epistemology, metaphysics, and methodology is assigned.
Two major contemporary voices in the fields of the history and philosophy of science are those of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.5 Regardless of their attempts to argue otherwise,6 it appears certain that what each describes as the true nature and essential processes of knowledge growth in the sciences are at odds, representing fundamentally different and opposing schema.
Popperâs thesis is closer to the folklore of science, postulating a systematic, deliberate, and conscious process for the development of larger inventories of knowledge proceeding through the construction of falsifiable hypotheses and their confrontation with empirical reality: âWe invent our myths and our theories and we try them out.â7 Popperian science is then most clearly identifiable with speculative philosophyâconjecture and refutation:
Popper thus argues for the rational man who imposes procedurally his ethic of rationality onto the very character of discovery in the larger adventure of making human experience rational. And ârationalâ presupposes, imposes in fact, a self-consistency, an internal coherence.9
Kuhn, on the other hand, has read the history of science quite differently and proposes that in the sequence of creative thought, Popperâs perception is that of only a single episode in the sequence. He argues that science proceeds in its development of fundamental insight through the replacement of one paradigm by another, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy being replaced by Copernican astronomy. Paradigms are discarded for several reasons: awkwardness (the computational correction of Ptolemaic theory had proliferated by necessity into unmanageability); impatience (Copernicus presented to his colleagues a system which could explain little, if any, more than its predecessor, yet it was simpler, and the other had been given a fair amount of time to prove itself); anomalies (in a different episode, an experimenter unexpectedly released a gas which would later be known as oxygenâto a follower of the phlogiston theory, the gas was an unacceptable result); and multiplicity of competitive theories.
It is during periods of crises, in the transitional periodsâand more specifically when competitors have been severely reduced in number, most importantly to oneâthat âextraordinary scienceâ (Kuhnâs phrase) occurs. âExtraordinary scienceâ is a testing, challenging procedure which is identical in its significant aspects to Popperâs version and generalization. Once the crisis is resolved by the selection of the new paradigm, Popperian, extraordinary science ends and ânormal scienceâ (again Kuhn) or âpuzzle-solvingâ begins. The creative moment is over and scientists now get down to the proliferation of games, techniques, and instrument-designs which will be used to confirm their paradigm-induced presumptions.
âNormal scienceâ is thus in large measure the actualization of tautology. Full sequences of inquiry and responses have been proscribed while other sequences have become prescribed. One knows what to ask of oneâs data and how to produce that data because one knows âinstinctivelyâ the boundaries and the range of correct and acceptable answers.
Kuhnâs paradigms thus represent several levels of actualization. They are metaphysical: sets of beliefs; sociological: universally recognized scientific achievement; and artifacts: tools, instruments and analogies.10 They thus relate closely to Polanyiâs âjustification of personal knowledgeâ (which are the commitments and responsibility for making certain choices and assertions the foundation of meaning and understanding), and Louchâs âwarrantâ and âentitlementâ in his refutation of the predilection for generalization as explanation and his assertion of the truer authority of ad hoc explanation.11
Kuhn thus rests to some extent in the tradition of Wittgensteinian and Cartesian linguistics while Popper is more identifiable with some âobjectivistsâ who posit a Kantian philosophical development. It is of less significance for the purposes of this essay that Kuhn would now prefer to refer to his sociological paradigms as âdisciplinary matricesâ and his metaphysical and artifactual paradigms as âexemplarsâ than that his insistent declaration is that he is attempting to describe the critical force of values in the choice of theory, explanation, meaning, and logic in science:
Additionally, Kuhnâs use of revolution as a metaphor of the change of paradigms signals the assumption of the panoply of constructs with which most political analysts are quite familiar: conservative-radical factions, alienation, resistance, violence, waste, and a certain sequence of the dynamic of change (e.g., from disequilibrium to equilibrium). It represents, too, a âproofâ of his thesis that scientific explanation is often profoundly affected by historical phenomena presumed external to it, for certainly the imagery of revolution has displaced evolution as the dominant impression of change in Western experience. To the contrary, the Popperian interpretation is fundamentally that of an evolutionist.13 Again, according to Kuhn, we would anticipate evolution being the character of the mode of analysis to which Kuhnâs work is negation. The analyses of Kuhn and Popper are thus related dialectically and historically.
That both Popper and Kuhn continue to assert that the criteria of change in the scientistâs construction of rationality are accuracy, simplicity, scope, and fruitfulness seems more to demonstrate the irony of the formal convergence of paradox than to be a display of the former âtruismâ that âall roads lead to Rome.â However, if Kuhnâs reconstruction is to be chosen over Popperâs, there first needs to be the declaration of a formal qualification that perhaps the choice signifies that Kuhn is an apostle of this time, with its biases, bold impressions, and hysterias in its attempt to make change recognizable.
Yet within the confines of a consideration of political science, other reasons for the choice also seem powerfully convincing. These reasons can be articulated through a simple demonstration. This demonstration has to do with the role played by the concept âpowerâ in political science. If we assume for the moment Popperâs prescriptive history of science, for the science of politics, do we findâas we would be led to anticipate by Popperâtheories of power which take the form of falsifiability (e.g., the presumption of an organizing principle within human groups alternative to power which would obviate the puzzle-solving business of political scientists)? We, of course, do not discover the latter, but find instead that power as a conceptual tool corresponds most closely to the âbackground knowledgeâ of the âmethodological falsificationistsâ (see note 6), and remains an âunquestionableâ basic statement among political scientists.
Even given power as a natural phenomenon of human society, is the âconjectureâ that it is a causative of order posed so that it might be refuted or is the presumed concomitance between order and power so thorough in the investigations of political analysts that it functions as an identity and consequently might be suspended from critical consideration? Once more, there is no refutation possible since we are told again and again that order in human society cannot be obtained without the presence and subsequent use of power.14 But perhaps we should draw Popperâs attention to a more concrete problem in American political science. How is it that in the celebration of democracy as the institutionalization of Just power that Western political science seems to have become, is there never the slightest suggestion of the absurdity of identifying this construct with the reality of mass societies as they exist in North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere? Let us pursue this example in some detail.
Democracy and the Political Paradigm
Robert Dahlâs work is an interesting instance of the metaphysical paradigm of powerâs inevitable relation to order. In an historical essay, he argues that the American civil war is of interest to âstudents of politicsâ because it is a dramatization of the nature, failure, and success of the American political system:
One paragraph later, he appears to identify political systems with the nature of civilization, âbecause some problems have recurred ever since civilized men have tried to live together, ever...