Abstract
For this article, I ask the question ‘Where is the behavioural revolution?’ My aim is to illuminate the discursive evolution of the behavioural revolution in American political science through a ‘non-rhetorical’ history of the behavioural revolution. I examine the way the analytic construct of the behavioural revolution evolved in the discourse of the discipline over time. I begin with an illustrative example drawn from contemporary reference material and then turn to an analysis of the writing of behaviouralists authors in the 1950s and early 1960s: Robert Dahl, Heinz Eulau, and David Easton. I then discuss the emergence of the behavioural revolution in the discourse of the discipline more generally and contrast a proponent of behaviouralism with a critic. I end the article with a discussion of the way that contemporary disciplinary historians understand the behavioural revolution. While the importance of the concept of the behavioural revolution is shown to be ongoing, the origin of the conventional use of ‘the behavioural revolution’ is traced to the late 1960s.
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Notes
For a detailed discussion of early ‘founders’ in American political science, see Crick’s (1959) The American Science of Politics: Its Origins and Conditions. Crick gives extended attention to A.F. Bentley, Charles Merriam, and Harold Lasswell.
Dahl’s paper was originally presented at the 5th World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Paris, 26 September 1961 (Dahl, 1961: 763).
As Somit and Tanenhaus (1967: 183) point out, the term ‘behaviourism’ was commonly used before the 1960s when the term ‘behaviouralism’ came to be the predominate usage (see also Easton, 1985: 137).
Curiously, Dahl cites Easton’s (1953) The Political System as evidence that the term has been in use since WWI. I say curious, since an earlier citation would seem more appropriate. Later, Dahl also gives credit to Frank Kent, an American journalist who published Political Behavior in 1928 and to Tingsten’s (1937) Political Behavior (see also Farr, 1995 on Dahl’s, 1961 article).
I discuss another important article by Truman below.
Which is not to say that Eulau withholds from criticizing traditional political theory along the same lines pursued by Dahl and Easton. According to Eulau (1963), ‘much traditional political inquiry has been purely formal in the sense that is was limited to the observation of patterns and took the meaning content of behavioural for granted. Political institutions or constitutions were described and their formal similarities and differences were noted, but what these patterns meant to the people involved was not investigated. Rather meanings were ascribed, usually on the basis of the observer’s cultural understandings’ (69).
In Chapter 5, Eulau discusses some ‘behavioural dilemmas’. Eulau (1963) begins by noting that ‘the behavioral persuasion in politics is difficult to live by. Behavioural practitioners make exacting scientific demands on themselves’ (110). This persuasion is difficult to live by since it ‘aspires to the status of science’ and since Eulau (1963) ‘takes it for granted that a science of politics is both possible and desirable, and I shall start from there’ (111).
Recall that Dahl cited Truman’s earlier 1951 article. Truman (1951) is a book chapter that appears in Research Frontiers in Politics and Government, which was produced for the Brookings Institution. Other notable behaviouralists who have chapters in this book are Herbert Simon, Robert Dahl, and Alfred de Grazia.
There seems to be somewhat of a consensus around the idea that the behavioural ‘revolution’ was hardly a scientific revolution as described by Kuhn (1962) (see, e.g., Eulau’s, 1991 APSA oral history; Farr, 1995; Gunnell, 2004; Dryzek, 2006).
Easton (1965: xiii) acknowledges Dennis in his preface as one of many graduate students who helped in some way to contribute to the book.
Judging from Easton’s remarks in 1985, his efforts were an overwhelming success. In his ‘Political Science in the United States: Past and Present’, Easton (1985)says of the behavioural period that ‘if there was any single comprehensive description of the subject matter of political science it was to be found in the notion that it studied the authoritative allocation of values for society. This was the conception that I had put forward in my book, The Political System, in 1953, and it had found widespread acceptance’ (144). For more on the success of empirical theory, see Monroe (1997).
Easton also mentions the influence of the Ford Foundation (established in 1936) as a factor in the name change from social to behavioural science. On foundation influence and the rise of behaviouralism, see Hauptmann (2006, 2012).
On Easton’s efforts to establish a general form of empirical theory, see Adcock (2007) and Gunnell (2013b).
For another treatment of Easton’s impact on the behavioural revolution, see Adcock (2014).
For Easton ‘empirical’ theory is tantamount to ‘behavioural’ theory. The ancient desire to understand the nature and origin of ‘political systems’ or regime types ‘expanded after World War II to become empirically oriented, or behavioural, theory’ (Easton, 1968: 293).
In my reading the alternating usage of the quotation marks indicates that political scientists are not yet convinced that the phrase is wholly unproblematic and ready for use without the qualification.
This unqualified use is particularly remarkable given that just a year later Easton would declare the end of the ‘behavioural revolution’ and the beginning of the ‘post-behavioural revolution’ (see Easton’s, 1969 APSA presidential address ‘The New Revolution in Political Science’).
Of course, not all political scientists started doing behavioural research. According to Farr (2003: 322), ‘numerically, nonbehavioralists represented the majority of practicing political scientists and theorists’.
Wolin (1969) characterizes the crisis in the ‘tradition of political theory’ in the following terms: ‘there is a widely shared belief that the tradition was largely unscientific where it was not antiscientific and that the defining characteristic of a scientific revolution is to break with the past’ (1068). On ‘traditional’ political theory, see also Hauptmann’s (2005) ‘Defining “Theory” in Postwar Political Science’. For a critique of the idea of a long tradition of political thought, see Gunnell (1978, 1986).
The vocation of the traditional or epic political theorist is characterized by Wolin (1969) in the following terms: ‘Here lies the vocation of those who preserve our understanding of past theories, who sharpen our sense of the subtle, complex interplay between political experience and thought, and who preserve our memory of the agonizing efforts of intellect to restate the possibilities and threats posed by political dilemmas of the past’ (1077).
There is no space here to dive deeply into these epic issues and I have dealt with them in more detail elsewhere (Berkenpas, 2009).
According to Easton (1969: 1059) our ‘discipline refers to our intellectual enterprise; our profession to the trained and expert scholars who participate in the discipline’ (cf. Gunnell, 2006).
For an analogous sceptical treatment of the behavioural movement in political science, see Adcock (2007) ‘Interpreting Behavioralism’.
On the relationship between disciplinary history and professional identity, see Dryzek and Leonard (1988).
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Acknowledgements
A version of this article was presented at the 2012 Western Political Science Association meeting in Portland, OR. The author would like to thank the other members of the panel ‘Public Knowledge: Historical Perspectives on the Discipline and its Publics’ for their kindness and feedback – John G. Gunnell (Chair and Discussant), Ido Oren, Stephan T. Leonard and Joshua Anderson. The author also thanks his long-time adviser at Western Michigan University, Emily Hauptmann, who read and commented on the article in its early stages.
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berkenpas, j. ‘the behavioural revolution’? a genealogy of a concept. Eur Polit Sci 15, 233–250 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.110
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2015.110