No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Readers of Thomas H. Greene's article, “Values and the Methodology of Political Science,” may have detected a theme of importance to political philosophy, a theme which, however, the author did not explicitly identify. Greene divided his essay into five parts: the first, third, and fifth parts contain what I believe to be an argument in favour of the reconciliation of social science and political philosophy; the second and fourth parts are devoted, in some measure, to a criticism of two contemporary political philosophers, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Greene argues, in effect, that the reconciliation of political philosophy with social science will have taken place when political philosophy is understood within the categories of social science, specifically within “Robert Merton's categories of theoretical range” (p. 274). The truth of Greene's argument depends, in part at least, upon the correctness of his understanding of Voegelin and Strauss. Correlatively, his argument is vitiated to the extent that he has not understood what Voegelin and Strauss have written about politics and theory and why, on the basis of such writings, they object to social science. What the author does not consider, but which ought to be considered, is the possibility that if social scientists and political philosophers have little of creative import to say to each other, it may be for sound reasons.
1 Greene, Thomas H., “Values and the Methodology of Political Science,” this Journal, III, no. 2 (June 1970), 275–98.Google Scholar Page references will be found in parentheses in the text.
2 Merton's, Social Theory and Social Structure was first published in New York in 1949Google Scholar. The books by Voegelin and Strauss to which Greene refers, The New Science of Politics and Natural Right and History, were first published in Chicago in 1952 and 1953 respectively.
3 The New Science of Politics, 172.
4 More accurate accounts of Voegelin's work which rely on his major contribution to political philosophy, Order and History, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge, La., 1956–7) are Germino, Dante, Beyond Ideology (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, chap. 8, and Sebba, Gregor, “Order and Disorders of the Soul,” Southern Review, III (1967), 282–310.Google Scholar
5 The New Science of Politics, 120.
6 What is Political Philosophy? and other studies (New York, 1959), 11–12.
7 If politics, by the nature of the activity, raises the claim to be judged according to goodness or badness, justice or injustice, then sound judgment is impossible without true standards. If social science claims to seek true standards about politics then there is nothing left to reconcile between it and political philosophy.
8 The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York, 1961), 486 (quoted at p. 287 by Greene).
9 An example of such abstract application of concept is the “device” of “an hypothesized means-end construct” (p. 277) in which the value serves as a posited end. Two things must be said of such a “device.” First, it may say nothing about politics because it is “an hypothesized… construct,” which, exactly be-cause it is hypothetical and “constructed,” need not refer to politics but only to other hypothetical constructs and devices. Second, if we presuppose that by fiat (or definition) the hypothetical construction and devices do apply to politics, we must ask if the terms “means” and “end” are appropriate to the study of politics. An end is really something produced by means of something else; but once something is produced it can be used and in being used becomes a means. There is nothing inherent in the means-end category which prevents an end from becoming a means, which should suggest not the Kantian paradox of an end in itself but the inappropriateness of the category for the study of politics. See, for example, chap. 21 of Arendt's, HannahThe Human Condition (Chicago, 1958)Google Scholar, for further argument along these lines.