Henry Jones Ford: The Political Science of Forecasting

Extract

Henry Jones Ford published The Rise and Growth of American Politics in 1898, and in it he looked back into the eighteenth century to find meaning in the developments of the nineteenth and provide material for his forecasts of the twentieth. So, too, do we look back for meaning in our own era, and use what we find to forecast about things to come. It is worthwhile, then, to reexamine the final section of Ford's work, “Tendencies and Prospects of American Politics,” because doing so helps us to understand the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting political scientists who forecast.

Ford began his prophesying venture with the bold statement that there are no new ideas. In America, he claimed, we seem to be bound by the Whig theory of governance: with us, it is all separation of powers and checks and balances. We tinker with them, and we bind the constitutional fabric ever tighter to prevent abuses of power by vile politicos. “The belief that the Constitution could be tinkered into some sort of mechanical excellence” hampered British thinkers and ours as well (1898, 355). In the late eighteenth century, the British concentrated on institutional reforms, but nothing could help, because men entered politics in order to gain wealth and position.