Closing of the American Mind (57 page)

To look at social science first, it might seem that it at least has a general outline of its field and a possible systematic ordering of its parts, proceeding from psychology to economics to sociology to political science. Unfortunately there is nothing to this appearance. In the first place, it leaves out anthropology, although I suppose that if I were desperate to make a case I could find a way of squeezing it in; and it also leaves out history, about which there is dispute as to whether it belongs to social science or humanities. More important, these various social sciences do not see themselves in any such order of interdependence. Largely they work independently, and if they, to use that hopeless expression, “interface” at all, they frequently turn out to be two-faced. Within most of the specialties, about half of the practitioners usually do not believe the other half even belong among them, and something of the same situation prevails throughout the discipline as a whole. Economics has its own simple built-in psychology, and that provided by the science of psychology is either really part of biology, which does not help much, or flatly contradicts the primacy of the motives alleged by economics. Similarly, economics tends to undermine the normal interpretation of political events that political science would make. It is possible to have an economics-guided or -controlled political science, but it is not necessary; and it is equally possible to have a psychology-guided political science, which would not be the same as the former. It is as though there were a dispute among the various natural sciences about which is primary. Actually each of the social sciences can, and does, make a claim to be the beginning point in relation to which the others can be understood—economics arguing for the economy or the market, psychology for the individual psyche, sociology for society, anthropology for culture, and political science for the political order (although this latter is the least assertive about its claim).
The issue is what is the social science atom, and each specialty can argue that the others are properly parts of the whole that it represents. Moreover each can accuse the other of representing an abstraction, or a construct, or a figment of the imagination. Is there ever a pure market, one not part of a society or a culture that forms it? What is a culture or society? Are they ever more than aspects of some kind of political order? Here political science is in the strongest position, because the reality of states or nations is undeniable, although they can in turn be considered superficial or compound phenomena. The social sciences actually represent a series of different perspectives on the human world we see around us, a series that is not harmonious, because there is not even agreement as to what belongs to that world, let alone as to what kinds of causes would account for its phenomena.

A further source of dispute within social science concerns what is meant by science. All agree that it must be reasonable, have some standards of verification and be based on systematic research. Moreover, there is a more or less explicit agreement that the kinds of causes admitted within natural science should somehow apply within social science. This means no teleology and no “spiritual” causes. Pursuit of salvation would, for example, need to be reduced to another kind of cause, like repressed sexuality, whereas pursuit of money would not. Search for material causes and reduction of higher or more complex phenomena to lower or simpler ones are generally accepted procedures. But to what extent the example of the most successful of the modern natural sciences, mathematical physics, can or should be followed within social science is a matter of endless discussion and quarreling. Prediction is the hallmark of modern natural science, and practically every social scientist would like to be able to make reliable predictions, although practically none have. Prediction appears to have been made possible in natural science by reducing phenomena in such a way as to be amenable to expression in mathematical formulas, and most social scientists want the same thing to happen in their discipline. The issue is whether various efforts in that direction cause distortion of the social phenomena, or lead to the neglect of some that are not easily mathematized and the preference for others that are; or whether they encourage the construction of mathematical models that are figments of the imagination and have nothing to do with the real world. A kind of continuous guerrilla war goes on between those who are primarily
enthusiasts of science and those who are primarily attached to their particular subject matter.

Economics, held to be the most successful of the social sciences, is the most mathematized—both in the sense that its objects can be counted and that it can construct mathematical models for at least hypothetically predictive purposes. But some political scientists, for example, say that the Economic Man may be very nice for playing games with but that he is an abstraction who does not exist, while Hitler and Stalin are real and not to be played with. Economic analysis, they say, not only does not help us to understand such political actors but makes it more difficult to bring them within the purview of social science by systematically excluding or deforming their specific motives. Economists, seeking mathematical convenience, turn us away from the consideration of the most important social phenomena, assert the objectors (including the small, vociferous band of Marxist economists who are rigorously excluded from the core of the discipline, the only social science in which this has happened). So it goes between the various disciplines and within several of them where the adherents of the different approaches have no common universe of discourse.

Publicity aside, what students actually see today when they first encounter social science are two robust, self-sufficient, self-confident social sciences, economics and cultural anthropology, extremes forming the antipodes, having almost nothing to do with each other—while political science and sociology, quite heterogenous, not to say chaotic in their contents, are strung tensely between the two poles.
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It should not be surprising that these two disciplines are more explicit than are the other social sciences about their founders: Locke and Adam Smith, on the one hand, and Rousseau on the other. For these sciences have as their clear presuppositions one or the other of the two states of nature. Locke argued
that man's conquest of nature by his work is the only rational response to his original situation. Locke emancipated greed and showed the illusory character of the countervailing motives. Life, liberty and the pursuit of property are the fundamental natural rights, and the social contract is made to protect these rights. These principles agreed upon, economics comes into being as
the
science of man's proper activity, and the free market as the natural and rational order (a natural order unlike other recognized natural orders in that it requires establishment by men, and they, as economists are constantly telling us, almost always get it wrong). Economists have in general stuck to this, are in general old liberals of one kind or another and supporters of liberal democracy, as the place where the market exists. Rousseau argued that nature is good and man far away from it. So the quest for those faraway origins becomes imperative, and anthropology is by that very fact founded. Lévi-Strauss is unambiguous about this. Civilization, practically identical to the free market and its results, threatens happiness and dissolves community. From this follows immediately admiration for tight old cultures that channel and sublimate the economic motive and do not permit the emergence of the free market. What economists believe to be things of the irrational past—known only as underdeveloped societies
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—become the proper study of man, a diagnosis of our ills and a call to the future. Anthropologists have tended to be very open to many aspects of the Continental reflection, from culture on down, to which economists were completely closed (Nietzsche's influence was already evident more than fifty years ago in Ruth Benedict's distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian cultures); they have tended to the Left (because the extreme Right, equally viable in their system, had no roots here) and to be susceptible to infatuations with experiments tending to correct or replace liberal democracy. Economists teach that the market is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is money. Anthropologists teach that culture is the fundamental social phenomenon, and its culmination is the sacred.
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Such is
the confrontation—man the producer of consumption goods vs. man the producer of culture, the maximizing animal vs. the reverent one—between old philosophic teachings present here but not addressed. The disciplines simply inhabit different worlds. They can be of marginal use to one another, but not in a spirit of community. There are few economists who also think of themselves as anthropologists, and vice versa, although there are, for example, many political scientists and sociologists who cross one another's borders, as well as those of economics and anthropology. The economists are the ones most ready to jump the social science ship and go it on their own, and think themselves closer than the others to having achieved a real science. They also have substantial influence on public policy. The anthropologists have no such influence beyond the academic world but have the charms of depth and comprehensiveness, as well as the possession of the latest ideas.

A few words about political science and its peculiarities might help to clarify the problems of social science as a whole. To begin with, it is, along with economics, the only purely academic discipline that, like medicine, engages a fundamental passion and the study of which could be understood as undertaken in order to ensure its satisfaction. Political science involves the love of justice, the love of glory and the love of ruling. But unlike medicine and economics, which are quite frank about their relations to health and wealth, and even trumpet them, political science turns modestly away from such avowals and would even like to break off these unseemly relations. This has something to do with the fact that she is a very old lady indeed, who would prefer not to show her age. Political science goes all the way back to Greek antiquity and has the dubious parentage of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, all with bad reputations in the land of modern science. The other social sciences are of modern origin and part of the modern project, while political science persists, trying to modernize and get with it but unable entirely to control old instincts. Aristotle said that political science is the architectonic science, a ruling science, concerned with the comprehensive good or the best regime. But real science does not talk about good and bad, so that had to be abandoned. However, both medicine and economics really do talk about good and bad, so the abandonment of the old political goods had the effect only of leaving the moral field to health and wealth in the absence of the common good and justice. This accords with Locke's intention, which was
not at all “value-free,” but was to substitute lower but more solid, more easily attained goods for those that had been classically proposed. Political science's transformation into a modern social science did not further social science but did further the political intentions of modernity's founders. It has tried to reduce the specifically political motives into subpolitical ones, like those proposed in economics. Honor is not a real motive; gain is.

Of course Locke himself was still much more a political scientist than an economist, for the market (the peaceful competition for the acquisition of goods) requires the prior existence of the social contract (the agreement to abide by contracts and the establishment of a judge to arbitrate and enforce contracts) without which men are in a state of war. The market presupposes the existence of law and the absence of war. War was the condition of man prior to the existence of civil society, and the return to it is always possible. The force and fraud required to end war have nothing to do with the market and are illegitimate within it. The rational behavior of men at peace, in which economics specializes, is not the same as the rational behavior of men at war, as was so tellingly pointed out by Machiavelli. Political science is more comprehensive than economics because it studies both peace and war and their relations. The market cannot be the sole concern of the polity, for the market depends on the polity, and the establishment and preservation of the polity continuously requires reasonings and deeds which are “uneconomic” or “inefficient.” Political action must have primacy over economic action, no matter what the effect on the market. This is why economists have had so little reliable to say about foreign policy, for nations are in the primitive state of war with each other that individuals were in prior to the social contract—that is, they have no commonly recognized judge to whom they can turn to settle their disputes. The policy advice of some economists during the Vietnam war attempted to set up a kind of market between the United States and North Vietnam, with the United States making the cost of South Vietnam prohibitive to North Vietnam; but the North Vietnamese refused to play. Political science, as opposed to economics, must always contemplate war with its altogether different risks, horrors, thrills, and gravity. Churchill formulated the difference between a political perspective and a market perspective in commenting on Coolidge's refusal to forgive the British war debts in the twenties. Coolidge said, “They hired the money,
didn't they?” To which Churchill responded, “This is true, but not exhaustive.” Political science must be exhaustive and this makes it a sticky subject for those who want to reform it so as to accord with the abstract projects of science. Consciously or unconsciously, economics deals only with the bourgeois, the man motivated by fear of violent death. The warlike man is not within its ken. Political science remains the only social science discipline which looks war in the face.

Political science has always been the least attractive and the least impressive of the social sciences, spanning as it does old and new views of man and the human sciences. It has a polyglot character. Part of it has joined joyfully in the effort to dismantle the political order seen as a comprehensive order and to understand it as a result of subpolitical causes. Economics, psychology and sociology as well as all kinds of methodological diagnosticians have been welcome guests. But there are irrepressible, putatively unscientific parts of political science. The practitioners of these parts of the discipline are unable to overcome their unexplained and unexplainable political instincts—their awareness that politics is the authoritative arena of effective good and evil. They therefore engage in policy studies whose end, whether it is stated or not, is action. Defense of freedom, avoidance of war, the furthering of equality—various aspects of justice in action—are hot subjects of study. The good regime has to be the theme of such political scientists, if only undercover, and they are informed by the question “What is to be done?” And, in a real peripety, it turns out that the area of political science where mathematics has had the greatest success is elections, the most exciting and decisive part of democratic life, where public opinion turns into government and policy. The most scientific element of political science is one that makes its practitioners friends and allies of real politicians, enlightening them and learning from them. Science here parallels the greatest political thrills and has no need of changing the perceived nature of its object to study it scientifically.