I have long been sceptical of the notion that politics can be or is a science in the sense that physics is a science. I realise, of course, as a historian and as a historian of higher education that like departments and faculties of Sociology departments or faculties of Politics or Political Science, departments and faculties established at the turn of the 19th century in the West (academic bureaucracies), imbibed deeply at the hip wells of quantitative analysis before World War II and behaviourism after World War II. I also realise that these cultural impulses had the aura of scientific analysis, a plus in the scramble of universities for government monies in the Cold War world.
At the same time I also recognise that the more putatively descriptive conceptions and practises of Political Science are not the only ones that have been present in Political Science departments and faculties over the years. There has also been another prominent cultural strain within departments and faculties of Political Science—political science as the “theological" study of political ideas and ideologies within academic bureaucracies—the normative.
This division between the descriptive and the normative was brought home to me again when I taught Sociology part-time at SUNY Oneonta. At the time Sociology and Political Science were united into one Department at the College. They no longer are. At the beginning of one school term—which one I don’t recall—I met a new faculty member in Political Science. We briefly bonded due to the fact that both of us had ties to the late Indiana University, me as an undergraduate student, him as a postgraduate student in Indiana’s summer Russian language programme.
This bond, as I hinted, did not last long. I recall that at the beginning of term in the second year he taught in the Department I mentioned to him, upon arriving back on campus, that I had just finished reading David Priestland’s excellent book on the history of global communism. I thought he, as a Political Scientist, would be interested in the book and we could converse on it. I was wrong. He looked at me quizzically and asked me why anyone would want to read a book on communism, which to him was apparently a dinosaur best laid to rest (I, by the way, suspect communism and other countercultural political theories and practises will be around as long as their are inequalities on some scale). I was taken aback: a political scientist who was not interested in the history of politics? But then I realised what his normative response to a book on the history of communism told me. It told me that for normative focused political scientists, or at least this normative oriented political scientist, communism was dead, should be dead, and that some variation of liberalism, in his case, was the best of all possible “democratic" worlds.
Normative political scientists of all political and ideological persuasions engage in intellectual work or labour that might be called applied or practical political science. Some might even call those who do such work demagogues. The work of these applied political scientists—some might refer to it as a form of social engineering—is generally ignored or limited in application to real world political issues if it is applied. Occasionally social engineering intellectuals do come to power, such as, for example, when theocrats dominated Europe Catholic and Orthodox and when they came to power in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. Neither instance of intellectuals in power is, at least for me, a good advertisement for applied political science.
Anyway getting back to the best of all possible “democratic” worlds, leaving aside the issue of whether any Western nation (or any nation for that matter) is truly democratic (none, even Iceland, are) I must admit that I do get a kind of pleasure, a pleasure some may find perverse, from watching normative political scientists squirm. Normative political scientists of whatever ideological persuasion seem to regard themselves as the vanguard of a movement toward some utopian radiant future. Parenthetically and paradoxically, the communist intellectual elite saw themselves as just such a vanguard as well. And this, the notion that they are a vanguard and that history is moving in a more “enlightened” direction, causes all sorts of problems for them and that is kind of funny in a farcical and satirical sort of way.
I no longer teach so I really don’t know what is going on in Political Science departments and faculties these days but I can hazard an educated guess. I suspect that many if not all of these liberal political scientists are now pulling their hair, wringing their hands, furrowing their brows, and perhaps even shaking the dust off their feat at the success of the populist know nothing right in “democratic” elections in the United States and beyond. I also suspect that they are engaged in all sorts of uncomfortable perorations in order to try to salvage their belief that “democracy”, faux oligarchic “democracy", is the best of all possible worlds even after it has given us successful right wing populist fascist parties just as it did before World War II. Of course, they too can question, just as they have before, whether this is “true” democracy, a phrase that raises once again the issues of vanguardism and the role ideology plays in the social and cultural construction of such a vanguard. History, it seems, ever repeats.
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