James Farr

Social Capital A Conceptual History

Taking its departure from current debates over social capital, this article presents new textual findings in a backward-revealing conceptual history. In particular, it analyzes the texts and contexts of Lyda J. Hanifan who was rediscovered by Robert Putnam as having (allegedly first) used the term; it offers discoveries of earlier uses of the term and concept—most notably by John Dewey—thereby introducing critical pragmatism as another tradition of social capital; and it recovers features of the critique of political economy in the nineteenth century—from Bellamy to Marshall to Sidgwick to Marx—that assessed “capital from the social point of view, ” especially cooperative associations. While it ends with Marx’s use of “social capital, ” Dewey is its central figure. The article concludes by returning to the present and offering work, sympathy, civic education, and a critical stance as emergent themes from this conceptual history that might enrich current debates.

The Policy Scientist of Democracy: The Discipline of Harold D. Lasswell

The “policy scientist of democracy” was a model for engaged scholarship invented and embodied by Harold D. Lasswell. This disciplinary persona emerged in Lasswells writings and wartime consultancies during the 1940s, well before he announced in his APSA presidential address, printed in the Review precisely 50 years ago, that political science was “the policy science par excellence.” The policy scientist of democracy knew all about the process of elite decision making, and he put his knowledge into practice by advising those in power, sharing in important decisions, and furthering the cause of dignity. Although Lasswell formulated this ambitious vision near the zenith of his influence, the discipline accorded the ideal—and Lasswell—a mixed reception. Some heralded the policy scientist of democracy; others observed a contradictory figure, at once positivist and value-laden, elitist and democratic, heroic and implausible. The conflicted response exemplifies Lasswells legacy. The policy scientist of democracy was—and is—too demanding and too contradictory a hero. But the vital questions Lasswell grappled with still must be asked a century into the disciplines development: what is the role of the political scientist in a democratic society? Do political scientists have any obligation to inform or shape policy? Are there democratic values that political science should serve, and if so, what are they? Lasswell never satisfactorily answered these questions. But in asking and trying to answer them—in his writings and in his own career—he was guided by a profound and inspiring conviction: Political science has a unique ability, and even perhaps a special obligation, to engage with issues of democratic choice that fundamentally affect the life circumstances of citizens.

Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions

Editors introduction 1. The declination of the state and the origins of American pluralism John G. Gunnell 2. An ambivalent alliance: political science and American democracy Terence Ball 3. The pedagogical purposes of a political science Stephen T. Leonard 4. Public opinion in modern political science J. A. W. Gunn 5. Disciplining Darwin: biology in the history of political science John S. Dryzek and David Schlosberg 6. Race and political science: the dual traditions of race relations politics and African-American politics Hanes Walton, Jr., Cheryl M. Miller, and Joseph P. McCormick, II 7. Realism in international relations Jack Donnelly 8. Remembering the revolution: behavioralism in American political science James Farr 9. Policy analysis and public life: the restoration of phronesis? Douglas Torgerson 10. The development of the spatial theory of elections John Ferejohn 11. Studying institutions: some lessons from the rational choice approach Kenneth A. Shepsle 12. Order and time in institutional study: a brief for the historical approach Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek Bibliography.

Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery:

This essay systematically reformulates an earlier argument about Locke and new world slavery, adding attention to Indians, natural law, and Lockes reception. Locke followed Grotian natural law in constructing a just-war theory of slavery. Unlike Grotius, though, he severely restricted the theory, making it inapplicable to America. It only fit resistance to “absolute power” in Stuart England. Locke was nonetheless an agent of British colonialism who issued instructions governing slavery. Yet they do not inform his theory—or vice versa. This creates hermeneutical problems and raises charges of racism. If Locke deserves the epithet “racist,” it is not for his having a racial doctrine justifying slavery. None of this makes for a flattering portrait. Lockes reputation as the champion of liberty would not survive the contradictions in which new world slavery ensnared him. Evidence for this may be found in Lockes reception, including by Southern apologists for slavery.

Popper’s Hermeneutics

Sir Karl Popper’s critics repeatedly indict him for being what he professes not to be: a positivist. ’This is an old misunderstanding’, he tells us, ’... which is neither honest nor apt to clarify matters’ (PDGS, pp. 290, 299).1 To bury this old misunderstanding, Popper even boasts of having ’killed positivism’ (UQ, p. 88). But if positivism is dead, much of contemporary social science suggests that there is indeed life after death. The central tenets of positivism still animate the self-understanding of many behavioural social scientists; and, dead or alive, positivism still incurs the wrath of critical theorists and ethnomethodologists. Fixated on his arguments for deductive explanation and the unity of science, Popper is dragged into this fray.2 And so his protests continue to fall on the deaf ears of both camps.

Situational Analysis: Explanation in Political Science

This essay forwards situational analysis as the model of explanation most appropriate for an adequate reflective understanding of political science. It keeps centermost our concerns with intentionality, rationality, contextuality, and meaning. It promises to be as general a model of explanation as we can expect because it forges an underlying unity amongst diverse explanatory practices, including substantive models, law-like generalizations, idiographic explanations, and textual interpretations. After a development of situational analysis roughly along Popperian lines, three different sorts of explanations in political science are surveyed in light of it. Its limits are explored, and a brief agenda for further methodological reflection is suggested.

Can Political Science History Be Neutral

In the December 1988 issue of this Review, John Dryzek and Stephen Leonard argued the need for “context-sensitive” histories of the discipline of political science. In their view, disciplinary history must guide practical inquiry if it is to be most useful. The course of their argument draws the criticisms of three political scientists concerned about the history of political science—James Farr, John Gunnell, and Raymond Seidelman. Dryzek and Leonard respond to their critics and underscore their own rationale for enhanced interest in the history of the discipline.

The Pure and Disciplined Body: Hierarchy, Morality, and Symbolism in France during the Catholic Reformation

The Pure and Disciplined Body: Hierarchy, Morality, and Symbolism in France During the Catholic Reformation To many French men, lay as well as clerical, the Catholic Reformation (I550-I730) was a religious process with profound political and societal stakes, and their moralistic writings cut a broad swath through the literature of early modern France. Writers as disparate as Jean Bodin and St. JeanBaptiste de LaSalle, for instance, drew from a discourse of sexuality in which the lexicon of purity, discipline, and hierarchy found prominent expression. Concepts such as purity, discipline, and hierarchy suggest a concern for boundary marking and boundary transgression. Douglas notes that

Humean Explanations in the Moral Sciences

There is an essential tension in Humes account of explanation in the moral sciences. He holds the familiar (though problematic) view that explanations of action are causal explanations backed by the laws of human nature. But he also tenders a rational and historical model of explanation which has been neglected in Hume studies. Developed primarily in the Essays and put into practice in the History of England, this model holds that explanations in the moral sciences cite agents’ reasons for acting in definite historical situations. Such explanations are context‐dependent, social (not psychological) in content, essentially post hoc, and provide insufficient grounds for prediction. The tension between Humes two models is considerable, not to say inconsistent. We would best understand him as trying to reconcile the two. Each provides different and equally important kinds of intelligibility. Until this is appreciated, the one‐sided interpretation of Hume as a psychological reductionist and a covering‐law the...

Marx No Empiricist

Marx never wrote a sustained treatise on scientific method; no Logic of Scientific Discovery, no Metliodology of the Social Sciences, no Rules of Sociological Method. He dashed off only two texts partially related to the topic, neither of which he polished nor published. One was an incomplete and premature introduction to his economic studies written in 1857; the other a very rough set of notes on Adolph Wagner written in 1879 and 1880 a few years before his death.’ When these twin texts are exhausted, interpreters of Marx’s view of scientific method must piece together paragraphs, sentences, asides, even complaints about ‘the twaddle about “science” ’.* Marx’s failure to write directly ora t length about scientific method has proved to be an unhappy omission given the importance attached to Marx’s own method. Georg Lukics, for example, declared that Marxist ‘orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’.3 Never has orthodoxy been so elusive, so open to dispute, so unsure about its articles of faith. In what is shaping up to be a perennial dispute, Marx has been hailed or condemned as a dialectical materialist, a positivist, a pragmatist, a realist, a humanist, a structuralist, a functionalist, a critical theorist, This chorus of dispute has recently been joined by Richard Hudelson in the pages of this journal..‘ His claim, not an entirely new one, is that Marx was an empirici~t.~ Hudelson argues on two fronts: (1) against the ‘widely held‘ view to the contrary, that Marx was in fact committed to at least five tenets ofcontemporaw empiricist philosophy of science; and (2) against Althusser, that Marx, both young and old, was ‘consistently empiricist’ (p. 241).s In this brief essay I want to argue against the first of Hudelson’s claims. While in conclusion I intimate that Marx is better understood either as a realist oracritical theorist, my primary