Every voice of dissent adds to unity

Fifty years ago, when 100 academics gathered in Oxford to discuss the formation of a professional association for the study of politics, the issue that caused the most heated debate was the name. In the United States, there had long been a discipline known as political science, and the Webbs had called the LSE "the London School of Economics and Political Science". But many of the delegates, especially from Oxford, strongly opposed the term science as inappropriate for the new discipline. Oxford prevailed and the association became known as the Political Studies Association, or the PSA. The argument has gone on ever since and it is a central theme of both these collections. The editors of Political Studies , the main journal of the PSA, have selected key articles from the past 50 years of the journal, but defiantly label their collection British Political Science, despite including articles by G. D. H. Cole and Michael Oakeshott, two of the original opponents of the term. The editors of the British Academy centenary monograph on politics prefer The British Study of Politics , but their contributors, who include Vernon Bogdanor, Christopher Hood, William Miller and Geoffrey Marshall, line up on both sides of the argument. Both collections are a rich source for reflecting on how the discipline has evolved, what it is and where it is going.

For Brian Barry, in his thought-provoking contribution to The British Study of Politics , "Politics as a vocation", the term political studies was accurate in 1950 because the discipline was not unified around a single method. Instead, there was "a multiplicity of unrelated intellectual endeavours" that used a variety of methods, drawn from many different disciplines. No special training was thought necessary to teach the subject; few teachers of politics in the first 20 years of the PSA had graduated in politics, and even fewer had PhDs; there were very few specialist politics journals, and publication, where it existed, was oriented primarily towards books rather than journals. The British study of politics at that time, unlike disciplines such as economics, had no sense of being a cumulative "scientific" enterprise, and many politics academics spent much of their time talking to practitioners and trying to address political issues of wider public interest, rather than issues generated by academics for academics, discussed in ways that made them for the most part inaccessible to outsiders.

Barry has long argued that British political studies should adopt the norms and methods of American political science, but he admits that progress is patchy and much less certain than many enthusiasts would like. Many of the signs of professionalisation are present, including the much larger number of politics academics - the combined total of the membership of the PSA and the British International Studies Association is almost 2,000 - the PhD has become a basic requirement for appointment, and specialist journals are proliferating. But, there is still great resistance in Britain to the idea of politics as a science if that involves the acceptance of a single core of concepts, theories and methods. The discipline still appears more fragmented than unified. There is a small and vociferous lobby that would like to change this but, as Barry points out, were this to happen, many topics and approaches that are currently studied would need to be dropped, in the same way that economics abandoned economic history and comparative economic institutions because these did not fit the dominant methodology around which the discipline had chosen to cohere. Ultimately, these are not simply intellectual questions but questions of power, something about which political scientists should know - the attempt to define the discipline in such a way that other approaches are excluded, which affects who gets published, who gets appointed and who gets promoted.

At the heart of this issue is the question of what the academic study of politics is for and who it is for. Those committed to the project of political science believe that the subject progresses only if academics write mainly for one another, refining their concepts and their methods and creating knowledge that over time is cumulative. Barry quotes Gabriel Almond's recent comment: "Michael Walzer has a better grasp of the concept of justice than Plato, and Robert Dahl gives us a better theory of democracy than did Aristotle." Almond's reason is that Plato and Aristotle knew much less than Walzer and Dahl because their observations were drawn from such a few city states, and their typologies were unformed and often inconsistent. In a "political science" view of the subject, their work has been superseded.

The alternative view places the subject before the methodology. The study of politics is eclectic because it draws on different disciplines - philosophy, history, economics, law and sociology. The choice is dictated by what is most appropriate to understand the subject matter. Such a study is necessarily pluralist and fragmented rather than unified around a single methodological or theoretical core. But although there have been important traditions in the British study of politics, as Paul Kelly demonstrates in his chapter on political theory, dominance even of major intellectual figures such as Berlin and Michael Oakeshott, has tended to be shortlived. Rather, within each field, whether international relations, political theory, public policy or political behaviour, there has been a number of influential and often conflicting approaches. Within each of these approaches, researchers try to develop fresh insights through critical reflection on existing assumptions and knowledge. But the grander claim of some of the advocates of political science is that there is a master method that allows us to judge that one approach is "scientifically" superior, permitting the inferior approach to be discarded.

The project of a political science in Britain is nothing new, as Jack Hayward points out in his introduction to The British Study of Politics . It can be traced back to Bentham's science of legislation on deductive principles. Utilitarianism provided the roots from which economics emerged, and might have provided the same for politics. In more recent times, the project of political science has been carried forward first by behaviourism and more recently by rational choice (which many behaviourists including Almond now abominate). Rational choice revives the methodological stance of utilitarianism but, while it is a powerful tool and in the works of Anthony Downs and Mancur Olson has provided some important new metaphors about politics, the suggestion that rational-choice methods should supplant all others could be achieved only by a drastic reduction in the scope of political studies. As Barry notes, many questions would no longer be studied simply because rational-choice methods could not be applied to them, and therefore they would be deemed uninteresting, outside the boundaries of the discipline.

It is hard to know why anyone would want to inflict such an impoverishment on the study of politics. There was much in the old tradition of political studies in Britain that was undoubtedly amateurish and constricting, partly because of the small size of the profession. But both these collections demonstrate how far the discipline has come, and how much broader is the base of knowledge on which its current practitioners rely. The application of behavioural methods in electoral studies is one example. In 1900, there was little firm knowledge of what influenced the way people voted except for conjecture and anecdote. As Bill Miller notes, what we know about elections now that we did not know in 1900 is almost everything. Major advances are evident in many other fields as both these collections demonstrate, although the breadth of the discipline is more evident in The British Study of Politics than in British Political Science .

Does all this academic industry mean that we understand politics any better? If professionalisation of the discipline does indeed mean unification in the sense of the adoption of a common core of theory and method, then the risk is that we shall finish not with a new science but a new scholasticism, with inflexible dogmas that exclude most of the interesting questions that draw people to the study of politics in the first place. The driving force of such a scholasticism is the production of specialised technical knowledge by and for an inward-looking community of adepts.

The fate of economics is worth noting. By narrowing its theoretical focus, economics reduced the number of topics it could address, or thought worth addressing, and this choice was largely dictated by its methodology. There were those such as Joseph Schumpeter who continued to argue that economists needed a toolkit that included economic theory, statistics, economic history and economic sociology, but his was a lonely voice.

One of the greatest strengths of the British study of politics is that the discipline has always been broader than the profession. Some of the best work, whether on international relations, on public policy, or political economy, has been interdisciplinary, the result of scholars working across disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries. Good examples are the chapters on totalitarianism by Archie Brown and on nationalism by Charles King. Many of the contributors to the literature on nationalism, including Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, Anthony Smith, and Eric Hobsbawm were not members of the political science "profession", but they have enormously enriched the study of politics, and in that sense, contributed to the discipline as it has been understood in Britain.

The British study of politics has many weaknesses that these collections reveal all too clearly, but it also has strengths, the chief of which has been the refusal of most of those who work within it to narrow the discipline by identifying it with a single method. As King notes, the worth of political research in Britain has always been judged more by the importance of its conclusions than by the technical elegance of its methods. A focus on issues that matter and the acceptance of a pluralism both in theory and method are what gives politics its continuing vitality as an academic discipline.

Andrew Gamble is professor of politics, University of Sheffield.