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Political science 171
4. It should be added (fourthly) (though this is to some extent implied in the
preceding paragraphs) that the progress made in the study of small groups, in
different settings and different societies, has also proved relevant to political
science. It is natural first to approach the politics of great States through the
study of great movements and of great social forces; but there has of late been
a re-discovery of the obvious truth that at the top of any political system,
however great, the decisive interactions are those of participants in a small faceto-face
group: for instance, on many occasions the group consisting of Lenin
and his closest collaborators; and that at the bottom of the system, face-toface
personal communications among ‘little men’ play as big a part as the
transmission of political ‘messages’ as do massive State installations. Political
scientists are glad to adopt findings and methods from social psychology, microsociology,
socio-linguistics, and social anthropology, as they do from the macrosociology
of great societies.
3. The trend of interest
Thus strong forces are drawing political science away from Statecraft towards
the study of politics without States. Indeed, it is not difficult for a political
scientist to imagine a radical boundary revision among the social sciences. There
might for instance emerge a logical discipline (including praxeology or micro-
economics, as well as the study of efficiency in administration); a statistical
discipline (covering all that is involved by the use of ‘variate language’ in any
context); a linguistic and semantic discipline; a discipline concerned with
biological factors (demography handles some aspects of this) ; a discipline con-
cerned with physiology, in particular with the physiology of the brain in relation
to psychology and linguistics; a discipline concerned with ethology and with the
study of relationships in face-to-face groups. This continued process of ‘speciali-
zing out’ might serve to raise technical standards: at the same time, it would
force a rapprochement between politics, economics, sociology, and social
psychology at the ‘macro’ level, the level at which problems are very urgent
and very large, but indeterminate, so that the most difficult aspect of the matter
is to determine how to break problems down and to specialize with a view to
solution. Needless to say, this common residuum, this ‘science of great issues’,
would also include the problems of philosophy and ideology, which are expelled
from, or at least neutralized within, the sciences committed wholly to the ri-
gorous use of statistics and experiment.
Such a process of specialization would be consistent with past experience and
perhaps with scientific logic. The ‘hardest’ elements in each of the great disci-
plines would be linked together by their technical content; and the r61e of the
residual discipline or disciplines would be to handle in co-operation the uni-
versal questions of human society, each from its own point of view, in politics,
economics, sociology and psychology. We should then no longer need to ask
what lines divide political science, political economy, political sociology, and
the psychology of political behaviour. The question would no longer be meaning-
ful for political science if that discipline extended to the discussion of politics
wherever it is found.