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Political science I 77
Can one claim that laws of a scientific character have been established by
political science? Political scientists are perhaps readier to talk about tenden-
cies and syndromes than about laws. It is not now usual to accept laws of poli-
tics as ‘iron laws’, like Michels’ ‘iron law of oligarchy’ or some of the more
rigid interpretations of Marx’s political thought. But the whole trend of work for
the last fifty years (following clues left by Thucydides, Aristotle, Machiavelli,
Harington, and Montesquieu, as well as by Marx) has been to treat each politi-
cal system as an interdependent whole, within which there is an interplay of
economic, social and political factors, and also to note its ‘boundary main-
tenance’ problems. It is by no means easy to move scientifically from ‘correla-
tion’ to ‘cause’ and ‘explanation’, but a great deal has been done to establish
correlations within what is called (not very happily) the process of moderniza-
tion, and some of this work is quantitative.
It is also possible to trace mutually supporting factors within a single political
system. In the United Kindon, for instance, the predominance of two major
parties is connected with the practice of single member plurality elections, and
one can with a measure of confidence predict that the mutual dependence of
these two sets of institutions wil not be broken unless some very unusual cir-
cumstance intervenes. Similarly, it was not difficult to predict, on the basis of
existing statistics, that a number of military coups d‘dtut would take place in
1968, and that certain States were particularly at risk. The art of political pre-
diction1+ is a matter of narrowing down the possibilities and of giving a rank
ordering of some sort, however weak, to the possiblities which are kept in play.
The art can be, and is being, made more ‘scientific’ by improving our strictness
and clarity in specifying possibilities and our resources in measuring degrees of
probability. These methods can be much further improved: but the scope of
political prediction is necessarily limited. The discipline deals with a single
world system, and a limited number of component State systems, each almost
as mobile as an Atlantic weather system; and political prediction tends to feed
back into politics in an unpredictable way,’s as self-fulfilling or self-defeating
prophecy.
C. Fundamentals of method
In the work of the founding fathers of the discipline, from Thucydides to the
Federalists, one can identify three major themes, which settle methodological
assumptions and define the tactics of analysis; a doctrine of stages, a doctrine
of ecology, and a method of comparison.
I. Stages
It may seem arbitrary to treat a doctrine of stages as a method of analysis rather
than as a law, and it has in fact frequently been stated as a law. But the doctrine
of stages has always, wherever used, been loaded with ideology, and one now
handles it with caution.
In the ancient world, the doctrine was generally cyclical : the world ran down-
hill from the age of gold, and political virtue declined with it until the time of