Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Political science 181
I. The United States pattern
In numbers, American political science now leads; at least three-quarters of
all political scientists work in the United States. This flows partly from the sheer
scale of higher education in America, partly from the fact that a large propor-
tion of each age group enter higher education. But it is related also to the pre-
dominance in American Universities of the four-year general course for the
Bachelor’s degree; within this framework of general education, political science
is an important and attractive subject, and it is indeed made a compulsory
subject in some American State universities, as part of the process of making
good citizens, capable of democratic participation. The American profession
of political science is thus a pyramid based on a very wide range of preliminary
teaching. American academic leaders debate anxiously the character and or-
ganization of the ‘Introductory Course in Political Science’; textbooks compete;
and the system is in some ways unsatisfying intellectually. Nevertheless, it has
established the place of political science in American political life, and from
these broad preliminary courses there emerges a stream of selected students for
training in graduate schools, which offer a broad intellectual approach to
political science, combined with intense specialization. Competition between
these graduate schools is one of the driving forces in political research in the
United States.
It follows from the character of the system and the self-perpetuating inter-
dependence of the graduate schools that there is a strong sense of the unity of
the discipline as a force in democratic politics and also an essential component
in the spectrum of social sciences. There are tendencies pulling the other way;
in some American arts colleges and graduate schools the attraction of the
older humanistic disciplines (in particular, history, philosophy and law) is
strongly felt, and the ‘behavioural’ view of political science is rejected. But in-
fluence is not in one direction only: to some extent the humanities are drawn in
to serve social science, as for instance by the use of historical data in the study
of political parties or of international crises.
It should be added that there is now an established tradition of ‘area studies’,
in which a particular region is studied by various social sciences, in combination
with the study of languages, literatures, law, history and geography. These are
referred to again on p. 191 below.
2. The English pattern
The modem social sciences were founded in the Scottish Universities in the
eighteenth century by the combination of French and English models, and at
the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a very fruitful combination
of the Scottish tradition with the analytical utilitarianism of private scholars in
England, men such as Bentham, Malthus and Ricardo. The first dawn of reform
in the English Universities was the founding of University College, London,
under Benthamite auspices, in 1828, and in the middle of the nineteenth century
the nascent University of London provided the model of university organiza-
tion in what are now India and Pakistan.
In England itself there was in mid-century a strong reaction against philo-