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

184 W. J. M. Mackenzie
gap, but the interest of the Americans in this development perhaps strengthened
the hands of conservatives in the Law Faculties, and there was at first more
progress in research institutes than in the Universities. In the 1960s the pendulum
has swung towards a deliberate development of the social sciences,
including political science, and many new chairs have been instituted. It is
however too early to guess what wil come of this development.
It is still difficult to understand fully the position in the USSR and Eastern
Europe. The long-established Law Faculties have apparently accepted a narrower
role; economics (especially mathematical economics) has flourished as a
tool of planning, and occasionally (as in Hungaryzz) as an instrument of criticism
of forms of public management; sociology (including political sociology)
has prospered in Poland, where it has always been strong; the managerial aspect
of administrative studies (praxeology, cybernetics, time budgeting) has also
been fruitfully developed.
But political science, in so far as concerned with political training, was primarily
a matter for the highest schools of the Party. Political science in the
universities (for instance in Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) has in
recent years shown a capacity for distinguished work, but it has perhaps been
slightly suspect, in so far as it is not under the direction of the Party. But what
the Party teaches, how it interprets the Marxist tradition at a high intellectual
level, is still ‘esoteric’, in the sense of Aristotle’s ~UTEPLX~L Myoc, and it has
not so far made its voice heard effectively in the world-wide debate about the
Marxist view of man, and in particular of political man.
A ha1 word about the ‘export’ of the American, the English and the European
models of political teaching to the universities of developing countries.
In each case, there has been an unlucky tendency to export the academic
form and to lose the social and intellectual substance. The juristic tradition is at
its strongest and narrowest in developing countries which adopted a West-
European model during the nineteenth century; Greece and Turkey for instance,
and some Latin American countries. One is apt to iind there highly
political universities, in which the discipline of political science is not yet strong.
Similarly, there have proved to be serious infelicities about the adoption of the
American model in the Philippines, the English elitist model in parts of Africa,
the British utilitarian model in India and Pakistan.
4. Summary
This section has not been easy to write, dealing as it does with what might be
called ‘the political science of political science’. Much is known, a little vaguely,
through personal contacts with colleagues and students, and this account has
drawn on the advice of a number of consultants. But there is little published
documentation, and the discipline has perhaps not hitherto been sufficiently
mature and unified to seek to take stock of itself as a political and social phenom-
enon throughout the wold.
There would probably not be much disagreement about what has been said
of the American and English traditions: a popular tradition of political sociali-
zation, seeking now to become more professional ; a tradition of elite political