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

220 W. J. M. Mackenzie
other disciplines as well), and political scientists are under an obligation to give
such help as they can. Naturally, this help should be given by argument and
investigation of a disciplined kind, and its premises and assumptions should be
made as clear as possible. But the obligation is not to be evaded on the ground
that the problems proposed are too complex for scientific treatment: the politi-
cal scientist may not have a complete answer, but (like a doctor faced with a
disease which he cannot cure) he is under an obligation to give such help as he
can. He may not know enough, but at least he knows more than others.
The issue between these orientations can be expressed in a quotation from Sir
Peter Medawar’s book, The Art of the Sobble:73
‘No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie
beyond his competence. The most he can hope for is the kindly contempt
earned by the Utopian politician. If politics is the art of the possible, research
is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.’
Those who favour discipline-oriented research can reproach the others as un-
scientific. But the latter can retort that purity in science is not possible; that
society sustains the scientist and has a right to call on him - indeed that it does
inexorably call on him, since he cannot live outside society.
But political science, it seems, cannot escape involvement in this dilemma,
and undoubtedly the main body of political scientists would seek some central
position by which to justify their working assumption that the two orientations
are not only conflicting but also complementary: on the one hand, that political
science is strongly conditioned by its political and social environment and
risks self-deception if it forgets this; on the other hand, that political science
has no special contribution to make to the solution of problems except in so far
as it can offer a great range of knowledge organized in an orderly way and
subject to scholarly canons of accuracy and objectivity.
3. Theoretical styles
There are also differences of style in political theory, not corresponding exactly
to these orientations.
These can perhaps be subsumed under three headings, which indicate different
ways of handling political theory, radically different in style, though they over-
lap in content.
a. Grand theory. One meets here names such as Marx, Herbert Spencer,
Weber, Parsons. These are men who do not neglect empirical study, but believe
that it is not fruitful unless organized by a self-consistent structure of unifying
concepts. They seek to establish a system, a hierarchy of concepts comparable
to that of physics, which links the design of experiments and their results
through middle-level generalizations to a relatively small number of key con-
cepts, rigorously defined and related.
It may be said that such a style is bound to lead in the end to metaphysics, and
indeed that it is not the method used in natural sciences less fundamental than
physics. To which it would be retorted that all natural sciences rest on physics
and that physics cannot shirk the problems of what is as yet unobservable -
the cosmos, for instance, and the ultimate structure of the atomic nucleus.