JOHN PRATT THEORIES OF THE STATE AND SOCIETY: THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

JOHN PRATT THEORIES OF THE STATE AND SOCIETY: THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

An old and familiar narrative of nineteenth-century social and political thought holds that the classical tradition of political theory was extinguished with the rise of the social sciences. Henceforth a ‘science’ of politics, excluding normative concerns, would be strictly subordinate to the overarching science of sociology. Politics would be epiphenomenal, the product of laws of social science. This narrative works better for France, and perhaps Germany, than for Britain, where theoretical sociology was weak; and in the British case an alternative version of the narrative might assert that political economy posed the most fundamental threat to classical political thought. But intellectual historians have become more sceptical of the claim that the ‘dual revolution’ in politics and economy at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries brought about a total transformation of the intellectual landscape and eliminated older intellectual traditions. They have become more aware of the resilience of a prudential approach to political thought that, refusing to accept the inevitable triumph of a sociological view of the world, instead presented itself in novel form as a ‘science of politics’, ‘science politique’ or ‘Staatswissenschaft’.

The idea of a political science was by no means new in the nineteenth century. The term itself can be traced back to the sixteenth century, when Bodin and his jurisprudential contemporaries aspired to create a ‘civil science’. In the following century Hobbes, notably, conceived of the state as a mechanism that could be understood scientifically. In the Enlightenment these traditions were carried on by philosophers such as Montesquieu on the one hand and by the more practically minded Cameralists on the other. But it was in the nineteenth century that the concept really came into vogue. In France, the class of moral and political sciences at the Institut de France, created by the Idéologues in 1795 but abolished by Napoleon in 1803, was refounded by GUIZOT in 1832 as the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques; and TOCQUEVILLE prefaced his study of Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique) in 1835 with the proposition that

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‘a new political science is needed for a new world’. In Britain, MACAULAY declared in 1829 that ‘that noble Science of Politics’ was, of all sciences, ‘the most important to the welfare of nations’. And in Germany, Restoration liberals compiled a massive Staatslexikon (State Lexicon), an ‘encyclopedia of the political sciences’ (‘Staatswissenschaften’) with the aim of providing an authoritative exposition of liberal principles as the realization of a truly scientific understanding of politics.

Undoubtedly the French Revolution played an important part in the emergence of this new kind of political discourse. Post-revolutionary liberals were newly conscious of the fragility of political and social order, and sought to detach the valid principles of 1789, such as constitutional Government and the rule of law, from the political extremism that had produced the Terror. They typically deployed the science of politics as a remedy for the excesses of political voluntarism, summoning reason and empirical knowledge as counterweights to will and passion. Moreover, since the derailment of the French Revolution was commonly attributed to the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment, the science of politics had to be an empirical science grounded in the facts. The German Liberal Carl von Rotteck—co-editor, with Welcker, of the Staatslexikon—described in the preface the conflict between revolution and reaction in Restoration Europe, and depicted the purpose of the encyclopedia as the foundation of a new, rational political creed rooted in political reality and capable of rallying the moderates on both sides. Political science was an antidote to political extremism.

Rotteck, Professor of State Sciences at Freiburg and a deputy in the Baden lower house, was already the author of a four-volume Textbook on Rational Law and the Sciences of State (Lehrbuch des Vernunftsrecht und der Staatswissenschaften, 4 vos, 1829–35), but the Staatslexikon reached a much wider readership. It was published in the wake of its editors’ dismissal from their chairs on political grounds in the backlash against the 1830 revolutions, and was marketed both as a handbook for civil servants and as a volume aimed at the educated of all classes. Its main counterpart in north Germany was Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann’s Die Politik auf den Grund und das Ma β der gegebenen Zustände zurückgeführt (Politics Explained on the Basis of and in Relation to Prevailing Circumstances, 1835), based on his lectures at Göttingen. This volume quite explicitly aimed to provide a political education for the middle class, which Dahlmann identified as the centre of gravity of the state. Like the editors of the Staatslexikon, he set out to resolve the problem of how to reconcile order and change. Their closest analogues in France were the group known as the Doctrinaires, the most notable of whom, ROYER-COLLARD and Guizot, both had a deep influence on Tocqueville. They saw the rise of the middle class and the concomitant development of a democratic social state as inevitable processes: the point was to understand them and to seek to moderate and channel them.

This science of politics became the most important idiom in which to couch reflections on the relationship between state and society. Thinkers such as Macaulay, Guizot and Tocqueville were all conscious of the idea that the progress of society was governed by an autonomous law, and that, moreover, social change shaped political institutions. All shared the broadly historicist approach to political thought that was so characteristic of the nineteenth century and held that the transition to commercial society (Macaulay) or to

a democratic society founded on equality of conditions (Tocqueville) demanded a new kind of political system. This approach had its origins in the distinctive ideas of the

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Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular in the idea of autonomous social change as the motor of history. Moreover, it was because there were objective constraints on political action and political will that a political science had to be empirical rather than deductive. Macaulay’s crushing review of JAMES MILL’s ‘Essay on Government’ was a classic exposition of the inductivist critique of the attempt to deduce what is the best form of Government from universal axioms about human nature. No historicist could accept the possibility of universal axioms about human nature, since human beings are the creatures of time and place.

The emergence of the science of politics should be seen as an aspect of a movement away from deductive political theory in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Whereas KANT had taken the view—shared by many philosophers before him—that forms of Government actually experienced by states were mere historical accidents that offered little guidance in determining the proper purpose of the state, nineteenth-century writers almost universally took it for granted that a science of politics must be empirical and historical. Hegel was in the vanguard here: the essentially historical character of political philosophy (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM), and indeed of all philosophy, was one of his fundamental insights, and it had a profound impact on German political thought, which under Hegel’s influence recognized that it must take existing state forms as the starting-point of its enquiries. The Heidelberg jurist and academic liberal Robert von Mohl was quite clear that human nature was diverse and historically determined, so that it was impossible to pin down the purpose of the state without reference to historical circumstances or public opinion. This was a widely accepted view in the nineteenth century. J.S.MILL, for instance, accepted that human nature was historically determined. His abortive science of ‘ethology’, sketched in Book VI of his System of Logic (1843), was intended to demonstrate how national character could be traced to the action of the universal laws of mind in time and place, and thus to show that the absence of a universal human nature did not prevent the formation of a genuinely scientific moral or social science.

A central tenet of nineteenth-century LIBERALISM was the belief that, in modern society, public opinion must in the long run prevail. This was fundamentally what distinguished representative Government from despotism. An early exposition of this doctrine came with MME DE STAËL’s attempt to confront the question of how to ‘close’ the French Revolution in her posthumous work, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la république en France (The Present Circumstances that Might Close the Revolution in France and the Principles that Should Underpin the Republic in France), which was composed in 1798–9 but published only a century or so later. A crucial chapter on public opinion came, significantly, in the wake of chapters on royalists and republicans, and here Staël argued that the reign of public opinion represented the only hope of transcending the partisan conflict that had riven France for a decade. One of the most important spokesmen of this tradition in the early nineteenth century was Staël’s friend and one-time lover BENJAMIN CONSTANT, a vocal and unreserved exponent of the idea of the Government of opinion. For Constant modern Government must rest on spontaneously expressed popular opinion, and consequently the free press was the cornerstone of constitutional Government.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 662 Most liberals, however, took a more complex view than Constant, arguing that opinion

had to be guided by informed and educated leadership. This was indeed Staël’s point of view. In De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions, 1800) she articulated the hope that men of letters might assume a ministry of secular spiritual leadership, and that the formation of that ministry might be advanced by the creation of moral and political sciences based on the model of the positive sciences. This view almost certainly shaped SAINT-SIMON’s thinking, and through him that of COMTE, although both these writers took it in a more authoritarian direction than Staël envisaged. But the idea that the purpose of political science was in large measure to ensure that opinion could be guided was characteristic of many nineteenth-century liberals. BAGEHOT and Gladstone, Guizot and RENAN, all supposed that a science of politics must be a practical rather than

a theoretical science, grounded in inductive knowledge of politics derived chiefly from history, and serving to underpin the art of political leadership.

The distinctive concern of the practitioners of the science of politics was with the dialectic of state and society: they sought to nourish a political prudence that knew when institutions had to be reformed if they were to continue to exert any legitimate authority over civil society. Characteristically this was a liberal—or, in Britain, a Whig-liberal— project, and was classically articulated in Macaulay’s speeches on the parliamentary debates preceding the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. The science of politics was intimately associated with key liberal ideas such as constitutionalism and representative Government. Representative Government was important because it institutionalized the interdependence of state and society. Parliament would serve as a vital ligament between state and society. Because society was potentially a self-regulating mechanism tending towards equilibrium it did not require external regulation: instead, law must emerge from social interests as articulated in Parliament, and must therefore support society’s self-regulation instead of replacing it.

In Britain, one of the most notable analysts of the dialectic of state and society was the economic and political commentator Walter Bagehot. He drew heavily on Burke, from whom he learnt that political institutions must depend on time and place, and that politics must therefore be a practical art. He was critical of those cultural elitists—he singled out MATTHEW ARNOLD—who he thought risked stifling the seeds of progress: for Bagehot the whole problem was to find forms of Government compatible with a rapidly changing society. He found the solution in what he called ‘Government by discussion’, a distinctively modern form of Government; and in particular in the English system of parliamentary Government. In the English system, characterized by the fusion rather than the separation of powers, Parliament exercised real power and hence could play a key role in not merely reflecting but shaping and leading public opinion.

What was ‘scientific’ about this science of politics? What distinguished it from a purely prudential art of Government? J.S.Mill objected to a merely empirical political science on the ground that it would tend to sanctify the status quo: what is, has to be. Hegel objected to Haller’s Restoration conservatism on similar grounds. The chief answers to this line of objection lay in the development of the comparative method and the historical method as the keys to the creation of what the historian Sir John Seeley termed ‘the impartial study of politics’, which would be capable of identifying the direction of historical change and so enabling statesmen to adjust to it as well as to

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channel it. Both methods enjoyed enormous prestige. In Britain, HENRY MAINE’s Ancient Law (1861) was a crucial influence, but in Continental Europe a key role was played, a generation or more previously, by the jurist and proponent of the historical school of law, Carl von Savigny. Prominent exponents of the comparative method included E.A.Freeman and HENRY SIDGWICK in Britain, Emile Boutmy in France and Rudolf von Gneist in Germany. History supplied the data for an inductive science of politics, while the comparative method bolstered the rhetorically important claim to impartiality and also enabled law-like generalizations to be formulated.

It is important to stress two points about the ‘science of politics’. The first is that there was no radical gulf between ‘political science’ and ‘social science’: in fact, for most of the nineteenth century the terms were uses more or less interchangeably, at least in Britain and France. The second is that in the nineteenth century these were not purely academic projects but instead aimed at shaping public opinion. The Staatslexikon’s editors proclaimed that their aim was to educate active citizens, and this was an aim they shared with the Social Science Association, that ‘outdoor parliament’ which did so much to shape and articulate a liberal public opinion in mid-Victorian Britain. Likewise in France the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, although it eventually became best known as an institution that provided a specialist training for aspiring higher civil servants, in the first instance emerged from a belief that the disaster of the Second Empire had been due to the absence of an educated and self-reliant middle-class opinion. Under the influence of thinkers such as TAINE it set about shaping a politically informed public opinion.

While the science of politics was predominantly understood as an inductive science, there was a different, deductive, tradition that can be identified with Comte and his followers in France and with J.S.Mill in Britain. They both questioned the scientific standing of a purely empirical science of politics, arguing that to count as a science it must have some logical dependence on the higher-level generalizations of a broader science of society. Significantly, perhaps, Comte abandoned the term ‘political science’, which he had deployed as a synonym for ‘social science’ and ‘social physics’ in the 1820s, and replaced them all with his own neologism, ‘sociology’ (see SOCIAL THEORY AND SOCIOLOGY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY). In his influential System of Logic Mill argued that the most that the autonomous study of politics could do was to formulate empirical generalizations: if these were to count as scientific laws, it had to be possible to ‘verify’ them by showing post hoc how these generalizations might

be deduced from psychological laws. That said, Mill himself made a significant and influential contribution to the inductive study of politics in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861).

The inductive science of politics should also be distinguished from traditions of social theory, associated with thinkers such as Saint-Simon and Comte, Marx and Engels (see MARX AND MARXISM), which sought to found a science of society upon long-run laws of historical development that would provide certain knowledge of the future development of society. Comte argued that to aspire to scientific status a branch of study must have its own distinctive method and its own distinctive subject matter; and he maintained that what was distinctive about sociology was that it dealt with a subject matter that changed over time, and that its method must therefore be historical. This view was echoed by both Hegel and Mill. But here the historical method was deployed in the

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search for certain laws of historical development, rather than to furnish the data for an empirical science of politics. In the one case, social science closed off the possibility of political life as an autonomous arena; in the other, it underpinned it.

It was Marx and Engels who were the chief exponents of the view that the state was epiphenomenal and that the struggles in civil society drove the course of history. They claimed their socialism to be scientific rather than utopian because it did not so much hold out communism as a goal as demonstrate its necessity. To that extent it seemed to erode the autonomy of the political. As with all propositions about Marxism as a system, however, this has to be subjected to a number of qualifications. In his journalistic and historical writings, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx seems to have assumed a more complex relationship between the economic base and the superstructure than he elsewhere implied. Since the point of Marxism was to provide a scientific foundation for a revolutionary movement it had to allow some room for political agency.

Evolutionary social theory, which flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, tended to reinforce the quest for grand laws of history as the basis for social theory. Thinkers in this tradition treated society as an organism, and set out to determine the laws that governed the course of its evolution. It is now well known that evolutionary social theory predated DARWIN’s Origin of Species, and even after Darwin wrote it continued to be influenced by Lamarckian assumptions about the mechanism by which societies evolved: Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1872), though purportedly concerned with the relevance of the concept of natural selection to the understanding of society, is a good example of this (see DARWIN, CHARLES and SOCIAL DARWINISM). More strictly Social Darwinist doctrines that saw the struggle for existence and the extinction of nations or races through warfare as the mechanism of social evolution really came into their own only in the era of the ‘New Imperialism’ after about 1890; and they were less influential in Britain and France, the major imperial powers, than in Germany, whose colonial empire was small. Even then their importance was tempered by the widespread belief that rationality and altruism—themselves products of the evolutionary process— equipped man to rise above and conquer the determinism of biology.

While the science of politics was an international project that attracted liberals, in particular, in many different countries, it is possible to identify some distinctive national traditions. In Germany, the political or ‘state sciences’ emerged organically from the older tradition of Cameralism, an early modern tradition of administrative science closely linked to the training of public officials. In comparative perspective the most distinctive characteristic of the political sciences in Germany was that they retained close associations with the education of servants of the state. This tradition had no counterpart in Britain, where the Trevelyan report had insisted on the superior value of a liberal as opposed to a practical education for civil servants. Neither did it have an analogue in France until the creation in 1872 of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, which soon acquired a virtual monopoly over the education of higher civil servants. But that School was a private foundation, its intellectual influences were Anglophile rather than Germanophile, and the concept of the political sciences it espoused owed more to British than to German models.

Another key variable was that the academic study of law, and especially of public law, was of much greater importance in Germany and, to an extent, in France. In Britain, by

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contrast, the idea of public law and with it the legal concept of the state were weakly articulated, and with the exception of isolated figures such as Maine, Pollock and DICEY, the British model of political science owed more to political economy and history than to law. This divergence has had an enduring significance: in Germany and France, the academic study of political science emerged under the umbrella of the law faculties, whereas in Britain it was nurtured in departments or faculties of history.

The mode of thought described here is far removed from academic political science as it emerged in the twentieth century and flourished after the Second World War. A full account of the origins of this political science lies beyond the scope of this volume, but an important transitional stage was the flowering of elite theory in the writings of Michels and Ostrogorski, PARETO and MOSCA (see INTELLECTUALS, ELITES AND MERITOCRACY). Drawing on crowd theorists such as Taine, LEBON and Sighele, these writers maintained that the fundamental difference in all societies was between the class that rules and the class that is ruled. All societies—democratic or authoritarian, republican or monarchical—were ruled by elites, and the point was to classify elites and to understand how they compete. Earlier liberals, much as they might attend to the role of the political leader in guiding opinion, nevertheless saw opinion as a potentially positive and progressive force. Public debate, whether in Parliament or in the press or in public meetings, helped generate rational opinion. What made elite theory different was that it depicted opinion as a fundamentally irrational force, but also as something capable of being understood scientifically and manipulated. This understanding of leadership was borrowed from crowd theory’s ‘hypnotic’ model of the relations between leader and crowd. The emphasis on educating public opinion thus disappeared, and in the hands of this school ‘political science’ acquired a neo-Machiavellian style. Its focus was now on advising political leaders how they might best direct mass politics.