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The New Revolution in Political Science*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

David Easton
David Easton*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

A new revolution is under way in American political science. The last revolution—behavioralism—has scarcely been completed before it has been overtaken by the increasing social and political crises of our time. The weight of these crises is being felt within our discipline in the form of a new conflict in the throes of which we now find ourselves. This new and latest challenge is directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy. This challenge I shall call the post-behavioral revolution.

The initial impulse of this revolution is just being felt. Its battle cries are relevance and action. Its objects of criticism are the disciplines, the professions, and the universities. It is still too young to be described definitively. Yet we cannot treat it as a passing phenomenon, as a kind of accident of history that will somehow fade away and leave us very much as we were before. Rather it appears to be a specific and important episode in the history of our discipline, if not in all of the social sciences. It behooves us to examine this revolution closely for its possible place in the continuing evolution of political science. Does it represent a threat to the discipline, one that will divert us from our long history in the search for reliable understanding of politics? Or is it just one more change that will enhance our capacity to find such knowledge?

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1969 , pp. 1051 - 1061
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1969

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Footnotes

*

Presidential Address delivered to the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2–6, 1969. New York City.

References

1 Compare with the Credo of Behavioralism as described in Eastern, D., A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 7 Google Scholar.

2 Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

3 See Easton, D., The Political System (New York: Knopf, 1953), pp. 78 ffGoogle Scholar.

4 For the difference between outcomes and outputs see Easton, D., A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965), p. 351 Google Scholar.

5 For the literature on social indicators see Bauer, R. A. (ed.), Social Indicators (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966)Google Scholar; “Social Goals and Indicators for American Society,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, vols. 371 (05, 1967) and 373 (September, 1967)Google Scholar.

6 See Riecken, H. W., “Social Science and Contemporary Social Problems,” 23 Items (1969), 1–6 Google Scholar.

7 This undoubtedly reflects only the few articles on this subject submitted for publication rather than any editorial predisposition.

8 See Easton, D. and Dennis, J., Children in the Political System: Origins of Political Legitimacy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), chapter 2Google Scholar.

9 Lynd, R. S., Knowledge for What? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939)Google Scholar.

10 D. Easton, The Political System, chapters 9 and 10.

11 Marcuse, H., One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). chapter 4Google Scholar.

12 See McCoy, C. A. and Playford, J. (eds.), Apolitical Politics (New York: Crowell, 1967)Google Scholar and D. Easton, The Political System, chapters 2 and 11.

13 See especially Roszak, T. (ed.), The Dissenting Academy (New York: Random House, 1968), IntroductionGoogle Scholar.

14 David Singer of the Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, in personal correspondence.