Organization and Political Science

• Author: Owen S. Stratton
• DOI: 10.1177/106591294900200308
• Published date: 01 September 1949
• Date: 01 September 1949
• Subject Matter: Articles

ORGANIZATION AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
OWEN S. STRATTON
Wellesley College
OLITICAL scientists pay much attention to organization in govern-
ment, but, somewhat paradoxically, they seem only slightly conscious
of its importance in their professional affairs. In much of the think-
ing of political scientists about procedural matters, the individual tends
to crowd out the organizational. Thus they often speak of my work, my
book, my course, and seldom use the word our in the same connections.
Individual work seems quite naturally a thing in which to take pride, and
it is doubtful that they very often think that the ends for which they work,
both in research and teaching, might be achieved more easily and more
adequately by the use of organizational, cooperative means.
It is possible that some of the individualism of political scientists
can be attributed to their long and early experience as pupils, in the
course of which they came to accept the notion that honorable academic
work is an individual matter and cooperation a mortal sin. The per-
sistence of a habit often has nothing to do with the reasons for its in-
culcation, and so it seems to be with the individualism of scholars: its
active encouragement when they were pupils made sense because it sim-
plified their teachers’ problems, but the habit persists into a new situation
where it tends to obscure the advantages of cooperation. Persistence
of the habit is reinforced by the fact that most of the erstwhile pupils
are now teachers and, in their turn, find it convenient to brand as dis.
honorable most academic manifestations of the cooperative spirit among
their charges.
Although academic individualism in this country draws much of
its life from competitive American culture, it is also strengthened by the
traditions of post-mediaeval European scholarship. The beginnings of
modern scientific thought often involved returning the hostility of a
highly organized church. As a negative reaction, if for no other rea-
son, individualism came to seem a good in itself. The resulting protestant
tone of secular scholarship was accentuated in much of the political phi-
losophy which is still influential today, partly because that philosophy was
critical of the hierarchical church and the claims of the state and partly
because it was much concerned with absolutes, the perception of which
was believed to be an individual matter.
The anti-organizational spirit persists as a kind of cultural lag, de-
spite the evolution of political science into a complex body of knowl-
edge too large to be comprehended in its entirety by any single individual.
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Since familiarity with a subject is a prerequisite to its being successfully
taught, it follows that adequate teaching of all of the important aspects
of political science is likewise beyond the capacity of one man.
This would hardly be worth commenting upon if it were not for
the existence of considerable evidence in the state of politics and in the
writings of political scientists that the accomplishments of the latter, great
as they are, fall short of what is necessary or even desirable. In teach-
ing, for instance, an examination of curricula now in effect reveals an
uncertainty about the purpose to be achieved. The typical curriculum
seems to be a collection of courses not much more than accidentally
related and calculated to accomplish little beyond giving students some
knowledge and taste of different fields chosen at random. Although many
curricula list more than enough courses to give a student a general
knowledge of all the important aspects of government which we are
prepared to teach, the probability seems great that he will, in fact, be
graduated while remaining ignorant of much which is vitally necessary
to give the all-important contextual meaning to that which he believes
he knows.
Our deficiencies in research and synthesis are summed up in the
fact that we have no usable and non-metaphysical theory of government.
We have a host of explanations of such phenomena as the state of
political parties in America, Hitler’s rise to power, the results of the last
election, and so on; but we have great difficulty in defining the relation-
ships between them. Our inability to do so is probably not owing to
shortage of data, for we have excelled in...