The Politics of George Catlin

• Date: 01 September 1961
• Author: Francis D. Wormuth
• Published date: 01 September 1961
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400345
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE POLITICS OF GEORGE CATLIN
Encamped in the winter-quarters of the Bavarian army at Neuburg in 1619,
Descartes reflected upon the problems of philosophic method. Young George
Catlin, encamped at Mons in the winter of 1918, turned his thoughts to perhaps
a humbler but a more appropriate topic.
A vast accident, unallowed for in a civilization which seemed not only stable but placidly
progressive, has caused yet others to lay their ears against the mouths of the silent ones, and to
become consulters of the mummy-head of History. The war was a period in which men forsook
ordinary ways, and, going beyond rule, became either more or less than themselves.... The
period has passed; the thunder of the great storm is, for the time being, distant. But, under the
sullen skies of distress and discontent, it has left not a few who ask what are the causes of these
social catastrophes; whether it pass the wit of man to avert them; whether they are indeed ac-
cidents or an ineluctable human fate; what are the principles on which a society is founded
wherein these disasters seem inevitable, even although the next one prove fatal.’
According to Judge Jerome Frank, who was Charles E. Merriam’s assistant
in 1920, it was Merriam’s experience in the First War also that diverted him
from the historical and legal studies which had hitherto preoccupied political
scientists and caused him to launch at Chicago what Harold Lasswell has called
&dquo;the new political science&dquo; -
the study of power. Catlin’s work in the 1920’s
and early ’30’s was done at Cornell; at Cornell and Chicago, therefore, took form
what an English writer, reared in the tradition of dilettantism, has derisively
called &dquo;the American science of politics.&dquo;’
Significantly, Catlin’s first work was on Hobbes - Thomas Hobbes as Phi-
losopher, Publicist and Man of Letters, the prize-winning Matthew Arnold Me-
morial Essay at Oxford in 1921.3 The atomism of Hobbes, his reduction of
politics to individual will and power, and his concern for psychology are all
found in Catlin’s system. The fiction of the Leviathan, however, is not found
there; and the metaphysics of Hobbes is replaced by a thoroughgoing empiricism
and an extensive reliance on history both as the source of data and as the prov-
ing-ground of hypotheses.
In 1923 the distinguished historian Wallace Notestein brought Catlin to
Cornell University,4 where he had the advantage also of close association with
Carl Becker. Catlin’s first book, The Science and Method of Politics,5 published
in 1927, begins with an exposition, which has not yet been improved upon, of
the indispensability and the limitations of history. &dquo;To know History is to con,
trol power.&dquo; But it is not enough to know raw data: a political science must
formulate hypotheses and test them against the data.
1
George E. G. Catlin, The Science and Method of Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927),
pp. 5-6.
2
Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1959). In England there is no political science association but a "Political Studies Associa-
tion."
3
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922.
4
Of this generation of Notestein recruits, two, George Catlin and Marshall Knappen, became
distinguished political scientists; Frank Notestein became a leading demographer. Frederick
G. Marcham, whom Notestein also brought from Oxford, succeeded Notestein as Goldwin
Smith Professor of...