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The Chicago School: Forgotten but Not Gone
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2004
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- 2004 by the American Political Science Association
What was the Chicago school of political science? Has it been forgotten in contemporary American political science, as Gabriel Almond suggests?
In speaking of the Chicago school, we perhaps should distinguish between what I will call Chicago 1 and Chicago 2. Chicago 1 refers to the University of Chicago's Political Science Department in the 1930s–1940s (the primary subject of Almond's essay). Chicago 2 began with the department's behavioral period, after the Second World War. The members of Chicago 1 were influenced by the sociological approach, frequently known as the ecological school, which advocated studying contemporary political problems using new field methods of inquiry.1
The Chicago school of sociology, to which Almond refers, demanded that scholars go into the field and collect statistical and interview data in order to determine how people really lived.
For example, Arthur Bentley's book The Process of Government, although published in 1908, did not become influential until the 1950s, when it inspired important work on pluralism.
Merriam in particular argued for the use of statistical data, but the move in this direction occurred mostly after World War II.
The publications that set the tone for Chicago 1 were diverse. Gosnell's Getting Out the Vote (1927) was the first important piece of field research in political science and, I believe, the first social experiment in political science to use a control group. Lasswell's prolific works include several classics. Psycho-pathology and Politics (1930) and Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936) are still widely cited; Power and Personality (1948), World Revolutionary Propaganda (1939, with Dorothy Blumenstock), and The Policy Sciences in the United States (1951, edited by Daniel Lerner) were hailed as major books at the time they were published.
Although Merriam wrote many books,4
he made his most lasting impact as the political engine behind Chicago 1 through academic-entrepreneurial accomplishments such as forming the Social Science Research Council.5Merriam was very much the politico, running unsuccessfully for mayor of Chicago. His politics extended into his daily life. He had a special device, attachable to the mouthpiece of an old-fashioned upright desktop phone, to muffle conversations so people in the next office could not hear him speaking with Chicago politicians. Merriam's office at the University of Chicago also had two doors, to prevent potentially embarrassing political encounters. For these tidbits, I am indebted to David Easton, whose generosity I have shamelessly exploited for both personal and intellectual insight into happenings at the University of Chicago during this time. For a fuller description of the behavioral period than this essay provides, see Easton's oral history of the discipline, in Easton 1997 or Baer et al. 1991.
Merriam—who joined the University of Chicago in 1900—was asked in 1905 to conduct a study of municipal revenues for the reform-oriented City Club of Chicago.
Douglas later was elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois.
Chicago 1 can be said to have ended when Lasswell left Chicago for Yale, before Merriam's death in 1953. Its most enduring legacy: having laid the groundwork for the growth of behavioral political science in the postwar period.
The Chicago School and the Behavioral Movement
On the cusp of Chicago 2, the departmental chairs (Leonard White and Herman Pritchett, in the late 1940s and early 1950s) favored historical-institutional-legal approaches to scholarship. A group of so-called Young Turks—led by David Easton, Morton Kaplan, and Leonard Binder—wanted to make the discipline more empirical. The Young Turks were not mere quantoids, however, and actually were instrumental in the department's hiring of German philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss's arrival at Chicago in the early 1950s set up a valuable dialectic in the Political Science Department, one that sharpened the difference between behavioralists and more traditional antagonists to empirical research, and forced all parties to be more explicit in examining the philosophical foundations of their own premises. Grant McConnell served as a link among the various groups and chaired the department as it became more behavioral, with the addition of scholars such as Aristide Zolberg, David Greenstone, and Duncan MacRae.
Meanwhile, the behavioral movement that grew out of Chicago 1 gained adherents nationwide, with ground-breaking works by Ithiel de Sola Pool, Heinz Eulau, Austin Ranney, Warren Miller, and Gabriel Almond himself. Almond—along with G. Bingham Powell, Sidney Verba, and Harry Eckstein—pioneered behavioral analyses in the comparative context, and Morton Kaplan and Frederick L. Schuman took similar analyses into the field of international relations.8
Initially positivistic in orientation, the behavioralists tended to assume that a political reality existed and could be understood through the objective techniques of scientific inquiry. Behavioralists sought to discover the uniformities in political behavior by systematically collecting and precisely recording data in a manner that allowed replication, which in turn facilitated and encouraged quantification. These data were to be used to test the validity of generalizations, by reference to behavior relevant to larger questions; ethical evaluations were to be held analytically distinct from this process of empirical examination.9
See Easton 1997 for details on the premises of behavioralism and for a full discussion of its critics.
The Nature of Science, and Challenges to Behavioralism
Underlying both Chicago 1 and Chicago 2 are questions of continuing intellectual interest: What is the “scientific” nature of political science? Are we building on what previous generations have learned? Or, as Thomas Kuhn has suggested, does every movement eventually generate a countermovement?10
Kuhn 1970.
Critics of behavioralism argue that it directs attention away from human actors and toward a discipline in which human intentions, choices, and purposes are given too small a part. Others challenge behavioralist claims to value-free political inquiry, charging that behavioralism's ideological presuppositions are merely masked. Still others find behavioral political science so full of specialized and technical jargon that it holds little relevance for the public and politics. Behavioralists are accused of denigrating values and not recognizing the extent to which normative concerns are crucial to political acts. They also are criticized for ignoring both policy and social responsibility and for emphasizing fundamental science rather than applied knowledge relevant for policy makers and politicians.
Critics of behavioralism range from Weberian interpretivists and humanists to postbehavioralists, traditional institutionalists, and Marxist sociologists. The original followers of what came to be called postbehavioralism11
This term was coined by Easton (1969), in an APSA presidential address that broke with behavioralism and created controversy among Easton's former behavioral colleagues, signaling a critical turning point in the movement.
Ironically, two of the most prominent sets of challengers to behavioralism came from the University of Chicago. The first were the traditional Straussians—Leo Strauss himself, as well as Joseph Cropsey and Herbert Storing—who never accepted the basic behavioral tenets in the first place. They rejected the idea of a science of politics, thus effectively opting out of many of the disciplinary debates for years in order to focus on more purely intellectual efforts in theory, constitutional law, and policy. The other challengers were rational choice theorists, who swarmed out of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago to take the political science discipline—indeed, all of social science—by storm in the 1970s.12
The Economics Department at Chicago was not the only intellectual center for rational choice theorists, but it did play a critical intellectual role in political science's move toward rational choice. See Monroe 1991 for an overview and counterviews by some of the main participants in the debate—e.g., Herbert Simon and William Riker.
Movements frequently change as they become successful, with adherents often grasping the essence of an idea but missing much of the subtlety expressed by the developers of the new paradigm. In speaking with founders of the behavioral and postbehavioral movement as part of the research for this comment, I discovered some puzzlement at the way critics had homogenized behavioralism with regard to the attention paid to the subject or human actor. For example, Easton felt that his approach using systems analysis made one of the major subsystem variables the “personality system.” In society, it is seen as co-equal in analytic importance with the other subsystems of politics, social structure, and culture. The so-called black box, which presumably represents the political subsystem, responds to the influence of these other three major subsystems. The input of political support, which led to studies of trust of political authorities, relied heavily on testing subjective attitudes. Beyond this, however, survey research and opinion studies developed elaborate measures to take into account subjective attitudes toward leaders, policies, et cetera, and even had personality indices (authoritarian personality scales such as the F scale) for leaders and followers. These studies of authoritarian behavior came straight from social psychology. Finally, of course, Lasswell was a critical part of the behavioral movement but was hardly a structuralist indifferent to subjective elements.
I remember being baffled, my first year in grad school, as Philippe Schmitter drew a diagram on the blackboard and spoke of a mysterious “little black box” into which something called “inputs” went and from which something called “outputs” emanated.
Although a few predominantly behavioral departments still exist, the important philosophical distinctions between rational choice and behavioral-ism are now frequently ignored in practice, as behavioralists and rational choice theorists join to combat perceived attacks (from postmodernists) on “science.” What remains of behavioralism—Chicago 2—thus has become incorporated into conventional wisdom.
Conclusion
So has the Chicago school been forgotten in contemporary political science, as Almond suggests? This depends a great deal on what we mean by the Chicago school.
If we adopt a narrow conception of the Chicago school, restricting it to Chicago 1 as described by Almond, then the profession does appear to have moved past the Chicago school, on to the postbehavioral period, to the rational choice era, and finally to postmodernism and the age of Perestroika.
If we adopt a slightly broader view of the Chicago school, however, and include Chicago 2, then we can argue that the school is forgotten, but hardly gone. Indeed, one can plausibly assert that the ongoing importance of the Chicago school has exceeded even the wildest dreams of its initial adherents. Such a claim is based on two factors:
(1) The prebehavioral Chicago 1, which Almond discusses, provided the intellectual foundation for behavioral political science. As such, the Chicago school (taken to include both Chicago 1 and Chicago 2) was the dominant postwar movement in the discipline—and it continues to play a major role in many postbehavioralist departments today.
(2) With help from the university's Economics Department, the Political Science Department at Chicago played a critical role in the development of rational choice theory during the 1970s. It did so by filling in the little black box of behavioralism, proposing a psychological model of how the mind works: decision makers pursue perceived self-interest, subject to information and opportunity costs. The focus of the debate between behavioralists and rational choice theorists concerned the nature of scientific analysis of political life. This focal point still holds today, even though rational choice has supplanted behavioralism as the scientific cutting edge in the discipline, and even though rational choice itself now confronts intellectual challenges to its exclusive claims to scientific legitimacy. The discussion over the feasibility and nature of the scientific study of politics, begun by Merriam and his colleagues, thus continues.
Finally, we can adopt an even broader interpretation of what the “Chicago school” means, and think of the Chicago school as an iconoclastic movement defying the hegemony of existing approaches and challenging political scientists to explore various kinds of scientific inquiry. Such a conceptualization captures the essence of both Chicago 1 and Chicago 2. It encompasses the rational choice approach. It also aptly characterizes the current Chicago department, which has played an active role in Perestroika—a movement that encourages methodological pluralism, challenges the hegemonic scientific claims of both the behavioral and the rational choice approaches, and is forcing contemporary political scientists to think deeply about the scientific premises underlying our own work.
If we adopt this broad view, then the Chicago school is still very much alive. It exists in those few remaining behavioral departments. It exists in the many postbehavioral departments and in the rational choice approach that challenged behavioralism. But it also exists in the Perestroika movement that questions the narrowness of the scientific approach begun by Merriam and his friends. This is an irony, I suspect, that Gosnell, Lasswell, and Merriam would have appreciated.
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