AUTHOR, ARGUMENTS, AND IMPACT

From across the Atlantic, The American Science tends to be viewed as the quintessential expression of an abidingly empiricist English mentality, which has been identified by some critics as a major obstacle to the development of a modern discipline of political science in Britain (Hayward 1991). A closer inspection of its main lines of argument, and the eclectic set of intellectual influences that it exhibited, reveals such a characterization to be misleading. The kaleidoscope of ideas that the book brought together had its roots in the medley of theories and minds that Crick encountered during his years as an undergraduate student at the London School of Economics (LSE). Founded in 1895 by the moderate socialists gathered around the influential Fabian Society, LSE was home to an unusually wide (in British terms) array of ideological and philosophical perspectives, encompassing Karl Popper, Friedrich von Hayek, and Michael Oakeshott in the years when Crick studied there (Dahrendorf 1995). The unusual fusion of styles of argument located inThe American Science—with historical, philosophical, Mannheimian, and ideological idioms bumping against each other—reflects this diversity, as well as Crick's facility for creative intellectual synthesis.²

Bernard Crick.

If this work is read alongside a bevy of scholarly and journalistic publications that he authored from the mid-1950s (Crick 1954a, 1954b, 1961, 1962), it becomes clear that Crick's position was neither straightforwardly anti-American nor antipolitical science, as his interpreters have assumed. He was a keen student of American history and wrote admiringly of some of the major figures of the Founding era (1961). In terms of political science, he penned several influential essays on the nature of political scholarship and its importance as a University-level subject (1971, 1980a, 1980b). American thinking about politics filtered into his own educational experiences in different ways. Some of the competing ideas about the study of society, and political science especially, which he encountered at LSE, reflected the percolation of political science into some of the leading British universities in the 1950s (Kenny 2006). Crick was well versed in the work of some of the LSE's former and contemporary luminaries, several of whom had made important contributions to debates about politics, the state, and political analysis within the American profession. This group included Graham Wallas, the first Director of the LSE and one of the major early twentieth-century figures to ground theoretical claims about politics on the “facts” of human psychology (Wiener 1991). Crick was familiar, too, with the thinking about associations, statehood, and the political outlined in the popular lectures delivered by the emigré socialist intellectual Harold Laski at LSE (Crick 1989). The latter's travels to the United States played a major role in bringing pluralism to the fore in American political thought in the early decades of the twentieth century (Gunnell 2006). Crick himself embarked on his doctoral studies intending to produce a thesis that sounded impeccably Chicago-esque: “The Method and Scope of Political Science: The Problem of the Integration of Empirical Social Research into the Study of Politics” (Crick 1980, 297–98). As is often the case with talented and zealous graduate students, he encountered a crisis of faith soon afterwards, and subsequently abandoned this project.

These different influences are apparent within the main lines of argument that Crick developed in his doctoral thesis and the book he published three years later.³

In thesis and book Crick identified a set of interlocking values that together gave shape to the “Lockean unanimity” that, he argued, came to define Americanism itself in the decades after the founding of the republic (1959, 8–11). The idea that politics should be taught and studied as an independent subject within universities had from the outset been conjoined with the notion that it ought to serve the republic in molding the consciousness of American citizens, particularly in the context of successive and ongoing waves of immigration. Relatedly, the notion that social and political phenomena could be understood on a par with the natural world was underpinned by some deeply rooted liberal assumptions about politics, nationhood, and morality. Out of this mélange developed the peculiarly American notion that the academic discipline of politics could and should serve two masters equally—the requirements of a constitutional democracy and the aspiration to scientific explanation. The celebration of science in nineteenth-century liberal thought reflected a powerful fetish for technology and an understanding of societal progress imagined as the fulfillment of America's manifest destiny (37–48). Both of these presumptions, Crick maintained, were protected by the depth and breadth of the prevailing liberal pattern of thinking, which rendered unnecessary the reexamination of fundamental political arrangements and foundational values.

Crick was by no means alone in attempting to attack the encroachment of scientism in social and political research in this period. The American Science was published at the very moment when “behaviorism” was beginning to gather momentum in the United States, and gave a temporary focus and voice to a number of the discontents and resentments welling up within the American profession in response to this emergent current (e.g., Cook 1960; Monypenny 1960). The latter formed a crucial backdrop to the formation of the Caucus for a New Political Science a decade later. Crick undoubtedly anticipated the sharp turn against some of the precepts and implications of a liberal-inclined political science that characterized this critical current in the late 1960s, although his take on liberalism was very different from that of later critics. In his argument, liberal political science and paradigms like Marxism were equally deficient because of their tendency to treat the domain of politics as comprehensible in respect to social processes, laws, or facts of human psychology that emanated from outside it. Against such meta-assumptions, he countered that there were no adequate underlying explanations or noncontradictory resolutions of the conflicts that human society engenders. Ideological perspectives founded on the illusion that there were, brought a dangerous impatience with politics in their wake. Even avowedly liberal approaches to politics, therefore, could unwittingly prepare the way for authoritarian policy outcomes (Crick 1959, 213–48; 1954a). Although his thinking may have anticipated aspects of the agenda of the Caucus, it is important to appreciate that it did not itself constitute a direct influence on most Caucus participants. The anger and energy of reform-minded political scientists of this later period stemmed from the impact of forces such as the women's movement, civil rights, debates about social inequality, and the moral fallout from the Vietnam war, not the historically inclined republicanism favored by Crick.

At this time of its publication, however, The American Science created a stir. Indeed, few first books by junior British scholars have achieved the kind of profile that it briefly enjoyed. Reviewed in most of the main journals, it received some sharply critical responses and outright hostility, as well as words of praise and approval. Among the most perceptive of the first wave of critical responses were the objections offered by the English-educated scholar George Catlin (1960), a leading advocate of “a conception of a rigorous science of politics dedicated to an end in action” (Gunnell 2005, 599). He queried Crick's reliance on simplified caricatures of national intellectual traditions and his inability to capture the mobility and interactivity of ideas and intellectuals in Anglo-American political science. Other reviewers were less polite than Catlin in expressing their dislike for the polemical, occasionally ad hominem, character of Crick's commentary (Garceau 1959). Yet the very acidity that infused some of Crick's discussion of the normative importance and liberal character of the aspiration to establish a science of politics as a value-free mode of enquiry constituted a major part of the book's appeal in some quarters. Viewed from a more distant temporal vantage point, it is clear that his trenchantly critical focus helped establish this book as an important source of inspiration for a subsequent strand of critically minded disciplinary historiography.

CRICK AND THE POLITICAL

The American Science has therefore come to occupy a curious place within the collective memory of the discipline. It remains an almost ubiquitous presence within the footnotes of disciplinary historians and clearly inspired some later writers (e.g., Ricci 1984). Yet it has left little by way of a lasting intellectual imprint on disciplinary critics, right up to and including the recent Perestroika current, and it exercises little substantive influence over contemporary historians of the discipline.⁴

Crick provided the fullest elaboration of his thinking on these themes in the book he published several years after The American Science—his best-selling In Defence of Politics (1973; first published 1962). This theoretically focused attempt to revive insights from the ancient and modern republican traditions in the context of a discussion of the trans-temporal characteristics of political communities established him as a major figure within political theory in Britain. Politics, he maintained, constituted both a particular mode of governance that had been adopted by only a portion of human communities, and a demarcated field of human endeavor—the processes and institutions through which the interests of members of the body politic were publicly aired and defended. The political mode of governance also represented a way of organizing social interrelations that taught citizens the impossibility of the simultaneous satisfaction of all of their interests. On this basis, he argued forcefully against two established tendencies in modern intellectual conceptions of politics: (1) the appeal of theoretical ideas that idealized the creation of some kind of nonpolitical consensus as a vantage-point from which social dysfunctions and political divisions might be objectively viewed and (2) the abandonment of the ancient notion that politics was intrinsically civilizing for those who participated fully within it (1973).

In relation to the first of these commitments, he maintained that human communities that chose to regulate their affairs through political systems, processes, and debate were far more likely to manage the unavoidably divergent interests and values of their members in sustainable and peaceful ways (Crick 1971, 1973). On this basis, he dismissed a host of contemporary ideological and philosophical attempts to erect and defend other a priori principles of political societies—especially theories founded on claims about the human personality, the merits of tradition, or the conditions appropriate to the exercise of rationality (all familiar parts of the Anglo-American theoretical scene in the 1950s). The recurrent dream of an escape from, or transcendence of, the political foundered on the ontological reality that humans possess a myriad of divergent interests and values that cannot be resolved through a higher order conception of rationality or interest. Without politics, there can be no “…order to the pluralism and variety of civilized society, the thing which enables us to enjoy variety without suffering either anarchy or the tyranny of single truths” (1973, 26).

It followed for Crick that a healthy civic culture and the provision of opportunities for individuals to act and deliberate as citizens were vital ingredients for a community committed to political modes of governance and self-regulation. Citizenship was enhanced, he believed, through the experiential learning of the values of compromise, moral independence, and the importance of securing provisional agreements on questions about which citizens disagreed fundamentally. The freedom of the individual in modern democracy was closely associated with the achievement of an independent public domain, where notions of the common good could be worked out by, and made binding on, all (1977).

Read retrospectively with this broader pattern of thinking in view, the main lines of argument of The American Science can be understood as flowing from an evolving republican–liberal sensibility. This informed many of Crick's reflections on the appropriate nature of political inquiry and education more generally, and has continued to animate his later academic writings and more recent political career.⁵

These ideas about politics and democratic education shaped much of Crick's thinking about the philosophical underpinnings and ideological character of the political science tradition, but have largely disappeared from the collective memory of the book. Ironically, Crick or his publishers bear some responsibility for this neglect. Its final text omitted only two sections from his doctoral thesis. One of these was the chapter on “Political Science and Citizenship” (1956, 531–60) in which he expressed this normative duality very clearly:

AN ANGLO-AMERICAN CRITIC OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Viewed in the round, Crick's thinking reflects a mélange of roots, influences, and resonances that obviate simplistic categorizations of the supposedly rival intellectual traditions located in England, Continental Europe, and the United States. As Catlin (1960) observed at the time of the book's publication, and as more recent commentators have reiterated (Farr 2006), approaches to the history of political science that cling to such premises remain a major obstacle to improved understanding of the discipline's intellectual history. Crick's own thinking bears the particular imprint of the time he spent at two of the leading political science departments of the 1950s—Berkeley (where he was a Visiting Fellow, 1955–1956) and Harvard (where he was a Teaching Fellow, 1952–1954) (Gunnell 2004, 258). He was deeply influenced by the group of political theorists assembled around Norman Jacobson (1978) and Sheldon Wolin (1961) at the former, and the mode of “epic” political theorizing through which they articulated important critiques of modern liberalism. Wolin was in this period refining the thinking that was to figure in his hugely influential account of the tradition of Western political philosophy, Politics and Vision (1961). At least two of the ideas at the heart of this study carried directly into Crick's work: Wolin's classically inspired conception of politics and citizenship as akin to a vocation, not a set of disembodied rights or mechanically acquired skills; and his critique of the tendency in Western philosophy to subsume politics underneath the tendrils of moral philosophy (287– 94).

The author of The American Science also owed debts to the scholarly traditions associated with the kinds of historicopolitical theorizing practiced in some of the leading departments of the Northeast. Above all, he absorbed Louis Hartz's historical interpretation of American political development. The American Science faithfully reproduced the Hartzian picture of an American political culture distinguished by “the absence of serious ideological or class conflict and the presence of a fundamental agreement on values.” Crick also followed Hartz and other “consensus theorists” in regarding “the social sciences themselves” as “important symptoms and causes of the fundamental agreement on basic political values associated with the hegemony of liberalism” (Huntington 1974, 2, 7).

Samuel Huntington (1974, 8) sheds light on another key source for Crick when he observes the paradigmatic impact of Tocqueville's writings on this generation of political historian. Tocqueville's writings on America form the backdrop to all of the pieces that Crick produced during his years in the United States (Crick 1963). He was deeply influenced by Tocqueville's sense of the dangers for a democratic order represented by the twin vices of social conformism and radical individualism. There is also a less tangible, and perhaps less conscious, sense in which Crick sought to emulate Tocqueville. He reveled in the role of traveling scholar-critic pioneered by the stream of intellectual visitors from Europe—Tocqueville included—who refined their own social and cultural thinking through commentary on American affairs (Liebersohn 1994). This tradition developed a particular tributary around the emergent discipline of political science, to which a number of British-based luminaries made important contributions—James Bryce, Wallas, Laski, and Catlin among others. The importance of the transactions, exchanges, disagreements, and forms of mutual learning occasioned by these intellectual migrants (as well as by a number of American scholars who visited and took up residence in Britain's political science community) has been somewhat eclipsed in the discipline's historiography by the more dramatic and contentious character of the German emigration of the inter-war years (Farr 2006). As various historians have observed, this ongoing pattern of Anglo-American intellectual interchange also forms a vital aspect of the development of ideas about the discipline in both contexts (Gunnell 2004; Kavanagh 2003). In Crick's case, the peculiar dialectic of distaste and admiration for American developments expressed by Tocqueville and other European critics provides an important clue to the character of his own response to American political science and thought (Crick 1963).