CROSSING OVER

In order to serve in France during the World War I, Catlin, in 1914, vacated an Oxford “exhibition,” once held by Harold Laski. While eventually waiting “‘recall’” to Oxford and critically reflecting on what he took to be the limitations of what he had learned at that institution, he began to formulate the ideas that would eventually inform his book. He later remarked that, during the war, “at least we lived in a real world, unlike that of some of the Oxford society which for me was to follow.” His examiner at Oxford was Ernest Barker, who had demoted Catlin's scholarship to an “exhibition,” because, Catlin claimed, “he thought I plagiarized his own ideas.” Although he was offered fellowships at both Exeter and the University of Minnesota, he eventually took a position at Sheffield, but when informed that the college did not, and would not, “teach political philosophy and science,” he decided finally that in England “there was no room to take wing.” Cornell trumped Harvard's offer of a fellowship by awarding him a “professorship” and allowing him, at the same time, to write his dissertation. Oxford, even after replacing the traditional study of the Greats, “did not display active interest” in inviting him to return, and he settled down at Cornell to focus on what he considered to be the pressing problems of world peace, the exercise of power in politics, and the nature and role of a science of politics.

Catlin took the position at Cornell in 1924, and, in the same year, with the encouragement of the Cornell psychologist Bradford Titchener, finished his dissertation. A short time later, he was invited by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Council to come to New York City and study Prohibition, and it was here that he met Merriam and Harold Lasswell and subsequently not only became deeply involved with American political scientists who were dedicated to propagating a new science of politics but also gave new depth to that vision and joined it conceptually to the emerging empirical and normative pluralist paradigm. What attracted Catlin to the American scene was not simply the growing emphasis on empiricism but the manner in which this perspective was linked to a commitment to practical application which he believed had been so lacking at Oxford. With respect to the latter, Catlin found in the United States the intellectual ambience that was conducive to this goal. He considered Merriam the “Moses” of the new political science, and Arthur Bentley its “Grandma Moses,” and with Lasswell, he “maintained an unbroken partnership … We found political science a chaos. We left it tidied up,” and “with the pluralists we deposed the sovereign national state.” He later took umbrage, however, at Bernard Crick's (1959) designation of the discipline as the American Science of Politics, because, Catlin noted, his own initial “thoughts were shaped at Oxford” by his work on Hobbes as well as through contact with individuals such as Graham Wallas and Laski. He left Cornell in 1935, but continued to pursue, until the end of his life, the connections between political science and political action (Catlin 1972).

Catlin's book was the product of a gestation period of several years before he was finally impelled to “adventure to America in order to have free time for study” (Catlin 1927c, x–xii), and it incorporated some of his early articles (Catlin 1925, 1927a, 1927b). He conceived the work as a contribution to a genre that had been “almost untouched” since Aristotle, that is, a conception of a rigorous science of politics dedicated to an end in action. Although he deemed it an “unsystematic” exercise, it was more thorough and specific than anything produced at that time by his American heroes who have been more commonly associated with the emerging scientific persuasion.

The political and intellectual context of the book, as Catlin perceived it, was the postwar era and a general “revulsion against the doctrine of the omnipotent State” as it was manifest both in politics and in the study of politics. This turn away from the theory of the state, Catlin claimed, had its roots (as Barker had already stressed) in the English Whig tradition of natural rights, tractarian religion, and, the more recent, forces of trade unionism and internationalism. These positions were reinforced by a variety of pluralist arguments which, even prior to the recent “Fascist reaction,” had “confronted the theory of the absolute State power with a realistic presentation of the facts of the governmental process” and a new vision of democracy (1927c, ix). Catlin's only quarrel with pluralism (and he had Laski in mind) was that much of it was still attached to and grounded in a liberal “ethical philosophy” rather than a descriptive, empirical, and “dispassionate study of actual human behavior” and “the rules of political conduct.” The task that Catlin set for himself was to find a scientific and empirical basis for democratic theory, a search that was to define much of mainstream political science through the remainder of the century (e.g., Dahl 1956; Herring 1940). Although he believed that pluralism was “ethically superior,” it was too often approached as another abstract “ideal” which became a form of “dogmatism” and which, if it lacked scientific grounding, had “no better guarantee of issuing in practical political action” informed by a grasp of the “basal principles of political method.” Knowledge of such principles, as in the case of all “the great conquests of man over nature,” would, he argued, demonstrate what was “feasible” and provide a means of social “control” (1927c, x–xi). Although Laski had not supported his return to England, Catlin noted that he was indebted to Laski as well as to Barker but also to the American sociologist Harry Elmer Barnes who had been one of the early proponents of both normative and descriptive theories of pluralism as well as the introduction of empirical analysis into political theory.

Although it is widely, but incorrectly, believed that, during the 1920s, political scientists explicitly rejected historical studies in favor of the pursuit of a more rigorous science, Catlin was the only person to undertake an extensive critique of history in these terms. Although historical research, he argued, should properly seek to find out what had happened in the past, as a prelude to gaining control of life in the present, it had been bogged down in an unmethodical collection of particular “facts” that revealed little of the “real world” in any manner that could contribute to a “scientific study of politics” (7, 22). Although in the physical sciences, “data have long been arranged with a view to the yielding of practical and theoretical results,” historical study, he argued, was a “chaos” dominated by the anecdotal reflections of moralists, artists, idealists, and antiquarians. Even the “scientific” school of history mistook “accuracy” in the collection of facts for real science and failed to provide any “utilitarian treatment” (23, 55, 66). If history was to be “useful,” it was necessary to “generalize” and compare and to focus on its “contemporary,” “institutional,” and “psychological” dimensions. History, itself, Catlin argued, “is and never can be a science; but it provides the data for the social sciences” and must be “scientifically prepared” through “the deductive method with a hypothesis” and by techniques of measurement and quantification which would make it possible “to administer appropriate and scientific legislative and administrative remedies” in the pursuit of “social therapy” (1927c, 67, 70–71, 74–76, 81–82, 84).

Catlin's principal argument was for the adoption and application of what he took to be a universal scientific method of generalizing from particulars, which could be the basis of an authentic law-governed science of politics. When, however, he employed phrases such as “the method” or “methodology of politics,” he was usually referring to the subject matter of politics and to a general “rational ‘form’ or schema” which, he argued, could be construed as informing individual and group behavior—what he would designate as the exercise of will and the search for power. What was required, he argued, much as David Easton (1953) would claim a generation later in his critiques of “hyperfactualism” and the poverty of general theory, was a “Theory of Social Structure” and a “grasp of the fact that social phenomena are interconnected in a social system.” Such an approach, he insisted, would yield a useful definition of politics and a basis for “observations of social behavior” and the “study of the political structure.” Catlin claimed that this kind of theory had already been achieved by economists through their model of “economic man” and that a similar strategy should be utilized in the study of politics (1927c, 83–85).

In defending the “possibility of a political science,” Catlin drew upon Karl Pearson's account of theoretical instrumentalism, that is, the claim that scientific theories and laws are conventional constructs and constitute a “logical structure superimposed on the observation of a highly frequent occurrence.” Theories and facts were viewed as separate, yet theories were held to be both derived from and tested by factual observations. This image of theory would be further elaborated by later positivist and logical empiricist philosophers of science, and, in secondary and tertiary form, it would become the received account of science characteristic of mainstream political science during the behavioral era (e.g., Easton 1965; Lasswell and Kaplan 1950). Catlin noted that although scientific methods were often unpopular and misunderstood, it was now important for “Politics” to “clear for itself the forest of detail by the use of abstract hypotheses and of a scientific method.” One of the things that would separate Elliott and Catlin, and subsequently antibehavioralists and behavioralists, was the latter's commitment to the idea that neither politics nor political inquiry was substantively autonomous. Following Wallas, and Walter Lippmann, Catlin argued that it was really human nature and society that were at issue, and Catlin, like behavorialists after midcentury, took politics to be a domain that was analytically distinguished and constituted. He even claimed, similar to later political scientists such as Robert Dahl (1956), that the institution of “Government is a relatively unimportant part of Politics,” if compared with the significance of social processes such as group interaction and the pursuit of power (1927c, 91, 93, 95, 99).

Catlin maintained that because human nature was complex, a science of politics required a radically interdisciplinary approach rather than divided “departmental knowledge.” A predictive science should be modeled on the form of the natural sciences and entailed that “Politics must view social phenomena externally.” A science of “pure politics is limited to naturalism” and “consists of a body of verifiable and systematic knowledge gathered by observation and experiment” rather than “a conglomerate of historical excursus, of belles lettres about ‘liberty’ and the like, and of debating points prepared for a party platform.” In order to simplify the facts of observation, a concept of the political “process” was required rather than a focus on, what he considered to be, ghostly entities such as the state as it had been conceptualized in the past. What should be studied was the statistically constituted “‘averageness’ of human nature” and “the conduct of the average man” and group organized around assumed motives such as the pursuit of self-interest. Catlin believed that such a notion of instrumental rationality could be detached from the ideology of classical economics and become the basis of a hypothetical “working fiction” of “an abstract political man” or “laboratory creature” representing a “conscious formalism.” Such a model was not to be construed as a claim about reality but as a tool that had explanatory utility and served the function of undermining “uncritical theories” based on obsolete concepts such as sovereignty. This, then, was his vision of the possibility of political science, but, Catlin argued, “there is yet no such thing as a political science in any admissible sense,” and “hitherto the unguarded field of political theory has been a veritable Valley of Hinnon wherein men have been permitted to cast without challenge the rubbish of uncritical speculation and the burning oil of enthusiasm, to fling the bodies of opponents and to sacrifice to strange idols” (1927c, 106–7, 112–13, 126, 130–31, 141–44).

Because, in Catlin's view, there was no indigenous subject matter of political science, which predetermined its domain, he was forced to confront the issue of the discipline's “place among the social sciences.” Although he noted that many fields such as law and history had attempted to annex and submerge the “middle province” of politics, there were, he claimed, sufficient heuristic grounds for viewing it as “a realm in its own right.” Although it might seem that “to pass from political to economic theory is like passing from sea-fog to mountain air,” there was reason to move beyond an economic interpretation of history to a political one and to focus on political structures comparable to what Durkheim had spoken of as objective social facts. Yet, as he suggested that E. R. A. Seligman and Beard had demonstrated, in their studies of economics, politics, and history, attempts either to define “social determinants” in terms of strict disciplinary boundaries or to unify the social sciences were mistakes and bound to fail. There was “not one social science but many jostling each other,” and any hope “precisely to define frontiers must be futile.” He claimed, nevertheless, that because the objects of social science were analytically delimited, political science had as much standing as any other discipline and could carve out a domain based on a concept of “man in his relation to the wills of his fellows in control, submission and accommodation” (1927c, 163–64, 168, 205).

Catlin's most detailed and focused argument, which, within political science, was the principal discursive forebear of contemporary rational choice analysis, was devoted to giving an account of “the process of politics” in terms of an extended analogy with economic theory. Once again, he claimed that the success of economics resided in the manner in which it had created an “ideal being,” and “whether economic man exists or ever existed is immaterial.” Although a “mere fiction,” it could function as an abstract “scientific hypothesis.” The idea of a “political man,” based on assumptions such as Hobbes's idea of human beings as creatures “seeking power,” would be a kind of “scientific Frankenstein” who, rather than pursuing money, as in the case of economic man, strived for “man-power” such as that involved in voting (1927c, 213–15, 253, 257).

Although there was no ambiguity about Catlin's commitment to the idea that the ultimate purpose of a science of politics was social transformation and control, or what he referred to as a “science of social hygiene” (Catlin 1927d, 252), he argued that this, paradoxically, required distinguishing between facts and values and separating political science and ethics. Pure science must precede application. In a pluralistic society, science could wield influence over politics only if it was grounded on the neutral authority of objective and impartial methods. Although, as in the case of Woodrow Wilson, Catlin sought a kind of rhetorical assimilation of theory and practice by referring to both the subject matter and the field of inquiry as “Politics,” he insisted on the difference between science and values. Like Lippmann, Wallas, Merriam, Lasswell, and others, Catlin was committed to a science that would inform experts acting in the public realm. “The most important task of democratic education in politics is to inculcate an invincible skepticism about the range of lay political knowledge…The political situation must, then, be approached not with preaching and programmes, but in the attitude of a profession of social medicine” in which ethical theories should not intrude. “It is no more the task of a political scientist to instruct men about political values than it is the task of a teacher of sculpture to instruct his pupils in theories and ideals of artistic expression.” The role was only to provide material and technique (Catlin 1927c, 288, 295, 299).

Catlin urged “moral detachment,” the notion that “Politics is concerned with means; Ethics with ends,” that Politics “studies what is, not what should be,” and that values are grounded in aesthetic rather than scientific judgments. Despite what he believed was the contrary view manifest in much of the history of political thought as well as in contemporary studies of that history, he insisted that there is “no one value or system of values which alone can be held or known to be laudable or right.” But, at the same time, he claimed that better values were grounded in better knowledge and that such knowledge was the answer to the salvation of civilization. Although he argued that science could tell us what will happen but not what we should do, he assumed that knowledge of what will happen was practically compelling. As in the case of Dewey and the pragmatists, he believed that the progress of science would ultimately both make clear the proper value choices and provide a means of implementing those choices (1927c, 299, 301, 310, 323, 325, 349).

Albert Einstein noted that Catlin was “one of the first in our time to treat systematically the question of linking theory with practice in politics” (Catlin 1972, 58). Dewey, reviewing Catlin's book along with the Harvard philosopher Ernest Hocking's Man and the State, noted that both stressed psychology, but although Hocking held on to an obsolescent defense of the state, “the impression left upon me by [Catlin's] book is one of wholesomeness, like a refreshing breeze blowing through a close atmosphere.” He judged it to be “brilliantly written” and “pragmatic” in purpose with a “brilliant critique of various schools of history-writing” (Dewey 1927a). Robert Crane (1927), a strong supporter of the new scientism, maintained that, despite some faults, Catlin's work had “the distinction of offering the sole constructive suggestion of recent years in the methodology of politics. A. Gordon Dewey (1927), another advocate of empirical approaches in political science, worried that the individualistic economic model might not take account adequately of the now accepted fact that “effective political activity is the activity of groups,” but he praised the work as exemplifying the methodological direction that the discipline should follow at a time when it was in a “state of flux” and seeking to probe behind “the visible organs of government.”

It is not surprising that what drew the most negative reaction were Catlin's advocacy of interdisciplinary studies and his depreciation of history. George H. Sabine (1928), who would later join the philosophy department at Cornell and whose work, a decade later, would dominate the study of the history of political theory, agreed that in some respects the general spirit of the book did reflect Aristotle's project, but he noted that the historian would be “ill-advised” to accept the role of fact-collector for social scientists and that, with respect to the adaptation of economics, this “cold-blooded imitation of one science by another” was inappropriate in the study of politics where, for example, prediction was more difficult. Beard (1927) went considerably further and suggested not only that economists would be surprised by the degree to which Catlin had credited them with powers of prediction but also that “if this procedure offers a correct working hypothesis, then darkness enshrouds all those who labor under the impression that politics is fundamentally concerned with the state and government and with the social and economic factors that appear to determine, or at all events condition, their forms and operation.” What is interesting, however, is that neither Sabine nor Beard was theoretically and philosophically far removed from Catlin and that what bothered them was primarily the matter of the demarcation of academic terrain.

In 1930, Catlin published A Study of the Principles of Politics, which was dedicated to Titchener and Wallas and in which he more explicitly noted his debt to Dewey. This work received less attention, probably because it was in part essentially a reprise of the earlier book, but also because by this point there were few political scientists who were inclined to challenge his conceptions of either science or democracy. But he again stressed the need to turn away from typical studies of “political philosophy and the humanities” and toward the development of a naturalistic interdisciplinary science of society based on general laws, and he argued ever more strongly that such a science should be devoted to the utilitarian goal of social control through the manipulation of public opinion. Harold Gosnell (1933), one of the early innovators in the application of quantitative methods in political science, praised Catlin as a pioneer, but strangely, one might think, Merriam (1931) had little that was positive to say about the book. Part of the problem was an underlying theoretical disagreement that centered around Laski, to whom, Merriam noted, Catlin made frequent reference and with whom he seemed concerned about “reconciling his doctrines.” Merriam doubted “that what we need is another still more orthodox Grammar of Politics” and an attempt to reconcile “Austinians and Pluralists.” This was a very odd characterization of the work, but Merriam concluded that, on the whole, the book did not demonstrate “maturity of thought, facility in generalization, penetration, and vision.” What is once again important to note is that Merriam was not a defender of pluralism as an account of democracy, and that despite Catlin's insistence on distinguishing between ethical and empirical claims, he embraced pluralism as a democratic theory.

Despite Merriam's criticism, Catlin remained steadfast in his defense of the Chicago school, and he actually provided the most elaborate and articulate statement of the vision of science with which Merriam and Lasswell are commonly associated. In reviewing Lasswell's World Politics and Personal Insecurity Catlin noted that it was “one of the five most important books on political theory since the war” and part of a trilogy which included Merriam's Political Power and T. V. Smith's Beyond Conscience. Together these works, he suggested, signaled the triumph of one of the principal strands of political theory that, after the war, constituted the revolt against “the idealistic doctrine of the right-wing successors of Hegel.” The “Chicago School of Philosophy,” Catlin claimed, “became incarnate with Professors Merriam, Park, Smith and Lasswell, as the Chicago School of Politics” which, in its turn away from “political philosophies of values,” and toward quantitative and interdisciplinary studies, brought to an end the contempt once directed toward the idea of a “science of politics, as a mechanics of means.” Catlin predicted that this corpus would be “more important than Marxism, because it would “substitute exact, verified and impartial knowledge for political theology and messianism” and supplement principles and values with “a science of the practicable, acquainted with the limits set by human nature and natural law.” In the end, he wondered only if the members of the Chicago School would not be “well advised to direct their attention to the revival of natural law, not, however, treated on the “ethical plane of the Schoolman, but on the plane of objective, scientific inquiry” (1935, 278–81). Within the next decade, the study of natural law would, with the presidency of Robert Maynard Hutchins and the appointment of individuals such as Leo Strauss, indeed, come to Chicago, but not in the manner that Catlin anticipated. In the 1920s, however, it was from Harvard that the basic critique of pluralism and the vision of a new science emanated.

HOLDING THE LINE

In some respects, one might equate Elliott's response to the new theory of democracy, and the methodological claims attending it, to that of the eminent Swiss/American natural scientist Louis Agassiz who contributed so much to modern science but, in the face of an overwhelming acceptance of Darwin's theory, remained one of the last holdouts for a vision of intelligent creation and its social as well as natural implications. Even Darwin, as he finished the Origin of the Species, did not expect any quick agreement from many of his contemporaries who had for so long conceived of the world differently, and Elliott spoke for those who could not conceive of democracy as based on other than communal unity and of political science as detached from values.

Elliott was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, attended private school, and graduated from Vanderbilt where, before becoming a political scientist, he was one of the Fugitive Poets. The latter were originally several friends, including, most notably, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson, who met in a salon atmosphere in Nashville. The group disbanded at the beginning of World War I but came together again in 1919 as the individuals drifted back to Vanderbilt. Elliott had been associated with this gathering as early as 1915, but, along with Robert Penn Warren, joined the now more formal association shortly after they began to publish, in 1922, the poetry journal, The Fugitive. While studying in Königsberg, Germany, Elliott submitted a nostalgic contribution, “A Critque of Pure Reason,” in which he lamented his current situation as a “metaphysicked fool” who longed for the countryside and communal culture of rural Tennessee (Elliott 1928a). The “fugitives” were more diverse than the later “Agrarians” who, after 1928, included Ransom, Davidson, Tate, and Warren and who were the authors of the manifesto I'll Take My Stand. The agrarians were distinctly romantic idealists seeking to recover a lost sense of community which they associated with the old South, but both groups were, on the whole, characterized by an antimodernist spirit which was reflected in Elliott's work.

Like Catlin, Elliott served in France during the war, and, like Tate and Warren, attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he eventually took his degree in the new Politics, Philosophy, and Economics curriculum initiated by A. D. Lindsay at Balliol. After teaching briefly at Berkeley, Elliott joined the Harvard faculty, at the invitation of President A. Lawrence Lowell, in 1923, at the age of 27, where he taught for 41 years before accepting a position, prior to retirement, at American University. At Harvard, he directed more than one hundred dissertations, and, along with Carl Friedrich, dominated the department, and particularly the field of political theory, for many years. Among his students were some of the most influential, but eventually diversely inclined, future members of the profession including Easton, Sheldon Wolin, Samuel Huntington, and William Riker, and he was the teacher and mentor of Henry Kissinger and Pierre Trudeau. His students often complained of his absence when, from the 1930s to the 1960s, he traveled to Washington for a variety of activities including functioning as a Roosevelt brain-truster, an advisor to Truman, a member of the National Security Council, a confidant of, and later a speech writer for, Richard Nixon, and a state department advisor for both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. His public and university involvement in Cold War politics and his position in international affairs have, in recent years, made him an object of criticism from several quarters as well as the bete noire of Lyndon Larouche.

The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism, Fascism, and the Constitutional State (1928b) was an idiosyncratic book. Completed when Elliott was 31, it consisted in part of a prize essay at Balliol which was an element of his thesis under Lindsay (to whom the book was dedicated and who was an influential academic and public intellectual), but it incorporated, in somewhat repetitive form, several earlier articles (1922, 1924a, 1924b, 1925, 1926, 1927a). Although sympathetic to individuals (such as Burgess, Norman Wilde, Hocking, and R. M MacIver), who in various ways sustained elements of the theory of the state, the work was neither a defense of the Germanic theory that had so long dominated the discourse of the discipline and the juristic conception of sovereignty associated with Austin nor a reflection of a one-dimensional ideology, but it did focus on the concept of the state as something more than government and on the conjunction of the ideas of democracy and community. Although distinctly problematizing pluralism, and less sympathetic to pluralism as a normative claim than were either Lindsay or Barker, upon whose work Elliott in part distinctly drew, his strategy was most generally informed by an attempt to accomodate the social reality of pluralism to the ideal of the state conceived as a people constituting a purposive organic entity. In this sense, the work resembled the argument of his Progressive contemporary, Mary Parker Follett (1918). In Kuhn's (1970) terms, it might be construed as an ad hoc exercise in shoring up a theory that was fast losing support. Like many of his English mentors, Elliott held on to remnants of German idealism while jettisoning much of the Hegelian and post-Hegelian baggage that Americans, particularly after the war, had begun to find distasteful and cumbersome. But most of Elliott's animus was directed toward the American philosophy of pragmatism which he confronted both as a particular argument, in the work of individuals such as William James and Dewey, and as a generic embrace of consequences over principles that he ascribed, in theory and practice, to everyone from Merriam to Mussolini. Pragmatism was, he claimed, the “Zeitgeist” of the era. In this respect, Elliott clearly recognized his enemy. It was in large measure the philosophy of pragmatism that spelled the end of the dominance of idealism and provided inspiration and support for both scientism and pluralism.

For Elliott, the “revolt” that he described and criticized had two symbiotically related dimensions: intellectual, and manifest in areas such as philosophy and social science; and political, characterized by movements such as syndicalism and fascism. Although he divided the book between an account of “pragmatic theory” and a description of “pragmatic politics,” the themes were consistently blended. He counted Bolshevism as part of the modern menace, but, he suggested, it was at least redeemed somewhat by its underlying rationalism which rendered it not “so skeptical of absolutes as pragmatism.” What Elliott was in part responding to was the aftermath of the post-Civil War retreat from abstract principles which was embraced by the founders of pragmatism (Menand 2001). What is ironic, or maybe instructive, is that it was in Harvard Circle that the philosophy of pragmatism most essentially took shape. Although rationalism in politics and in the study of politics had, Elliott claimed, seemed “ascendant” after the war, with the policies of Wilson and the advent of the League of Nations, there was, a decade later, in both theory and practice, and from both the ideological left and right, a “revolt against political rationalism” which entailed a rejection of the “rule of law” and the “constitutional and democratic state.” Although he recognized the political strains created by Reconstruction, “capitalistic industrialism,” and the “Great War” as contributing factors, the underlying problems, he maintained, were the growing influence of “voluntary associations,” or groups, and pragmatism which had provided both many contemporary political movements and social science with “their ideology and their values” (Elliott 1928b, vii).

Among those who influenced him, Elliott counted T. H. Green, MacIver, Leonard Hobhouse, R. B. Perry, Arthur Holcombe, A. N. Whitehead, and Hocking, but it was to Lindsay and, the Russian historian of English feudalism who had come to Oxford, Paul Vinodragoff, that he attributed his greatest debt. Lindsay had joined in criticizing the traditional doctrines of the state, but, while accepting much of English pluralism and socialism, he had held on to the image of the state as an inclusive purposive democratic unit and advocated a theory of constitutional sovereignty which, along with Barker's ideas, was clearly manifest in Elliott's reformulation. In a more negative vein, he specified Laski as his “greatest stimulant” (1928b, x), and this points to the extent to which the most crucial issue was not science but the theory and practice of democratic politics. Laski was a central figure in the introduction of pluralism into the conversation of American political science, and, for several years, he had been a resident scholar at the Harvard Law School and closely involved with pragmatists both in politics and in philosophy. Shortly before Elliott's arrival, Lowell had sent Laski packing after his support of the Boston police strike, an event which loomed large in Elliott's worries about the disestablishment of the constitutional state and the rise of pluralism.

In Elliott's view, which was quite accurate, the state, as both concept and institution, was under attack, and he took this as tantamount to an attack on democracy. The state, he argued, was besieged from within by unions and other organizations, and externally the very idea of the state was rejected on the left by Communism and on the right by “Capitalistic Fascism” as well as by those who advocated a world-state. Although pluralist syndicalists attempted to “discredit” the authority of the state, fascist syndicalists sought to create an excessively unitary form, but both rejected the rule of law and other attributes of liberal rationalism. Contemporary political science, Elliott claimed, had failed to discern these trends, because it had adopted the same basic pragmatic values and adapted and confined itself to a “scientific” description of the “facts” which was separate from values. Although Elliott believed that the field had not gone so far as to deny that a human being is a “purposive animal” with a capacity for reason, it had, he maintained, turned away from rationalism as a philosophy.

Elliott claimed that pragmatism had become so pervasive that it constituted the philosophy of both “revolt and reaction.” In political science, however, the effect had been simply to make the discipline “irrelevant.” Most fundamentally, he attributed this spirit of the age to the ideas of James and Dewey which had spilled over into political science and rendered the mainstream of the discipline “behavioristic in terms of psychology and positivistic in terms of philosophy.” This condition had both brought about a decline in the number of what he considered to be “true political theorists” and, as a consequence, a divide between political science and politicians who both, in their own way, had become infected with “pragmatic skepticism.” Although, he suggested, “absolute idealism” had been a mistake, the pragmatic reaction had gone too far as it infiltrated academic life and displaced the vision of such prophetic individuals as Walt Whitman. Even though he viewed pragmatism as a tributary of a larger anti-intellectualist trend in modern thought, it was most directly implicated in the “revolt against the sovereignty of the personalized state and against parliamentarianism” and stood behind not only syndicalism but also the “more chastened pluralism” of Laski, the “droit objectif of Duguit,” the “Fascist ‘efficiency’ gospel of Mussolini,” the doctrines of Sorel, and nearly every form of political and intellectual extremism (1928b, 7, 9).

Crucial to Elliott's diagnosis was a provenance consisting of an extended dramatic story of the modern decline from the “age of reason” to the “age of skepticism” with latter's rejection of rationalism and “universals.” Because “thought and act form a unity in history, this involved, in political terms, a focus on groups at the expense of both individuals and the state,” but group theory, he argued, “forms the rock upon which Idealism and pragmatism have alike gone aground with their ships of state” (1928b, 31–32). Although the former sought an extreme unity and ended in dictatorship, the latter, as in the case of the “general strike,” set class above state. The revolt against “intellectualism” and the triumph of “modernism,” represented by Dewey's instrumentalism, was, Elliott argued, manifest in all aspects of culture and education from art to science. In political thought, this turn away from rationalism entailed a rejection of the theory of sovereignty that had, in its various forms, been put forth by Dicey, Burgess, W. W. Willoughby, Jellinek, and others. The consequence was that “the life of certain groups within the state, notably trade unions and professional associations, has become a more real thing in men's experience than the common life represented by the state.” For Elliott, fascism was just the group idea taken to the extreme—“if Hegel was the apologist of Prussianism, Duguit [with his reduction of law to power and social solidarity] is not less than of Fascism.” Elliott claimed that while pragmatism may have had a leavening effect on the absolutist tendencies of idealism, it went too far and ended up providing a foundation for the “organically absolutist state of Fascist theory” (1928b, 40, 43, 64).

In political life, the pragmatic attitude and its abandonment of standards of value in favor of a consequentialist ethic had, Elliott argued, undermined stability and become the “mother of a brood of revolutionary theories of the state.” He believed that he had, as an army officer, witnessed this tendency as he observed the May First demonstration in Paris during the armistice in 1919. Here, reason and law disappeared. The solution to this condition, he argued, was legal norms which provided an “accepted rule for fixing political responsibility.” He argued that “constitutional government represents the same effort at political synthesis that conceptual logic does for thought synthesis. It must shun alike pluralism and absolutism” and stop the “centrifugal” tendencies of the former and curtail the “centripetal” forces of the latter. But, above all, constitutional government created a “community” as a “moral whole” in which popular sovereignty became a “reality” and to which the kind of “purpose” that supported democracy could be ascribed (1928b, 70, 75).

Another dimension of Elliott's work was a defense of what had become, in both the United States and England, the contested professional identity of political theory and an engagement of the concomitant issues of the identity of its object of analysis and the relationship between the political theorist and politics. Up to this point, few had ever explicitly suggested that there was any meaningful distinction between political science and political theory, and Merriam had sought to maintain their integration. As the theory of the state, and its philosophical grounds, waned and pluralism, with its emphasis on empirical methods, waxed, there was, as there would be a generation later, an emerging intellectual and professional tension between the general discipline and the subfield of political theory. Both sides of this divide were exercised, as they would continue to be, about the practical relationship between political science and politics, but although the division would persist for the remainder of the century and beyond, the practical concern, by the 1960s, would, in mainstream political science, fade to a discursive shadow. For Elliott, political theory was, rather than mere abstraction, a hybrid endeavor that required attention to facts, but it also consisted of a normative side with an emphasis on principles. Thus the “political theorist,” he argued, was both a “political scientist” and a “political philosopher,” and this combination was an intellectual mirror of the practical role of the “statesman” who must reconcile “means” and “ends.” The problem, however, was that “there is not a single contemporary political theorist in America who is to be counted among those of the first order,” and “most of our professors of politics would disdain the term theorists; they prefer to call themselves political ‘scientists’” (1928b, 5, 84, 85, 217).

Elliott was willing to admit that the concept of sovereignty, as conceived by individuals such as Austin, was a “relic,” but that to view the state as merely one group among others, as Laski, Sorel, G. D. H Cole, Duguit, and others had suggested, was to undermine the very idea of law. Sovereignty might in the end be a “fiction, but it was a necessary one for the survival of constitutional and democratic government. Elliott resurrected a version of the essential tenet of the nineteenth century theory of the state. This was the claim that the “state” referred to the People or sovereign community of which the government was only the agent. Elliott viewed the state as the organized form of the democratic community, but he maintained that the “government is the creature of the political community” and had only limited or delegated sovereignty as opposed to the complete sovereignty of the “federal state created by the Constitution.” In his formulation, “the constitutional state … is the political community,” which is in turn “a community of purpose” (1928b, 107, 247, 298). There can be no doubt that Elliott was by some measures what many would today think of as a Conservative, and he would increasingly move in that direction, but by other criteria, such as certain of his strictures against corporations, acts of government agents under color of law, and the autonomy of religious groups, he appeared quite differently. The core of his argument was that democracy required a national community, and, in this sense, he sounded much like Herbert Croly and other Progressives, and, despite his attack on Dewey, much like the book that Dewey (1927b) published in the previous year—The Public and its Problems.

Despite Elliott's rhetorical assimilation of the generic and specific images of pragmatism, as in his lumping together of James and Machiavelli, there were some actual, if tenuous, intellectual connections, but Elliott's claims about pragmatism as the root philosophy of Fascism and about Dewey's work as “an apology for the Fascist ideal of a ‘disciplined’ national organism” (1928b, 250) resembled the later equation of liberalism and totalitarianism in the work of individuals as diverse as Strauss and Max Horkheimer. On the whole, Elliott did quite a masterful job of weaving together his philosophical claims and his references to current political events, but like many of his generation, such as Friedrich, he was sadly mistaken about the Weimar constitution and in his prediction that, although many countries were abandoning representative democracy, “the new Germany seems steadfast in its practice of parliamentary government, under the benign moderation of Hindenburg” (1928b, 315). And his claims about syndicalist romanticism were in part drawn from the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt who would inspire so many later, and now contemporary, political theorists on both the left and right—although he demurred with respect to Schmidt's critique of parliamentary government. Although Laski's pluralism was the focus of much of Elliott's critique, he, unlike Merriam was heartened by Laski's later efforts in the Grammar of Politics (1925), which he concluded was a work of “political reconstruction” and “may well be the most important contribution that has been made to recent political theory” (1928b, 167). He may not have perceived exactly the direction (Marxist) in which Laski was moving, but, despite the residual pluralism, he was impressed by the new focus on state action and ethical issues.

Elliott supplemented his critique of pragmatism and pragmatist politics with his “co-organic” theory of groups. This was based on his essay written 6 years earlier in which he argued that a group possesses two kinds of consensus—one that is based primarily on economic activity and structured to attain its ends and another that consists of a moral agreement on values and purpose. It was, so to speak, both a Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Thus, he claimed, groups are co-organic, much like an individual human personality. Political science, he claimed, was concerned primarily with the second form of consensus, that is, the “morally purposive element,” as manifest in the state. “A constitutional state is the product of a national community of political purpose as to the ends of the political association” (1928b, 355–56). A co-organic community, he argued, is not organic in the sense of constituting some super-person. Its will arises from the associated individual members, and although it moves beyond laissez-faire doctrines, it does not go to the extremes of communism and fascism. Economic pursuits can get out of hand, and, consequently, they often need to be regulated in order to bring them in line with political purpose. The co-organic state was not, he claimed, just a theoretical construction but had met the “pragmatic” test in the institutions of the United States and Britain, and although in certain respects it might, like sovereignty, be a myth, it was, he averred, a “true” or necessary myth.

Reponses to this young political theorist's work were mixed. One reviewer noted, perceptively, that despite his opposition to critics of the state, “he is clearly on their side as against the old-fashioned simplification of political life” (C.D.B. 1929). Although some believed that the topic was important, the “clarity and coherence” of the argument were an issue (de Selincourt 1929). Another reviewer stressed the patchwork character of the book and stated that Elliott not only embraces a “vestigial idealistic structure in his thinking which operates to blind him to the facts” but also “fails utterly to understand Mr. Dewey's philosophy and confuses pragmatism with a general concern with consequences which he himself shares” (Murphy 1929). Despite Elliott's very positive review (1927b) of MacIver's The Modern State, the latter was less generous. Although he noted that Elliott's book was a worthy attempt to “redeem the long-continued neglect of political philosophy in the United States” and demonstrated how theories have “profound practical significance,” MacIver (1929) suggested that the diagnosis of pragmatism was “too generally applied” and that as far as reconciling pluralism and political order, the co-organic theory, despite its promise, was “not adequate to do so.”

JOINING THE ARGUMENTS

The most lengthy and careful response to Elliott, however, was that of Catlin (1929) who characterized the work, somewhat ambiguously, as “indubitably the book of the year in political theory.” Catlin claimed that although “it is one of the most important expositions of what Professor Elliott himself calls the ‘new Liberalism,” it “will be especially welcome in those constitutionally minded quarters which desire a new defense of the old Liberalism, with its belief in orthodox parliamentarianism or the permanence of the principles of the American Constitution, its stress on Constitutional action and its faith in the efficacy of reasonableness.” Catlin acknowledged that his own “prejudice” was “entirely against the treatment of politics from the standpoint of value and purpose, if this treatment is to be considered not as supplementary but as the only satisfactory treatment.” Although Catlin agreed with the need for a “philosophy of political idealism,” he stressed that the practice of “‘political idealism’ is the real problem” and that “realism is not opportunism.” It was necessary, he claimed, to recognize that “other factors enter into human life besides the conscious intellect so much belauded by Whigs and Liberals.” Because Elliott defended “the national state as the good, beautiful and the true,” he was actually the one who seemed “to be on the side of Mussolini” and failed to recognize that nationalism and internationalism are “deadly enemies” and that the “great issue of our time is whether we believe that sovereignty should ultimately reside in an international body representing that high good which is the ‘organized force of civilization’ or whether the national good is the summum bonum and the national state the final sovereign” (Catlin 1929).

Elliott and Catlin again crossed paths in Stuart Rice's influential Methods in Social Science (1931), which was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and which was one of the most important documents of the Chicago School and the newly reconstructed American science of politics. Elliott was the dissenting voice in this collection where he sought once more to challenge the naturalistic image of political science and the pluralist account of politics advanced by individuals ranging from Hume to William B. Munro (1928) and Catlin. Although he did not object to the idea of a science of politics defined in some broad sense, he maintained that it was inappropriate to seek to apply the principles of natural science. Like Catlin, he preferred the term “Politics” as a designation of the field of study, because it not only semantically implied a bridge between theory and practice but also represented his image of “political theory” as encompassing “political philosophy and political science,” but he still saw the state as the principal object of analysis. His quarrel was in part with social science's search for “universalized abstraction” and with Catlin's attempt to create such an individualistic view of “political man” which, while supposedly represented in acts such as voting, was far from applicable to political systems in much of the contemporary world.

Although Elliott was not sympathetic to pluralism as a normative thesis, he did, like many later critics of pluralism, see group life as a fundamental reality, and problem, of modernity and as a “better field for a scientific attempt at examining the political act.” Although it was possible to have a science of politics in the sense of a general commitment to objective description and comparison, he insisted on “resolutely renouncing any claim to discovering measurable variables in such a unit as political man (or woman),” because “the individual—given our present lack of a definitive scientific psychology—is still too unexplored and uncharted a realm to permit quantitative treatment of motives.” It was, he claimed, in “groups of some permanence we get institutionalized behavior,” but even here we are dealing with limited periods of time and particular cultural contexts. No one, for example, could, he argued, have predicted how Catholics would have reacted to the candidacy of Al Smith (who Elliott had supported). Moreover, what required study were the values and myths that moved people at particular times and places. “Timbucktoo cannot be governed like the island of Britain—though the government may offer some amusing parallels to that of Chicago, if one goes beyond forms to political realities” (Elliott 1931, 82, 86, 87, 91). In an “Appendix” to Elliott's article, Catlin in a modulated manner, continued to insist that the state was not the essence of politics and that political science should only be concerned with the particulars of “concrete reality” as instances of general laws grounded in human nature and that this included objects such as values about which generalizations could be adduced. He noted that “a study of values is indubitably quite as valuable as a study of social forces and controls,” and although Elliott saw the typical generalizations of political science as inherently limited, Catlin preferred to see them as temporarily incomplete and not yet fully demonstrated (94).

In a later contribution, however, Catlin was more pointed in his criticism of Elliott and the dangers of a philosophical approach to the study of politics. He claimed that, although political philosophy and political science were legitimately both part of what Aristotle called Politics, political science should be “autonomous” and that to think that ethical philosophy can directly contribute to it rested on a “woeful confusion of means and ends or of values and existence.” He suggested that because of intellectual lag most professional political scientists were still institutionalists who focused on the state and saw “all political theory” as a branch of ethics. This position, he argued, was being reinforced by individuals as diverse as Elliott and Laski as well as by some economists, and this explained why philosophy had been harmful to the study of politics. Even though ethics and the formulation of ends might be a part of the study of politics, the emphasis had too often been on positing ideals and absolutes which, when extended beyond the commitments of various groups to the society at large, bred intolerance. What Catlin recommended for political science was “practical agnosticism,” but what is again crucial to note is that Catlin's emphasis on the separation of science and ethics was for the purpose of gaining scientific authority that would be directed toward practical ends. It was a separation predicated on complementarity (Catlin 1933, 100, 114).