In “Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War,” Jeffrey Isaac urges us to discuss “the responsibilities of social scientists during wartime.” He focuses specifically on the ethics of responsibility appropriate to the university-based scholar when political authority attacks the values, both moral and non-moral, that we implicitly presuppose when we function as academics in general, and political scientists in particular. Isaac invokes the authority of Max Weber to elucidate the precise boundaries of these obligations as well as to find a notion of responsibility on which all political scientists, whatever their partisan commitments, can agree.

Of course, Isaac rightly notes that the context in which he writes is quite different from Weber's. Weber was also trying to find a kind of impartiality that all academics could agree on, regardless of partisan stances. But he pursued this aim in an academic environment in which using the lectern to impose one's partisan position on an audience was the norm.¹

He further assumed that his audience was deeply committed to a wide range of political parties, programs, and goals, and was expecting judgment about right and wrong political commitments, which, at least on surface, he claimed a social scientist as such was not in a position to provide. Isaac, on the other hand, wants academics, especially political scientists, to consider their public responsibilities, given their tendency to ignore the dangers to the values of academic freedom—such as free inquiry, free speech, free dissemination of one's work, and free exchange—that war, and the political invocations of “war,” might have. Unlike Weber, he is not worried about an over-politicized relation of the political scientist to his or her audience; rather his concern is with the under-politicized relation of political scientists to the values presupposed by all who engage in scholarship. Nonetheless, even though Weber, in his famous vocational lectures, was not overly troubled by the question of why the scholar should defend free speech and public discussion, Isaac is right in claiming that Weber's account of what social science might provide in clarifying political commitments presupposes these values.

Isaac's account of scholarly values and obligations takes the form of two sets of arguments, both derived from Weber. The first, which he claims is his central concern, focuses on defending a list of civil liberties presupposed by the academic role as it applies to political scientists. The second, which he finds peripheral to his argument, focuses on the particular responsibility of the political or social scientist in critically clarifying politics to a wider audience. In what follows, I suggest that the two arguments are not separable in the way that Isaac claims they are; in fact, if we take our role as students of politics as well as academics seriously, the obligation to clarify politics in a time of war (or peace) should be considered just as pressing as the defense of civil liberties; indeed, it follows from it.

Isaac's first argument, which forms the bulk of his article, is fairly uncontroversial. Agreeing with Stanley Fish, he contends that as scholars we have a duty to defend academic values when they are attacked, though not to take partisan political stances. It would be self-defeating, the reasoning goes, to separate our activity of engaging in inquiry from the (liberal) values that support it. That is, as much as we would like to, we cannot simply disentangle our scholarly work from the conditions that enable us to do it. Our awareness of this duty becomes more pressing during times when political authority is more than usually inclined to attack these values in the name of national security and fear of enemies. (One could add this is never more true when the war is seen as an endless struggle of good versus evil and the enemy is viewed not as an agent but an amorphous “ism” like terrorism.) Whatever our partisan political positions on war and peace, according to Isaac, we all can agree to respect and defend the liberal values that make free inquiry possible.

Isaac's motivation for presenting this minimal argument rests on the observation that most academics show little interest in the organizations and institutions that make it their business to defend academic freedom—a complacency that is, perhaps, especially egregious for political scientists. And thus he exhibits sympathy for the actions of groups like the Council of the American Studies Association, which denounces specific attacks on intellectual freedom by governmental agencies. Isaac also argues that it is perfectly consistent for a professional organization such as the American Political Science Association to abjure in its guidelines taking substantive political positions, while at the same time engaging itself in the defense of free inquiry and expression. But he retreats from the logic of this argument by expressing concern that such a stance crosses the line from impartiality to partisanship and thus requires “complex ethical judgment[s].” Worse, he fears that such a stance might create “political acrimony and conflict” within academic institutions. He therefore urges scholars to take great care when adopting a partisan stance in favor of liberal academic values.

The difficulty I find with Isaac's first argument does not stem from his endorsement of academic associations taking partisan stances on behalf of intellectual freedom or his views regarding the values presupposed by our function as scholars. Rather, I am concerned that the lesson he draws about our academic obligations is far too limited. There are obligations we have as scholars in general; but there are also obligations that we have simply by dint of having politics as the subject matter of our inquiries. This leads us to the focus of Isaac's second argument: the duties of the political scientist to clarify politics for a wider audience of citizens. This has, as Isaac points out, its clearest articulation in Weber.

Weber insists that social scientific impartiality imposes certain obligations on the scholar, especially on the social or political scientist who, at the very least, has the job of understanding the partisan commitments of lay political actors. For Weber, the responsibilities of the academic social scientist centered on the fact that he was in a unique position to provide political partisans with an account of the coherence of their positions, the means of realizing them, and the consequences of deploying various means to achieve their goals.²

He suggests that such clarification forces partisans to weigh the costs of realizing their ultimate ends and subsidiary goals against their original commitments; if the costs prove to be too high, they might have to revise their positions or abandon them outright.³ Needless to say, Weber believed that the academic could provide such assessments and still retain a certain impartiality, a certain distance, from the partisan stances being assessed. But more importantly, he claimed that the social scientist, to the degree that he maintained the authority to lecture students, had a duty to use the concepts available to him to evaluate ideal political commitments as they collide with “developmental tendencies.”⁴ The social scientist was in a unique position to confront the partisan with an account of the various historical and sociological tendencies that might directly impinge on the realization of the partisan's goals, for example, the reliance of all political movements on various forms of legitimate authority or the likelihood of market exchange to turn into a power struggle to determine price. It is in this context that Weber speaks of the duty to bring up “uncomfortable facts.”

Isaac registers Weber's deployment of social science to assess the variety of partisan political commitments as relevant for analyzing the meaning of the present war and occupation, justifications for it, and means and consequences of pursuing it, including unintended byproducts; but he sees this as a peripheral question to his argument about academic obligations. But the question Isaac's essay raises is not whether we have a duty to defend the civil liberties of free inquiry and discussion so central to the academic enterprise; it would be self-defeating to deny otherwise. Rather, the question is, What is the meaning and what are the consequences of such a position? Is the issue of whether political science can and should clarify partisan stances, especially in times of intense political polarization, such as during a contested war and occupation, truly so peripheral to the argument about the liberties assumed by all academics, regardless of their political commitments?

In fact, these two obligations are logically and practically interconnected, especially for those of us who claim to study politics—even admitting that we do so in different ways within a professional division of labor. At the most basic level, it would be odd to argue that we should, as Isaac has so nicely put it, be “attentive and active in support of the liberal values that make our social scientific practices possible” and not include an analysis of the political context in which these values have come under attack. That is, if we agree that responses to recent incursions on civil and academic freedoms cited in Isaac's article accord with our academic responsibility to protect the conditions of our own inquiries, it would be peculiar to insist that we are not also responsible for analyzing the sources of these incursions, or for evaluating various responses to these incursions for their coherence and consequences in the backdrop of the institutions and partisan positions of present-day politics (in much the same way that Weber urges the “impartial” social scientist to do in Science as a Vocation). But Isaac misses this opportunity to bring the two sides of his essay together.

Now if we turn to the occasion for this article, the responsibilities of academics in light of the U.S. war on and subsequent occupation of Iraq—and beyond this, the politically contested notion that this should all be subsumed under a “war on terror”—the matter of trying to mediate between political partisanship and political science becomes all the more complicated. For if war and justifications of a war policy based on attacking the patriotism of its critics leads to attacks on critical inquiry, as Isaac maintains, does that attack merely obligate us as academics and scholars to defend the civil libertarian values presupposed by our role as scholars? Or does it also obligate us to uphold the clarifying potentiality of social science, specifically, a political science that lays out the meaning and coherence (or lack thereof) of justifications for this war and occupation; an account of the means employed; and the consequences, both intended and unintended, of deploying these means given our account of the terrain of political conflict? Surely, a political science that can claim some measure of impartiality in its accounts of matters of peace and war would also be able to demonstrate which positions are incoherent, which are self-defeating, and which may be realizable but with questionable consequences. And we would also be obliged to bring up, as Weber put it, “uncomfortable facts” about the data used to justify or criticize the war and the consequences of such an incursion for both domestic politics and the nation's place in world politics.

Consider briefly one such attempt: the recent Weber-inspired account of empire and war as applied to the Iraq occupation provided by Michael Mann.⁵

Mann argues that we can distinguish four kinds of organized power: ideological, economic, military, and political. Each draws upon different social sources for its efficacy. Successful historical empires, Mann claims, have generally been able to mobilize all four of these kinds of power (with a minimum of at least two) to impose their hegemony on large territories. In the case of the recent Iraq incursion, and in its numerous attempts to exercise power in world politics, the United States has largely relied on its superior military force, while the use of ideological, economic, and political influence in the regions of concern has been fairly weak. If this is true, one unintended consequence of this choice is to strengthen ideologically the very groups that military incursions are meant to counter. Another is that military force has to substitute for political or ideological support, leading either to an endless need for military force to maintain hegemony or its inexorable collapse. Although I find this a powerful account, my aim is not to assess its strengths or weaknesses, but rather to illustrate the style of theorizing that follows from our role as academic students of politics. The concepts used here are not necessarily partisan (though their use may have partisan implications), and their deployment draws consequences for political undertakings relevant for both opponents and partisans of the recent wars. Above all, this conceptual account brings up uncomfortable facts and developmental tendencies that proponents and critics alike should consider—in this case, facts that could render the whole Iraqi undertaking self-defeating even in its own terms.

Yet matters become even more complicated because the impartiality that social science—in particular, political science—can claim for itself in providing such an account lies at best in the mode by which it constructs concepts and relates them to each other. As we all know, our partisan commitments are implicated in selecting the relevant features of these concepts and deciding on the relevant consequences of our political generalizations—Weber called this the “value-relatedness” of all concept construction, and Charles Taylor much later called it “the value slope” of all social science.⁶

Of course, partisanship plays a different role in the social science constructs by which we might assess a war, occupation of another country, an analysis of what counts as a war, and assessment of its internal political consequences, than it would if we were seeking to convince other citizens of the rightness of our political commitments. The crucial point, however, is that partisanship is on both sides of the divide between social science constructs and political persuasion when political science is employed in the impartial style to clarify explicitly partisan positions.

But the matter of responsibility and commitments of the academic political scientist does not stop here. Consider the claims of the harshest critics of the Iraq incursion: that the invasion was not necessitated by an actual threat but chosen to demonstrate American power in the region, that the stated justifications for the policy were largely based on a false presentation of the facts, and that one of the intentions of the policy was to help the governing party win the next election. Or alternatively, consider the liberal internationalist defense of the war—that the systematic violation of human rights by the previous regime justifies its dissolution, and that the gain in human rights that will be brought about by the American invasion outweighs the costs in lives lost and damage done to relations with allies. Would not a defense of the very liberal values that Isaac argues for also require a political scientist to subject such claims to scrutiny precisely in the manner that Weber recommended, or do we keep a studied distance from these claims because they are the subject of fierce partisan debate? Weber's famous ethic of responsibility for “foreseeable” consequences, which opens Isaac's essay, could point us in many directions depending how one interprets it.

Given all of these possible points for sharp disagreement, it is understandable why Isaac wants to pursue a minimal argument on the obligations of academics to defend liberal values threatened by a political authority seeking unconditional consent to its policies in the name of war. Certainly such restraint is necessary if we hope to attain the widest possible agreement among political scientists of varying partisan stances over an issue as strongly felt as the present occupation and invocations of war; it is no small accomplishment to move typical academics from a concern with their own scholarship and professional advancement to a concern with defending the fundamental liberties that make their work possible. But once Isaac admits that academics as academics implicitly endorse civil libertarian—what he calls “liberal”—values as a condition for taking responsibility for their role as academics and scholars, the logic of his position leads us to ask what obligations follow in playing the specific academic role of political scientist as clarifying agent of partisan stances—including a partisan stance in favor of the very liberal values Isaac assumes go hand in hand with the academic role. After all, if war cannot by itself force us to draw conclusions about the role of contested partisan commitments in relation to the defense of the conditions for social scientific clarification, and further, if war cannot prompt us to test our partisan commitments against the conclusions of social scientific clarification, what can?