The Bookshelf: The Undiscipline of Political Science

From Mathew J. Franck on The Public Discourse.com (Nov. 4, 2021):

The ideas that the truth about the human condition is radically contingent on history (historicism) and that we can speak rationally only about facts and not at all about “values” or moral principles (positivism) lead inexorably to a failure of all conviction, and ultimately to nihilism. What results is fanaticism: the impulse to bend others to one’s will, despite—or precisely because of—the lack of any rational foundation for one’s preferences.

Everyone by now is familiar with the phenomenon of “cancellation” on college campuses. To cite but a few prominent examples:

• In 2015, Professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis were denounced by a mob of Yale students for the latter’s writing of a perfectly sensible email regarding Halloween costumes, and the former’s calm defense of her in person to a gang of hostile students. The Christakises relinquished their leadership posts at a Yale residential college, and Erika Christakis subsequently left the university faculty.
• In 2017, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, a married couple teaching biology at Evergreen State College in Washington, were hounded from their faculty positions after Weinstein refused to participate in a “day of absence” for all white faculty and students. (Heying was on leave at the time.)
• Also in 2017, the social scientist Charles Murray was physically attacked by students at Middlebury College who had disrupted and shouted down a talk he had been invited to give. Middlebury political science professor Allison Stanger—who had been invited to respond critically to Murray’s talk—suffered a concussion in the attack on them both.

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Many lesser known incidents could be adduced with ease, but you get the picture. And students who deviate from the party line on college campuses often have it far worse than faculty. Ruination awaits many young people who vocally dissent from today’s “smelly little orthodoxies,” to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about these matters.

It should be noted that the examples above include both students and faculty behaving badly in reacting to arguments with which they disagree. I would venture to say that if faculty did not model brutal behavior for their students, and universally made it plain that they regarded such behavior as unacceptable, it would for the most part cease. Students may in many cases arrive in college very cocksure in their opinions about justice, but responsible faculty have always known how to deal with that problem: make them think about the matter, hard. So the poisonous atmosphere on many college campuses may be blamed on the faculty’s neglect of its duty at best, and its active betrayal of it at worst.

But how did things get this bad? I believe the causes are intertwined intellectual and moral failures. Here I will limit myself to what has gone wrong in my own discipline of political science, leaving it to others to comment on such fields as classics, English, history, sociology, psychology, or philosophy.

I first glimpsed what was amiss with the modern discipline of political science—and at the same time was drawn to a career in the field—when I encountered Leo Strauss’s 1953 book Natural Right and History as an undergraduate. I do not now regard his thoughts on the modern philosophers—particularly on Locke and Burke—as unquestionably sound, as I once did. But Strauss’s opening chapters, on historicism (“Natural Right and the Historical Approach”) and positivism in the social sciences (“Natural Right and the Distinction Between Facts and Values”) retain the power with which they struck me then. The ideas that the truth about the human condition is radically contingent on history (historicism) and that we can speak rationally only about facts and not at all about “values” or moral principles (positivism) lead inexorably to a failure of all conviction, and ultimately to nihilism, which in turn eventuates (in Strauss’s memorable words) in “fanatical obscurantism.” [read more]