Читать книгу Political Science For Dummies - Marcus A. Stadelmann - Страница 43

Unlike both traditionalism and behavioralism, the school of post-behavioralism has a specific birth date. It was created by David Easton, one of the great political scientists of our time (see Chapter 19). He coined the term in his address to the American Political Science Association in 1969.

He argued that the school of behavioralism was necessary in the 1950s and had done a lot of good for the discipline. However, by trying to become a natural science, political science had forgotten what it was all about. Political scientists are supposed to deal with current problems the world is facing and help people in the process. Instead, according to Easton, behavioralists ignored the current world and its problems, instead focusing only on trying to make political science become a real science. In the process, they created grand theories that were so abstract and complex that they couldn’t be applied to the real world. Easton urged a compromise. He argued that political science should keep a part of behavioralism but ignore other parts of it. Thus the term post-behavioralism. I explain the parts of behavioralism that were kept and what were discarded in the following sections.