Читать книгу Political Science For Dummies - Marcus A. Stadelmann - Страница 45

While accepting many of behavioralism’s ideas and concepts, post-behavioralism had some big differences. First, there was major disagreement over whether political science and the rest of the social sciences should try to become a real science like the natural sciences. The question was why political science should be like chemistry if it meant giving up doing real-world research that could actually help people. Also, many political scientists flat out rejected the idea that a social scientist could actually conduct objective or value-neutral research. Most post-behavioralists rejected the notion of positivism (see the section “Being truly objective,” earlier in this chapter), instead adhering to a school of thought referred to as historicism.

Historicism is also called the German school of thought. Major German philosophers, such as Georg Friedrich Hegel and Karl Mannheim, supported it in the 19th and 20th century. The idea is that all human thought is socially determined and relative to time. In other words, everybody, including the political scientist, receives values from the environment she grew up in, and these values will determine how (1) research is conducted, and (2) what conclusions can be drawn from that research. A political scientist growing up in the U.S. won’t interpret the results of research in a similar fashion to someone who grew up in Russia.

Post-behavioralists also believe that all thought is bound by the time period you grow up in. Someone growing up in the 1850s perceives research differently from someone conducting research in the 21st century. Therefore, true objective knowledge is impossible. People are subjective, formed by the environment they grew up in, even if they claim to be objective in nature.

Post-behavioralists also argue that objectivity doesn’t exist and that not just all social scientists are subjective but everybody is. Society needs to accept this.

Post-behavioralists don’t believe that grand theory can be discovered in the social sciences, including political science, and don’t support even attempting to create it. For them, grand theory is so abstract that it can’t be used to explain current problems and therefore there’s no use for it. They argue that the political scientist should forget about turning political science into a real science and should also forget calling for pure objectivity in research because it doesn’t exist.

Finally, post-behavioralists advised for more third-world studies and fewer studies of the advanced world. They were especially concerned with the emphasis behavioralism placed on democracies. Many behavioralist theories worked best in established democracies and weren’t adaptable to other forms of government.

Post-behavioralists became fully third-world oriented and will often travel to third-world countries to immerse themselves in local cultures to better understand the local cultures and their politics.

By the 1980s, many more political scientists studied third-world countries than advanced industrialized countries, and there was even a shortage of European and Soviet scholars in the U.S.