ACREDITACIONES DE LAS TITULACIONES Sí

In addition to mathematics, logic, and economics, my other principal area of attention at the University of Chicago was political science, my major subject. Traditional political science consisted mostly of

constitutional and administrative law, political philosophy, political institutions (mainly description of formal structures), public administration, international relations, and some history. At Chicago political science was different.

It introduced me not only to the ferment of intellectual life on a university campus but also to the larger drama of the great doctrinal struggles in the sciences as they move forward, encountering new phenomena and creating new paradigms. For the Chicago Political Science Department in which I found myself as an undergraduate and then a graduate student was the vanguard of the behavioralism that erupted in political science in the second through the fourth decades of the century and transformed that discipline.

Merriam and the Chicago School

The story is in considerable part that of Charles E. Merriam, chairman of the department through this whole period. He served as commander-in-chief and master strategist of the revolutionary forces. I was just a private in his army, attaining a commission (and drawing enemy fire) only after the publication of my revised dissertation, Administrative Behavior, in 1947. Having participated in these events for more than a decade, however, did much to form my views about how scientific disciplines develop, to teach me the strategies of subversion I later employed in attacking orthodoxy in economics and psychology, and to focus my sights on the phenomena of

human thinking and problem solving as the essential core of both organization theory and economics.

In giving an account of the Chicago School and my experiences with it, I have drawn on Barry D. Karl's biography, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics, to remind me of events that I would otherwise fail to retrieve from memoryalthough I disagree with Karl on some matters of interpretation.

My relation to Charles Merriam, the Chief, was that of a studentand a very young onein his department.

When I approached him, which was not often, it was with a certain trepidation and even awe. The relation became slightly more elaborate when, as we shall see, I subsequently wooed and wed his secretary, who was simultaneously a graduate student in the department.

A man of large enterprises, Merriam aspired to the mayoralty of a great city, and perhaps to still higher political office. Like any person of vision, he built organizations and won followers so that his personal energies could be multiplied and serve a larger purpose. The principal organization he built was the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, from which his followers went out to revolutionize the discipline in the nation and in the world.

The goal of Merriam's enterprise was to bring intelligence to bear upon the political process, and thereby to ensure and accelerate human progress. Government and the political process were central to his vision of society. Political institutions provided the stage on which human life was acted, and set the boundaries and conditions that shaped economic and social institutions. He wrote: "It is a long road out of a slavery to inanimate nature, out of a slavery to human nature, up to the mastery of the dark and fateful forces around us and within; but the race is on its way. The future belongs to those who fuse intelligence with faith, and who with courage and determination grope their way forward from chance to choice, from blind adaptation to creative evolution" (Merriam 1936, p. 326).

Applying intelligence to the political scene requires an understanding of political institutions and

processes. This understanding, Merriam thought, could be arrived at only through the scientific study of politics. And the scientific study of politics meant the study of human behavior, especially as carried on by psychology and her sister sciences.

When Merriam was learning his profession at the turn of the century, political science had little

resemblance, in method or substance, to the natural sciences of the time, except possibly in the descriptive work of those scientists, even then becoming a bit old-fashioned, who were called

natu-ralists. But in the mainstream of political science, description was overshadowed by moral philosophy.

Yet the young Merriam in Chicago, recently emerged from his doctoral concerns with political

philosophy, soon exhibited a strong empirical streak, investigating state and local governments in the spirit of the bureaus of governmental research that were then flourishing. His 1906 Report of an

Investigation of the Municipal Revenues of Chicago was in this empirical tradition, as were the majority of his early journal publications. While all of this inquiry was tied closely to policy, he thought policy needed to be preceded by empirical inquiry into state and local government and his methods were reportorial.

A second phase of Merriam's research, foreshadowed by a paper in 1921, "The Present State of the Study of Politics," became wholly visible in his collaborations with Harold Lasswell and especially with

Harold Gosnell. Of the origins of this shift, he says (in his third-person autobiographical fragment, "The Education of Charles E. Merriam"):

But, alas, by this time he was profoundly dissatisfied with the basic methods of observation and analysis in political science. Systematic politics was again delayed in the search for firmer ground upon which to proceed. . . .

Meanwhile, with a view to finding sounder methods, Merriam had begun . . . investigations in various lines of special significance:

studies in non-voting and quantitative methods with Dr. Gosnell and others. There came studies in propaganda and then in political psychology with Dr. Lasswell, leading to more elaborate inquiries in the field of psychoanalysis on the part of Dr. Harold [Lasswell];

studies in the field of political leadership, running through a series of special monographs, by Gosneil, Johnson, Peel, Robertson, Cohen, on down to the present still unfinished study of leadership by Louis Olum. [Merriam 1942, pp. 9 11]

It is hard to exaggerate the novelty of the methods used by Merriam and Gosnell in their 1924 study Non-Voting, published at least a decade before public opinion polls became part of the U.S. presidential election process. The appendices to that volume contain an admirable discussion of the methodology of polling, and even explain the use of Hollerith punch cards, presaging our contemporary dependence on the computer. Just a few years afterward, Gosnell, in Getting Out the Vote (1927), followed up this

pioneering polling study with one using the even more revolutionary technique of field experiment. None of Merriam's own subsequent publications employed methodological innovations of this, or any other, kind. His further

contributions to methodology were all achieved indirectly, through his department and its scholars.

Finally, we come to Merriam's systematic works, and especially Political Power and Systematic

Politics, published in 1934 and 1945, respectively. I will focus on the former, which is the better book;

but most of my remarks apply to both. The author himself explains his method in the introduction to Political Power: "It is not my purpose to repeat or refute the conclusions of the masters of political dialectics. Acknowledging my deep obligation to such thinkers, I propose to set forth what I have found out about the nature of political power during my years of reading, reflection, observation, experience"

(p. 3).

The book is entirely consistent with the author's characterization"reading, reflection, observation, experience." It reports no new empirical results and, for that matter, almost no specific old empirical results. The references, only moderate in number, are mainly to books, and seldom to specific chapters.

Thus the reader encounters a series of assertions about the nature and workings of political power set forth without any explicit evidential base.

But before condemning Political Power as a throwback to an earlier era, we must put it in its proper temporal context. In 1934 the outlier was not Political Power but the handful of revolutionary works by the Chicago School that had preceded it. A more appropriate comparison would be with Carl J.

Friedrich's Constitutional Government and Democracy (1941), which has more ample references but essentially the same expository style. From an even broader standpoint, Political Power belongs to a respectable tradition of empirical work in the social sciences. Even in experimental psychology, the most

"scientific" of the social sciences, William James's The Principles of Psychology, based on the same kind of common sense and common experience as Political Power, was still an important and respected book (and remains so today).

The social sciences have simultaneously suffered and benefited from the fact that many of the phenomena of human behavior are open for all of us to see and hear as part of our daily experience. We do not need telescopes, microscopes, Geiger counters, or radio detectors to observe the overt aspects of human behavior. (On occasion, electronic bugs might be helpful, but in most circumstances they are frowned upon as research instruments.) As a consequence, much knowledge about human societyeven knowledge that might be termed "scientific"has been derived from observation and experience.

William James was this kind of naturalist, an observer of himself and others, who performed almost no experiments in the laboratory. Economics,

too, has made almost a positive virtue of avoiding direct, systematic observation of individual human beings while valuing the casual empiricism of the economist's armchair introspection. The authors of the great classics of political science were also naturalistsbeginning with Aristotle, proceeding through Machiavelli, to Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce, who produced classic descriptions of the social and political systems in the United States.

Such works are no less empirical for being based on common observation and experience. Their methodological deficits are far more subtle than a departure from empiricism would be, and it is these deficits that Merriam sensed in his "modern" period of the 1920s: lack of concern for sampling and the representativeness of data, lack of access to thoughts not immediately expressed in action (for example, voting intentions), and lack of access to behavior that is not a part of everyone's experience (such as the decision-making processes of high government and corporate officials). And because of these deficits, it was difficult to carry on social science research with the same standards of objectivity and public

reproducibility as are demanded in the natural sciences.

While Merriam vigorously promoted methodological innovation aimed at removing these deficits, he himself was too intrigued with the Big Questions to wait patiently until the tools were in place. Hence, Political Power and Systematic Politics both belong to the classical, but empirical, tradition of

observation, experience, and reflection.*

The influence Merriam exercised through his department and his colleagues and students seems less inscrutable than does Merriam the man, whose mystery was enhanced by his heavy-lidded eyes and the mischievous teasing manner in his conversation and his autobiographical writing.

Student Life in the Department

I do not know when Charles Merriam became the Chief. He already had that title when I came upon the scene, and he had become chairman of Chicago's Political Science Department much earlier, in 1923. As much as any academic department I have known, this was the chairman's department. The principal faculty members were his appointees, pursuing lines of research that, for the most part, he had initially envisaged, perhaps in collaboration with them.

* I am all too aware that my own Administrative Behavior, while almost wholly empirical in intent and content, lies within this same classical tradition. However behavioral its content, the "facts" in that book are derived largely from observation and experience.

While I was a student in the department, the "faculty" meant primarily Charles Merriam, Harold Gosnell, Harold Lasswell, and Frederick Schuman. It was Lasswell's psychologizing and Gosnell's quantitative and empirical methods that most specifically symbolized the Chicago School. But what characterized it even more fundamentally for me, and I think for a number of other graduate students, was its commitment to the proposition that political science is science. Along with that commitment went a dissolving of departmental boundaries that made the whole university, and all of its methodologies, available to the students of political science.

The alliance with sociology and survey methodology was, of course, close. So was the relation with L. L.

Thurstone's factor analysis in the Psychology Department. It was thought only slightly peculiar that I studied mathematical economics and econometrics, logic, and applied mathematicsalthough Professor Marshall Dimock did once ask me accusingly, "Are you an intellectual fly-by-night?" The question would never have occurred to Merriam, or Gosnell, or Lasswell.

Obviously, not all the political science students tasted every delicacy in this large and diverse cafeteria.

Some tried one dish, some another. But the openness of the department made it natural for its faculty and graduates to play leading roles in the assimilation of political science with the other social sciences that characterized behavioral science development after World War II. Conversation with sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, and economists came naturally to them.

The Merriam department did not long survive, without transformation, Merriam's departure. Most of its stars had left before Merriam's retirement: Schuman, Lasswell, Gosnell. The reasons for their departure were complex. Certainly there had been harassment from the Hutchins administration, wrapped in its own dreams of Aristotelian and Thomistic glory and wholly unsympathetic to behavioralism in political

science. There had also been a damaging attack on the department as communist, initiated by Charles Walgreen of drugstore fame, whose niece had been a student in one of Schuman's courses. Merriam defended fiercely, with an eloquent statement to the committee of the Illinois legislature that investigated the matter, and the university administration behaved properly. But undoubtedly this affair cost Merriam some of his brownie points with Hutchins, and Schuman, somehow, left soon afterward. (Walgreen later apologized to the extent of liberally endowing in the University a lectureship in American Institutions.) The department rapidly and radically changed its characterperhaps declined is the wrong word, an alumnus's expression of nostalgia for things as they had beenand Yale soon became the flagship of behavioralism in

political science. Organizational Golden Ages, whether in government, universities, or business firms, seldom endure beyond the generation of people who create them. Although the Chicago School flourished on the Chicago campus for only about two decades, its life expanded and spread over the whole academic world, and it still represents a mainstream, if not the main-stream, of political science today.

It would be hard to arrange a greater diversity in personality and talents than prevailed in the faculty.

They were as often rivals as friends, and not above giving students glimpses of their (not always

complimentary) views of one another. (The shy Gosnell, for example, relieved some of his aggressions by drawing and privately exhibiting uncomplimentary caricatures of his colleagues.) But there was among the students a great pride of belonging to a brilliant enterprise and great camaraderie. Although each student had a thesis adviser, I don't recall them as being sharply divided by these attachments. Merriam,

Lasswell, Gosnell, and Schuman were all, in some way, common property, important parts of the scene for all of us.

Central to the scene, but also a little above it, was Merriam, larger than life. I found his classes rather dull, while other students were stimulated by them. But his conversationwhen he held forth in his office, or at the Shoreland bar, on the occasions when I was invited to join him there, or at dinners with the graduate studentswas always fascinating. He was always in command, and one always had the sense of being in the presence of great events, intellectual and political.

We would get glimpses of the National Resources Planning Board, or the President's Committee on Administrative Management, or the doings of the Public Administration Clearing House, managed by his close associate and crony Louis Brownlow. Merriam was a genial Olympian figure sitting in our midst, powerful, sometimes a little unkind in his teasing (more so to his faculty than to students), but generally a source of benevolence.

I retain a vivid memory of one of my last meetings with him. It must have been around 1947, and we had invited to Illinois Tech, where I was then teaching, a distinguished political scientist, Merriam's junior by perhaps twenty years, to give a lecture. After the lecture we had arranged a small dinner at the University Club, in downtown Chicago, to which Merriam was invited. Toward the end of the dinner, our lecturer began to tell us how he had managed Germany for General Clay during the postwar occupation, while a second distinguished guest had comparable tales to tell about how he had managed Japan for General MacArthur. It seemed all wrong to me: Merriam should be telling the stories, we should be listening. It seemed wrong to him, tooafter about half an hour, he turned to me and said, "Come on, Simon, we're going home." And we did.

Influence of the Chicago School

Who were Merriam's followers? "Followers" is not quite the right word, but "disciples" would be even less accurate. To attract disciples, one must provide certainty, and a catechism from which there can be no deviations and which can be recited to solve nearly all problems. Neoclassical economics provides that kind of certainty. So do Skinnerian psychology, Chomskian linguistics, Piagetian developmental psychology. There is no Merriamic political science. Political science of the Chicago School provided a goalto understand political behavior and political processesand some directions from which to approach it: data and theories in psychology, economics, and the other social sciences and modern techniques of experimentation, statistical analysis, and mathematical modeling. There were plenty of problems to which these data, theory, and techniques could be applied, but no simple template for applying them and no guarantee of the form the results would take. Hence followers, but certainly not disciples.

In assessing the influence of the Chicago School upon political science, one must avoid the fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc. Political scientists today make great use of polls and opinion and attitude studies.

Among the first studies of this kind in political science were those done at Chicago. Therefore . . . ? Today, loyalties are a common topic of political science research. Among the first thoroughly

psychological and empirical studies of nationalism were those done at Chicago. Therefore . . . ? The syllogisms are almost irresistible, but probably wrong. One could just as easily find the first cause in Columbia's Sociology Department (Paul Lazarsfeld), Harvard's Sociology Department (Samuel Stouffer), the Survey Research Center at Michigan, or the pioneering, and very early, contributions of Franklin Giddings, Stuart Rice, and Malcolm Willey.

The true cause is probably the gradual and steady advance of both social science methodology and social science concepts in the first three decades of this century in several disciplines and on many campuses, the advance that produced Recent Social Trends (1933) and The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences

The true cause is probably the gradual and steady advance of both social science methodology and social science concepts in the first three decades of this century in several disciplines and on many campuses, the advance that produced Recent Social Trends (1933) and The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences