Richard Kostelanetz
Government
More than other social sciences, the study of polities has to take place at the border between norm and practice, idea and reality. It is a complex study of constitutions and processes, organizations, and activities.
—Jean Blondel, “Government” (1966)
The study of government, also called “political science,” deals with how political power is gained and structured, as well as administered, in local, regional, or national frames; it also studies collective behavior related to politics, whether the power-seeking subjects be voters, radical activists, party professionals, or bureaucrats. More explanatory than prescriptive, the study of government is not as normative as social philosophy; for while acknowledging the function of ethics and ideology, it emphasizes the mechanisms that transform social philosophy into political policy. At its best this discipline aims to discern regularities in the apparently inchoate profusion of political activities, particularly those new connections and changing patterns, that lie beyond the perceptions of journalists. (The assumption that “politics” is only a dimension of society puts the comprehension of totalitarianism, or the total politicization of society, into the domain of sociology.)
The issue dividing the discipline is not ideological but methodological—whether to study the institutions of political power or the behavior of those desiring institutional position. The latter is sometimes called “political sociology”—indeed, several of its foremost practitioners hold “sociology” degrees; but their conclusions are generally less broadly sociological than specifically political. For instance, the sociological concern with the social origins and preconditions of totalitarian societies produced a post-WWII interest in the social preconditions of political democracy; so that a central problem for American political sociology became how a country so riddled with social conflicts (and incipient totalitarianisms) has managed to preserve a fairly stable democracy. From this concern followed studies of democratic processes—patterns of voting, the nature of American political parties, the procedures of campaigns, and the inevitable question of whether this New World democracy could be “exported,” so to speak, to currently new societies. The American study of political institutions, on the other side, emphasized the particular nature of Presidential power, the changing weights in the traditional “divisions of powers,” the pattern of Congressional processes, the purposes of foreign policy (which are implemented only at the federal level), and the impact of new knowledge and new technologies, particularly electronic communications, upon governmental functioning (and understanding).
The theme of this new political sociology was the social bases of politics, which is to say the analysis of how certain social factors favor one political form over another, why adherents of a certain political sympathy come from common social backgrounds, and then how social developments precede perceptible changes in political preferences. To the classic questions of political science—who gets what, when and how—the political sociologist asks who emphasizes what public issues, in what way, and why? This new way of analyzing politics, pioneered by Samuel Lubell in his highly prophetic The Future of American Politics (1952), customarily explains political expression by generalizing about its social preconditions, as in this example from Lubell: “The five precincts in all Los Angeles which [Henry] Wallace carried were heavily Jewish areas into which Negroes had begun to move (much like the East Bronx).” Or by offering typologies like the following from William Kornhauser’s The Politics of Mass Society (1959):
DIFFERENTIATED STANDARDS UNIFORM STANDARDS
FIXED STANDARDS Traditionalism Monism
FLUID STANDARDS Pluralism Populism
Unless evidence is handled objectively, and collective behavior viewed sympathetically, this form of explanation can lead to snotty debunking, if not vulgar dismissals of political movements—as in the collective atomization of McCarthyism edited by Daniel Bell, The New American Right (1955) or Nathan Glazer’s similarly high-handed analysis of the extreme left, The Social Bases of American Communism (1962). Nonetheless, the most intelligent political sociology dealt less in glibly negative, compensatory exposés than in justifications that connected a reasonable common sentiment to positive political expressions (such as older Negroes voting Republican, while their post-New Deal children tend to be Democrat).
Indeed, the essays collected in Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man (1962) offer a catalogue of sociological perceptions about political behavior; but whereas Lubell’s earlier book dealt strictly with American phenomena, especially the splitting apart of the post-New Deal coalition, Lipset drew upon global evidence for such empirical propositions as these: economic development, which produces industrialization, urbanization, increased wealth, and universal education, is the single essential social preconditions for successful democracy; “a stable democracy requires the manifestation of conflict or cleavage so that there will be struggle over ruling positions, challenges to parties in power, and shifts of parties in office”; the poor are more liberal or left than the rich on economic issues, but the correlation is reversed on such non-economic issues as civil liberties and racial opportunity; all ideologies, whether left, right or center, have a moderate version and an extreme form, the first of which is parliamentary, the other extra-parliamentary; reactionaries generally come from the downwardly mobile middle-class; poverty tempted by visible prosperity is susceptible to radicalism; and a rapid increase in the size of a democratic electorate may signify “the decline of social cohesion and the breakdown of the democratic process.” Lipset’s examination of totalitarian societies made him fear both excessive political involvement in democracies and the belief, growing in some American milieus, that social or personal problems can necessarily be solved by revolutionary political change. Like other neo-liberal political sociologists, he came to appreciate a certain kind of democratic apathy that reflected not the neglect of one’s political duty or a disgust with the established system but a genuine contentment that regarded major candidates as more or less equally acceptable and/or saw no need for even the most minimal political expression—the general truth being that most people, thankfully, were not politically active most of the time.
Implicit in Political Man is also admiration for the two major American parties for functioning (and surviving) as coalitions that successfully assimilate the diverse demands of minority interests groups, who never win everything they want and yet stay committed to their parties and the party system; for as Lipset noted in The First New Nation (1964), “How comparable are the social bases for multiple parties in France and the United States, yet different, thanks to coalescing parties, in stability and continuity.” After noting the absence of ideological rigor, traditional program, or solidified membership in American parties, Lubell shrewdly understood that, “The key to the political warfare of any particular period will be found in the conflict among the clashing elements of [within] the majority party,” for this pattern of continuing conflict within the organization was largely responsible, as many noted, for keeping American parties less oligarchic, or more democratic, than the European groups characterized in Robert Michels’ classic Political Parties (1911). Also common to both analysts was an admiration for democratic systems that evolved peacefully and resolved, or at least assuaged, innumerable political conflicts that reflected deep and multiple social cleavages, some of which were capable of instigating violence, inspiring dictatorship, or splitting the system apart. Indeed, Lipset’s study of “enacted rules that form the nature of parties and representation” turned into a celebration of the Anglo-American political achievement:
The change in Western political life reflects the facts that the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved; the workers have achieved industrial and political citizenship; the conservatives have accepted the welfare state; and the democratic left has recognized that an increase in over-all state power carries with it more dangers to freedom than solutions for economic problems.
Their general truth notwithstanding, sentences like these brought the change, particularly from young leftists, that Lipset, a sometime socialist, had sold out to the status quo; yet the underlying truth of Political Man—a theme that often escaped the innocent young—was an appreciation of the American penchant for consensus that survives all the reasons for cleavage. “What I saw in Europe,” affirmed Lubell, “left me wondering how many of us appreciate what stability in government really means.”
Political sociology maintained a particular interest in popular voting as, in Lipset’s phrase, “the key mechanism of consensus in democratic society.” Here, however, the most remarkable work elaborated an idea proposed before, most notably in Graham Wallas’s Politics (1908)—that most balloting reflects not individual “free” rational choice but social determinants—not just class or income, as Marxian analysis would have it, but also ethnic origin, religion, political inheritance, sex, and geography (and thus status drives as much as economic); and that the scholarly consideration of these social factors made political analysis increasingly subtle and yet accurate. (Pursuing this assumption, some sociologists suggested that if given an individual’s occupation, ethnic background, the party affiliation of his parents, and where he currently lived, they could, with nearly total accuracy, identify both which party generally won an individual’s allegiances and for whom he voted in the last Presidential election.) Moreover, since parties represented coalitions of distinct minorities defined by common sympathies other than class—Southerners, Catholics, Jews, farmers, suburbanites, professionals, etc.—election analysis customarily identified the “swing” of certain groups away from their traditional allegiance; and the politicians themselves would intentionally aim their appeals not at the undifferentiated mass but at one or another particular minority. It followed that this interpretation of political sympathy dismissed campaign oratory as “but the small talk which conceals the almost instinctive predispositions” (Lubell’s phrase) and implicitly debunked one classic theoretical justification for democracy; yet this new understanding also recognized that the American social reality of overlapping minorities whose contrary demands could best be mediated by “democratic” procedures. Nonetheless, the way that these analysts wrote about collective sentiment (of “The Negro,” “farmers,” et al.) sometimes created the false impression that nearly everyone in the category shifted from one party to another, though in fact such shifts usually involved much less than unanimity (and individuals do not always vote as their sociologist says they should)—perhaps itself a testament to the independent thinking of many Americans and, thus, the traditional rationale of democracy.
The analysis of Presidential voting patterns produced, in Samuel Lubell’s words, “a self-portrait of America, a self-portrait with each ballot serving as another brush stroke,” but with shifting precincts and states registering as more visible blocks of color. As a professional journalist, Lubell displayed a good sense for the general meanings buried in statistics, while his book frequently quotes from the interviews he personally conducted. In the best “scientific” study of voting, however, the highly refined statistical procedures (“sampling survey”) developed by the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld proved particularly useful in analyzing fine trends; and two of the most substantial general studies in this field, The People’s Choice (1948) and Voting (1954), were done by Lazarsfeld himself, along with numerous Columbia University associates. “In the period after 1950,” notes the Anglo-French political critic Jean Blondel, “voting behavior came to be the most popular field of study for political scientists.
More recent thinking about Presidential voting has been less sociological, concentrating instead upon the changing nature of political campaigns, especially in response to the new communications technology. If nineteenth-century campaigning was based largely upon personal appearances around the country that was traversed by rail and then coverage in the newspapers, candidates in the 1920’s began to reach their audiences primarily through the radio. In fact, radio enabled Franklin D. Roosevelt to overcome the nearly unanimous opposition of American newspapers. In the fifties, as the campaigning politicians switched to airplanes, television became their most powerful medium: for even non-campaign appearances could make or break their prestige—the earliest example being Estes Kefauver’s Congressional hearings in 1951, which nearly won him the Presidential nomination in 1952; but not until the sixties did political analysts begin to understand how the tube had changed American campaigning. Fabricating a Presidential “image” was a major theme of Theodore H. White’s best-seller, The Making of the President, 1960 (1961) which shrewdly placed the turning point of the 1960 Presidential campaigns at the first nationally televised political debates; and the book’s emphasis on the projected personalities and the medium’s ecumenical powers implicitly discounted both sociological and ideological factors. “There were certainly real differences in philosophy and ideas between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon,” White notes, “yet rarely in American history has there been a political campaign that discussed issues less or clarified them less.” Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), as noted before, provided more subtle explanations for Kennedy’s superior attractiveness on the new medium; but by 1968 journalists became so aware of the politicians’ cynical image-making that the following year’s best-seller had as it title The Selling of the President (1969), its author, Joe McGuiness, being a generation younger than Theodore White.
Disillusion with the corruptions of American democracy notwithstanding, another question central to the study of modern government asked whether the institution of political democracy could be established in new post-colonial nations. The “liberal” position on foreign policy, as noted later, occasionally implies that democratic systems could, and perhaps should, be established (and defended) abroad, because the systems themselves had a validity and a persuasiveness that transcended particular social conditions. On the other hand, the historian Daniel Boorstin’s first essay on native particularity, The Genius of American Politics (1953), argued that American democracy was strictly indigenous, if not historically fortuitous as well. “The attempt to distill our philosophy or to transplant our institutions is apt to fail,” he concluded, “because the principles on which we approach politics, and have succeeded in building our own institutions, deny such a possibility.”
Lipset’s more sociological discussion of the United States as The First New Nation echoes this theme of American particularity, concluding that, “Democracy cannot be created by fiat.” Pursuing a functionalistic interest in comparing how a particular law or institution functions in one or another political system, Lipset argued that in contrast to the “successful” Anglo-American democracies, whose social and intellectual roots are traced in detail, democratic systems in new states are likely to suffer the chronic instabilities already endemic in Latin American governments. By the late sixties, most close observers agreed that, parallels in overcoming colonial dominance notwithstanding, the American example had little relevance to the world’s new nations.
No problem confronting the United States government has been more agonizing and endlessly insoluble than foreign policy, as the issue of American political dealings with the rest of the world has produced three general positions (which might be normative enough to be “social philosophy,” where they not philosophically so paltry). These intellectual persuasions are most conveniently called conservative, liberal, and radical, though they did not necessarily correlate with the nature of an individual’s domestic social philosophy. The conservative, in brief, has believed in the continuing relevance of America’s traditional policy of isolationism from the world’s troubles. Even someone as liberal in his social philosophy as Charles Beard adhered to this view, attacking America’s World War II involvement in his final book, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948). Moreover, from the late fifties onwards, liberals disillusioned with America’s multitudinous involvements abroad began to urge disengagement from entangling alliances on the new grounds that our interminable intervening protective role, in addition to conspicuous military support of reactionary regimes, only provokes deserved disfavor—a new isolationism initiated by George Kennan in 1957-8, then most persuasively advocated by Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff in several polemical books, and subsequently popularized by Senator William Fulbright.
The fact was that World War II committed America to liberal internationalism, which became the dominant outlook, as the United States joined the United Nations and even provided the institution with a physical home (implicitly repudiating our failure to join the League of Nations after World War I). America assumed Britain’s earlier role of responsibility for world order and liberal leadership. Not only did the country commit itself, through the Marshall Plan and related programs, to aiding generously the economic recovery of non-Communist countries, but with the Truman Doctrine of 1947 the United States embarked on a network of mutual defense treaties that served in practice to underwrite military defense of other nations in exchange for their economic and political loyalty. The rationale for this last policy was “containment,” as outlined by an anonymous “X” (later identified as George Kennan) in a 1947 essay entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” To deal with the two-sided recognition of Soviet territorial ambitions and yet the unwillingness of both sides to engage in an all-out conflict that might escalate into nuclear war, Mr. X proposed “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” Hans J. Morgenthau’s In Defense of the National Interest (1951) pursued a similarly tough-minded approach that regarded sheer power as more useful than international law or common morality in dealing with Stalinist Russian—the use of philosophically illiberal means toward a liberal ends. Not all internationalists, it should be pointed out, subscribed to this policy, as Walter Lippmann in 1947 offered this prophetic dissenting criticism: “It would require, however much the real name for it were disavowed, continual and complicated intervention by the United States in the affairs of all the members of the coalition, which we were proposing to organize, to protect, to lead, and to use.”
In later years, this bias of internationalism informed a diversity of distinct policies, ranging from John Foster Dulles’ vain proclamation to “roll-back” Communism to the government support of the exploitative designs of American corporations, in addition to genuinely philanthropic enterprises of various persuasions. This liberal position on foreign policy, rather than the conservative, rationalized American military support of South Korea in the early fifties, and then South Vietnam in the sixties; it informed as well a policy of “flexible response,” often with American troops and materiel, to meet various levels of enemy insurgence, rather than the kind of smug isolationism implied by the fifties’ concept of “massive retaliation.” By the sixties, Josef Stalin had died, his successors revealed that Russia had no further expansionist designs, satellite Communist parties and states operated with more autonomy, China especially behaved like an independent power, the image of overall international power became more multi-polar than bipolar, and advocates of the liberal foreign policy could justly claim to have kept the world largely at peace.
The radical position in this trichotomy favored World Government, whether through American capitulation to Russia, as some “fellow travelers” urged, or through a super-institution especially established for that purpose. Wendell L. Willkie, the Republican Presidential candidate in 1940, popularized the concept of “One World” in a book of that title (1943), and the refugee scientist Albert Einstein became an early advocate, proposing in The Atlantic Monthly as early as 1945:
The secret of the [atomic] bomb should be committed to a World Government, and the United States should immediately announce its readiness to give it to a World Government. This government should be founded by the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain—the only three powers with great military strength....Any government is certain to be evil to some extent, but a World Government is preferable to the far greater evil of wars, particularly with their intensified destructiveness.
The ideal of World Government depended largely upon cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union; but whether because of Stalin’s territorial ambitions (certainly implied by both Communist ideology and Soviet behavior just after the war) or his evident personal madness, or because of, as the “revisionist” Cold War historians change, intemperate American policies, such a rapprochement became less likely during the late forties and fifties. By the sixties, however, especially after the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962, the two powers became more cordial, mutually establishing a treaty against nuclear testing in the atmosphere and a bilateral interest in preventing nuclear proliferation. Both also rescinded earlier ambitions for expanding economic and political dominance. By that time, however, Communist China had become a more autonomous power, capable if only through the immensity of its population of inspiring fear in both East and West; and its apparent unwillingness to negotiate with any and all foreign powers made the ideal of World Government honorable but irrelevant.
The only domestic debate to inspire equally adamant advocacies dealt with the issue of the structure of American power, with scholars dividing over whether political power is concentrated within a few hands or diffused among the leaders of various groups. On the issue of national power, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956) charged that overlapping alliances unify the mighty few at the top of corporations, politics, and the military (and then the ancient truth that the powerful have a vested interest in the perpetuation of their dominance). The contrary image of unstable, disunified, “countervailing” power was espoused earlier by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and David Riesman, the latter writing in The Lonely Crowd (1950); “A single hierarchy with a ruling class at its head has been replaced by a number of ‘veto groups’ among which power is dispersed.” Therefore, as the powerful chiefs are more often in political competition than collusion, no single group can impose its design without the collaboration of other interest groups, perhaps in exchange for support of their own pet projects. In Riesman’s analysis (echoed, incidentally, by Lubell), each group “has struggled for and finally attained a power to stop, things conceivably inimical to its interests and, within far narrower limits, to start things.” However, the most obvious criticism of this formulation notes that some groups and their leaders are more powerful than others. This new image of American power—diversity miraculously held in an indeterminate equilibrium by a changing center—seemed more visibly true to contemporary experience than Mills’s all-powerful ghost in the political machine; but an older truth is that pluralistic images have always had more fidelity than monolithic ones in characterizing anything in our total culture. (Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man [1964] suggests that this diffusion of power served to suppress and co-opt the left, destroying its “freedom” to change society; but this critically superficial analysis offers no way of explaining how American society has in fact changed.)
On the issue of local political power, advocates of the oligarchic interpretation can conceivably wage a stronger case; but here the numerous conclusions were almost as varied as the sociological studies. Floyd Hunter’s Community Power Structure (1953) documents how policy was controlled by a relatively small group in Atlanta, Georgia; but in Who Governs? (1961), Robert A. Dahl, a Yale professor who defended pluralism in his earlier Preface to Democratic Theory (1956), found in his local New Haven that independent sovereignties divide available political power among scarcely overlapping influential people and groups. “These very disagreements,” notes Blondel, “are often based on problems of method as much as on interpretation,” and the scholarly problem seemed to demand a conceptual advance before the argument would be more distinctly drawn.
As the dimensions of political power were changing in other ways at all levels in America, the characteristics of these transformations interested those studying government. Clinton Rossiter’s The American Presidency (1956) recognizes the historical trend of the President’s increasing power, prestige, and responsibility, in response partially to the liberals’ demand for a strong Presidency (above the pettiness of Congressman) and mostly to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation in 1939 of a new bureaucracy in “The Executive Office of the President.” Rossiter wrote that, “The immediate impulse for organizing it was Roosevelt’s own candid recognition that an otherwise professional performance during his first term in the Presidency had been hampered by the number of his duties and by the lack of assistance in their discharge.” (The later development of thermonuclear weaponry gave the President another kind of added power—absolute control over maximal war.) This new bureaucracy, and many of its individuals, remained after Roosevelt’s death; so that every subsequent President has inherited an organization that inevitably does not decrease in size. The problem thus becomes how to use this Presidential authority effectively—in particular how to overcome the possible obstructions inevitable in the delegation of power to men generally predisposed to personal initiative and accomplishment. This recognition produced numerous studies, none of them particularly distinguished, of the President’s assistants and advisors, as well as Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power (1960), whose major point was the contrast between Roosevelt’s competence with power and Eisenhower’s insistence upon delegating so much that control was lost. Neustadt suggested that “leadership in form” or name is not “a guarantee of leadership in fact,” especially with the recalcitrant Congress typical of the past decades; and this observation forced him to ask the previously unheard question of how the President might best make the available power work for, rather than against, him. Neustadt’s answers, while persuasive as much, are more concerned with positional power and individual political skill (again in awe of Roosevelt’s example) than the new “powers” of access to those media allowing publicity and persuasion.
The crucial changes in urban government have stemmed from its unceasing growth in size and complexity, often beyond the ability of the municipal administration to sustain traditional services; and then the fairly general shift in political leadership from the old “machines” to the new reform movements. Indeed, much reform activity grew from earlier writing about urban affairs and its corruptions; so that writers and professors often become “reform” political leaders, if not eventually the mayors or “managers” of many important American cities. What these reform movements promised was first of all “ better leaders,” by which they meant more honest and more enlightened individuals; and when reformers realized such aims, they at first received a generally sympathetic press. However, more recent studies, such as Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson’ s City Politics (1963), demonstrated that this emphasis upon “values” masked an even more drastic shift in power from lower-class to middle-class, from hyphenated Americans to citizens born and, especially, educated here, who have a different system of political demands to make upon municipal government:
If in the old days city administration was biased in favor of the tastes of the lower class, as made known by ward politicians, now it is biased in favor of the tastes of the middle class as made known by newspapers, civic associations, and, especially, professionals in various bureaucracies.
Indeed, to such unsentimental political scientists as Banfield and Wilson, the reformers’ talk of the “public interest” really represents the designs of particular interest; for the new-style leaders are ultimately as committed to the brokerage of power as their predecessors: “If in the old days specific material inducements were illegally given as bribes to favored individuals, now much bigger ones are legally given to a different class of favored individuals.” True as this is, the change in urban power still represents progress; for the new administrators have shown themselves more open than their predecessors to radical new designs for the real urban problem—the increasing complexity and diffusion of governmental responsibility.
The idea of regarding such a multifarious government as a complex “system” is indebted to strains of new thought developed in other fields—in this case, biology and then computer development; and perhaps the most accomplished practitioner of the intellectual strategy of applying ideas originating outside the profession to political understanding has been Karl W. Deutsch. A scholar of encyclopedic learning, diverse interests, an assimilative sensibility, and a scrupulous empiricism, who left his native Prague before World War II to become one of the great American minds of academic political science, Deutsch first worked with the mathematical theory of communication developed largely at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late forties. “Information theory,” as this is commonly known, deals with the amount of communication, measured in terms of “bits” (which signify the smallest discrete impulses), that flows over discernible channels between two terminals; so that “information” has a physical reality (“bits”) that can be quantified, regardless of what the actual messages say. The idea of measuring communication as such appealed to Detusch’s empiricism, as well as his awareness of technological impact; and he came to regard it as the most substantial index of political sympathy. In Nationalism and Social Communication (1953), for instance, he proposes to measure the existing sentiment for nationalistic unity by the pattern and amount of communication within a certain geographical area, for presence of “a people” is defined by “a community of complementary habits of communication.” His book is full of more research suggestions than conclusions or even verifications; but pursuing his theme of quantifying what had previously been pursued intuitively, Deutsch concludes that his research methods could probably predict “whether the unification of Western Europe will be a success or not, whether there will be peace between Hindus and Muslims in India, between Jews and Muslims in the Near East,” Later innovative research by Deutsch, usually in tandem with numerous associates, measured the changing rates of telephone calls between France and Germany, for instance, as indices of cross-cultural sympathies. While such methodological proposals demand prodigious research, the resulting answers have a specificity and “scientific” empiricism otherwise impossible.
Deutsch’s next major theoretical treatise in political understanding, The Nerves of Government (1963), appropriated another new kind of thinking, cybernetic theory (developed by his colleague at M.I.T., Norbert Wiener), to regard the governmental system as a functioning organism whose behavior approximates rules applicable to the human body with less suggestiveness, in several books or computers—an analogy also developed by the academic political scientist David Easton. Cybernetics, we remember, deals with those information process by which the functioning system considers the results of its activity (feedback) and adjusts itself accordingly, in order to maintain equilibrium—the process (called “homeostasis” in biology) is variably self-adjusting, rather than a rote mechanism. This new way of thinking came to the study of government before sociology, precisely because the networks of interrelation (and communication) are that much more apparent. Extrapolating from this cybernetic model, both Deutsch and Easton regard the government as the fixed institution in a “feedback loop” primarily engaged in shuttling information from one extension (or agency) to another, and performing in response to public reactions to previous activity. Applying his analogy, Easton regards politics as “a complex set of processes through which certain kinds of inputs are converted into the type of outputs we may call authoritative policies, decisions, and implementing actions.”
Extracting a more general principle from this analogy, Deutsch conjectured, “It might be profitable to look upon government somewhat less as a problem of power and somewhat more as a problem of steering”; and since this “steering is decisively a matter of communication,” the quality of information and the efficacy of its flow become decisively important. (Easton generalized that, “Anything that serves to delay, distort, or sever the flow of information to the authorities interferes with their capacity to take action.”) Deutsch, who is inclined to pursue his schemes to unusual analogies and conclusions, outlined numerous implications of his hypothesis of government as primarily a sensitized mover of information and, thus, emphasized several processes slighted in past analysis; but underlying all this extrapolation is the question of what might be the most appropriate purposes of contemporary political administration? On one hand, governments have a new function as the most appropriate central repository of public data; on the other hand, the causes of political failure could, in Deutsch’s analysis, include incorrect or inadequate information, such as “the overvaluation of the near over the far, the familiar over the new, the past over the present, and the present over the future.” (Indeed, by emphasizing both the future and his innovative image of the present, Deutsch linked his ideas to the new radical social philosophy.) In addition, his hypothesis related to that school of organizational theory that regarded the bureaucratic pyramid as disintegrating into a network of centers, often distributed over great geographical distances, yet within roughly instantaneous electronic contact with each other. Although not all of Duetsch’s suggestions were convincing or relevant, this unprecedented approach seemed particularly useful at characterizing governments that, though growing in size, had lost much of their earlier initiating power and yet still possessed a certain authority and a diffused scope—particularly at the middle “steering” levels of information dissemination (one message rather than another) and communication decision. Easton’s studies also appropriated eclectically other new ideas developed outside political science; and such scholars as Herbert A. Simon, L. S. Shapley, and Martin Shubik pioneered in the innovative application of mathematical models to political explanation. As analytically illuminating as these theories are, they rather discount the role of individuals in politics (or the obvious truth that administrators differ from each other); but what all these political scientists have in common is a sense that the unprecedented realities of the time demand a different kind of “governing” for classically humanistic ends.
The new radical social philosophy mentioned before argued that in liberal democracies most revolutionary social changes came not from political activity but sources outside politics—in response to technological development, affluence, generational difference, and the influence of new ideas. American political scientists since Arthur Bentley, early in the century, have been noting that pressure groups are often more powerful at initiating change than governmental institutions. The new reality demands an image of government primarily concerned with steering and adjusting in the interests of growth and equanimity, rather than power and leadership; and the steadily increasing size of American political institutions makes their initiative even less likely. Secondly, this greater emphasis upon information means that governments must become increasingly sophisticated, especially more dependent upon outside knowledge-producing sources, such as “think tanks” whose definitions of new realities and speculative ideas inform the policy alternatives available to administrators; and this change in particular is the essence of political “modernization” within Western industrial societies. Indeed, Herman Kahn and others have favored incorporating within the government a specialized agency responsible for channeling such information to all agencies that might find it relevant; but the fact that such an entity does not yet exist is merely indicative of politicians’ general lethargy in adjusting to a new world. Indeed, perhaps this lethargy, along with the decline of politics’ power, also casts a palling shadow upon the study of government, where scarcely a few exceptions have moved significantly beyond pre-WWII thinking; and their ideas, it is depressing to discover, are often unknown to professionals in this academic trade.
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