The Post-Behavioural Approach. (2016, 10 Marks)
Post-behaviouralism is the late-1960s reform of American political science that kept behaviouralism’s methods but rejected its claim to be a value-free, technique-first science. It was named and legitimised by David Easton in his 1969 presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “The New Revolution in Political Science”, in which the author of the behavioural creed turned critic of his own creation.
Origins
- Internal critique: Christian Bay‘s “Politics and Pseudopolitics” (American Political Science Review, 1965) charged behavioural studies with mistaking interest-group bargaining for politics and ignoring the human needs politics should serve.
- External shock: civil rights, the Vietnam War and campus unrest exposed a discipline with nothing to say about the crises of its own society; the Caucus for a New Political Science (1967) organised the discontent.
- Behaviouralism’s own narrowing: by confining inquiry to what could be measured, it had shrunk the discipline’s scope and cost it public relevance.
- Easton’s conversion: the seven tenets he named the credo of relevance gave the revolt a programme, with relevance and action as its twin watchwords. He described post-behaviouralism as both a movement of organised scholars and an intellectual tendency.
Core features
- Substance over technique: the importance of a problem, not the sophistication of the method, decides what is studied. Where the two collide, technique yields; Easton would rather be imprecise about an urgent question than exact about a trivial one.
- Values restored: fact and value are both legitimate objects of inquiry, and values are welcome where they serve human well-being; claimed neutrality conceals an empirical conservatism that endorses what it describes.
- Applied, not pure, science: theory earns its place by helping a society meet its crises. Easton wanted an action science in place of a contemplative one.
- Action and change: knowledge carries a responsibility to be used for reshaping society.
- Responsibility of intellectuals: scholars guard humane values, and the profession cannot stay aloof from public issues.
- Future orientation: study of alternatives and social change rather than system maintenance.
Significance
If traditionalism was the thesis and behaviouralism the antithesis, post-behaviouralism is the synthesis: it kept rigorous method while restoring purpose, and so halted the decline of political theory that Peter Laslett and Alfred Cobban had lamented in the 1950s. It cleared ground for the normative revival led by John Rawls‘s A Theory of Justice (1971) and for policy-oriented research. India shows the same arc: the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, founded by Rajni Kothari in 1963 as a centre of survey-based research, turned by the 1970s and 1980s to questioning Western modernity itself, most famously in Ashis Nandy‘s The Intimate Enemy (1983).
Limits
- A mood, not a method: it offered no new technique or theory, only a reorientation.
- Relevance is undefined: relevant to whom is itself a value choice, so the fact–value problem is relocated, not solved.
- Politicisation risks turning scholarship into advocacy and splitting the profession.
- Limited reach: quantitative work soon regained dominance through rational choice and, later, experimental methods. The Perestroika revolt, launched by an anonymous e-mail in October 2000 against the grip of formal and statistical methods, shows how little the relevance question was settled.
Conclusion
Post-behaviouralism was a correction of conscience rather than a new paradigm. Its lasting achievement is that relevance and values now count as legitimate criteria within empirical political science; its unfinished business is deciding whose relevance and which values.