In my last post, Academic Irrelevance, I argued how the vast majority of self-proclaimed “political scientists” have conspicuously neglected to engage with the public to provide any sort of genuine political understanding, thereby rendering themselves profoundly irrelevant to the actual social world of people and politics that they claim to be experts in.
Now I appreciate that this might seem to be a quirky, abstruse sort of concern to be preoccupied with these days, given the terrifyingly real level of deep structural collapse Americans are currently facing from seemingly every direction. But it’s not.
As Thomas Jefferson so insightfully pointed out:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information.”
(Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816 - see here)
Jefferson, writing back in 1816, was convinced that this vital flow of information would be naturally preserved if the press was sufficiently free to objectively disseminate it and the citizenry was sufficiently educated to be able to make sense of it.
In 2025, both of these fundamental requirements seem particularly shaky, and we’re in dire need of as much help as possible from other knowledgeable quarters to sharpen our collective political understanding. But we’re not getting it.
Instead, as University of Cambridge political theorist John Dunn described it in the video clip from my last post:
“Most academics who work on political theory, political philosophy, or political sociology work on what they think of as ‘well-defined questions’ and they believe that they provide robust and compelling answers to those questions. Now, in order to do that, you have to pull a long way back from the world. And my general, intuitive judgement is that if you pull a long way back from the world of politics, you just lose politics: it’s gone.”
But what could have possibly possessed them to believe that it was appropriate to waste their time formulating answers to such abstract, “well-defined questions” in the first place? Anyone who’s ever picked up a newspaper knows that politics is a messy, highly variable business, with so many sudden, bizarrely contingent twists and turns that it’s virtually impossible to securely predict what’s going to happen next month, let alone next year. That, after all, is precisely what is meant by the familiar old adage, A week is a long time in politics.
How is it possible that those who have spent years of their life obtaining advanced degrees in politics and government so consistently ignore what is intuitively obvious to the rest of us?
Well, one possibility is an academic phenomenon loosely known as “physics envy” – the conviction that the social sciences could – indeed somehow should – be approached in the same formal, rigorous way as the natural sciences, so as to discover the hidden universal laws of political action analogous to general relativity or genetics.
A moment’s reflection should reveal that this is completely nonsensical. The social sciences are fundamentally different from the natural sciences, as their domain is – tautologically – deeply related to human behaviour, whereas the natural sciences are almost always completely independent of it. The number of people who are convinced that black holes exist has nothing to do with whether or not they actually do or the particulars of their formation process. Indeed, the theory of black holes has nothing to do with human life at all. They will continue to do their thing for eons after the sun has become a red giant 5 billion years from now, likely swallowing up the entire earth in the process.
And while it’s an open question (well, sort of) whether a physics “theory of everything” that formally encompasses all natural phenomena at its most fundamental level actually exists, the notion of stumbling upon a similar type of all-encompassing framework in the social sciences is nothing less than patently absurd.
Because the logical prerequisites – aside altogether from the practical difficulties – are as follows: in order to do so, first you must come up with valid, all-encompassing laws of both individual and collective human psychology (and their overlap) and then somehow find a way of confidently extrapolating all of that to particular, rigorously-defined subclasses of human activity, like politics.
Anyone who thinks this jibes with our current level of understanding of both the brain and human societies isn’t just misguided, he’s profoundly delusional (the last time I looked, not too many neuroscientists, psychologists and sociologists – to name but a few of the relevant players – were concerned that they’d be out of a job anytime soon).
But just because it’s ludicrous to be pondering the prospect of a “political theory of everything” hardly means that social scientists aren’t capable of providing us with essential guidance about our social world. They simply have to take another approach - focusing their attention away from “discovering law-like regularities” and towards effectively interpreting human actions by trying to deduce the intentions, beliefs and desires of the key social actors in question.
Which is precisely what UC Berkeley’s Mark Bevir (another forward thinking, hope-instilling, exception-who-proves-the-rule political theorist), patiently explained to me several years ago, describing how social scientists must recognize that, unlike their natural science colleagues, the only way to make sense of our social world is to try to puzzle out the profoundly human motivations of those leading figures who have most contributed to shaping it towards what it has now become. It is, as he puts it, “an interpretive art”.
(This clip if from an Ideas Roadshow Conversation with Mark Bevir, How Social Science Creates the World)
So how does one become an expert in the “interpretive art” of politics?
After all, without a mathematically rigorous framework of invariant laws that produce necessary conclusions from specific initial conditions, how can experts be certain that they’ve correctly assessed the motivations and desires of our political actors? Well, they can’t.
But by studying their words and deeds, rigorously imagining the specific strategies they have in mind and studiously investigating as many historical precedents as can be found for their potential appropriateness, they can, over time, provide us with increasingly accurate diagnoses of what is happening and why.
Of course, surprises will always occur: no two political scenarios, however superficially similar, will ever be anything close to identical; and their particular future trajectories might well end up diverging widely from one another.
But if our experts don’t ever bother looking carefully at the social world as it truly is, in all its full-blooded, all-too-human contingency, they won’t see anything at all.
And we’ll all be blind.
Howard Burton