The Emergence of Political Science in Communist Countries

The scientific study of politics requires an environment which accepts free inquiry and discussion. Scholars must be permitted to ask questions of their own choosing, gather data without hindrance, and communicate freely with one another about their findings. To be sure, freedom to investigate sensitive policy matters is limited by all governments. Moreover, political scientists themselves inevitably introduce some measure of their own values or ideological predispositions into their works. But it is obvious that without the guarantee of certain minimum freedoms, political science as we know it in the West could never exist. Communist regimes traditionally have made independent inquiry or objective discussion of political phenomena impossible. In the Stalinist period, scholarly analyses of politics-or, for that matter, of aesthetic, literary, moral or economic questions-amounted to little more than doctrinal exegesis or the elaboration of practical measures to implement the Party's demands. An autonomous social science in Stalin's Russia or Eastern Europe was simply unthinkable. Since the dictator's death, however, Communist governments have modified their hostility toward the social sciences in general, and toward political science in particular. A decade of deStalinization has been accompanied by steps to encourage the scientific study of politics. In several East European countries, political science now enjoys recognition as a discipline in its own right. This does not mean that political science in Communist countries has freed itself of political controls, or that what is presented as political science is always of scholarly merit. On the contrary, one of the greatest difficulties in evaluating the emergence of a Communist political science stems from the lack of any clear cut dividing line between ideological or political works on the one hand, and studies of genuine scholarly merit on the other. In making distinctions between these two categories of writings on politics it is necessary to apply criteria which take into account the realities of the political science profession in Communist countries, while following broadly accepted standards of what may properly be termed political science. First, it is clear that propaganda and dogma do not properly belong within the discipline. At the same time, there is no justification for rejecting works as unscholarly or unscientific simply because their approach is Marxist. The principle that separates propaganda and polemics from scholarship is the elusive but fundamental consideration of independence of judgment. As F. Burlatskii, a Soviet philosopher, has remarked, political science asks questions "whose answers are not known beforehand." A second criterion for distinguishing between works which are political science and those which are not concerns the extent to which Communist scholars rely on authorities other than the standard works of Communist doctrine. Such a practice, of course, is subject to abuse by writers who seek to give official dogma a scholarly veneer by reference to non-Communist as well as Communist sources. On the other hand, attempts to exploit Western scholarship for official ends cannot disguise the fact that in those countries where political science has been allowed to develop, there has been a sharp break with Marxist-Leninist approaches to politics, and much of the terminology, method and conceptual framework of Western political science has been adopted. In such cases, one can speak of a fundamental change in method, in which the standards of the discipline replace those of the ideology in determining the validity of research and scholarly analysis. Finally, it should be noted that contributions of real merit can be made to the study of politics by persons who are trained in other fields, particularly in countries where political science is not officially recognized as a discipline in its own right. Given the hostility to the discipline present in many Communist countries, this may be the only way in which the scientific study of politics can develop. We do not devote equal attention to each country of the Communist world. In Albania, Bulgaria, East Germany and Hungary, and in the non-European Communist states as well, there has been little or no public discussion of the merits of political science. Studies on political questions published in these countries are dogmatic and polemical. In other Communist countries, conditions vary widely. Poland and Yugoslavia have shown the most progress; Rumania and Czechoslovakia have only recently accepted the concept of political science as a dis-