Political Philosophy and the Policy Studies Organization

Recently, in the course of researching a book on the relationship between Western political philosophy and American public policy analysis, I examined the first twenty years of the Policy Studies Organization and discovered some disturbing trends. Early pledges made by the Organization that it would seek to integrate into its Policy Studies Journal ideas gained from the Western political tradition have been only partially fulfilled. One result of this unfortunate omission is that the contemporary study of American public policy issues remains essentially isolated from the history of Western political philosophy. When the Policy Studies Organization published the inaugural issue of the Policy Studies Journal in 1972 students of the history of political philosophy reacted with guarded optimism. Political philosophy enjoyed a questionable status within the discipline of political science during the post World War II era. The efforts of behavioralists to equate political philosophy with antiquarianism and to deny the validity of qualitative analysis had convinced many political scientists that knowledge gained from studying the history of Western political thought was no longer relevant. This hostile atmosphere was moderated somewhat when the postbehavioral revolution in political science arrived on the American scene, heralded by David Easton's 1969 call for a renewed emphasis on the ancient "humanist conception of the intellectual as the guardian of those civilized, humane values known to most men" (Easton, 1969: 1059). The subsequent formation of the Policy Studies Organization and open invitation by its Policy Studies Journal to research "regardless of methodology or ideology" ("Statement of Purpose," 1972: 2) seemed to promise a much more tolerant attitude. Political philosophers were encouraged to believe that the pages of the Journal would be free from the limits imposed by behavioralism. It is apparent that the Journal has sought to live up to that promise. For twenty years there have been a number of notable essays and reviews published that are genuinely informed by the accumulated wisdom of the Western political tradition. John Ladd's "Policy Studies and Ethics" in 1973 included a thoughtful consideration of Plato and Aristotle as thinkers worthy of merit for policy studies. George Modelski's "Long Cycles and U.S. Strategic Policy" in 1979 discussed the ideas of Thucydides, Francis Bacon, Lord Bolingbroke, and David Hume. James Wiser's "exploring Liberal Norms" in 1983 applied the history of liberal thought to a critique of three books on contemporary American liberalism. Irirangi Bloomfield's "Managing Technology in the United States and Switzerland" in 1984 included an analysis of the Judeo-Christian heritage common to both societies. Paul Thompson's "Agriculture, Biotechnology, and the Political Evaluation of Risk" in 1988 applied the political views of Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham to an examination of the risks of new agricultural biotechnologies. Although there have been other articles that have taken the Western political tradition seriously, more frequently different messages have been delivered. Too often the history of political philosophy has been relegated to a museum relic, displayed on the mantelpiece of the Policy Studies Journal but seldom utilized or consulted. Vincent Ostrom's "Human Fallibility, Political Theory, and the Environment" in 1973, for example, determined that: