There is still a fourth school, to which the book here reviewed belongs, which offers some hope of a really successful reorientation of political theory. Since its inspiration is more from economics than any other source and since economics is the social science closest to politics both in the nature of the events abstracted for study and in the process of abstraction, it happens that the works of this school are clearly political in nature. Since economics like politics has a long tradition of normative theorizing, these writings contain normative elements alongside of positive ones. Most important of all, however, they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past. Some of the main works in this fourth school of re-orienters of political theory are: Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (although this work has its roots as much in sociological as in economic theory); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and, as an important addition, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.--William H. Riker (1962) Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Nov., 1962) [Reviewing The Calculus of Consent. by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock], pp. 408-409.
Because I am working on a side project (recall here; here) on the (non-)reception of Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy, I stumbled on this passage in Riker's review of The Calculus of Consent. I also want to situate the passage in the black hole in our collective narrative of what exactly political philosophy could be within analytic philosophy and its sister-discipline political theory pre-Rawls (which was re-opened for me by Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall (recall here; here; here; and here). Somewhat to my own surprise these issues intersect with my interest in neoliberalism and the split between ('positive') economics and ('normative') philosophy.
I suspect most of my readers know who William Riker is (not to be confused with the Star Trek character). He is now widely seen as one of the founders of rational choice theory, and among other achievements introduced game theory and social choice theory into political science. He is, what in an earlier generation disparagingly would have been called (by the sociologist Talcott Parsons [recall]), an exponent of 'economic imperialism.' We call it 'intellectual arbitrage' now. He founded the so-called Rochester School that's associated with the 'behavioral revolution' in political science. When he published the review of Buchanan and Tullock, Riker had just published The Theory of Political Coalitions, which was a major contribution to orientation he promoted.
About half of the review is quoted above. And only after this set-up does Riker discuss the contents of the book. So, the review itself is self-consciously a methodological intervention and cannon creation.
So, Riker distinguishes four approaches to political theory. First, there is the return to the classics which he (correctly) associates with Leo Strauss. This is treated -- much as Bacon treated final causes -- as sterile. Riker correctly represents Strauss's school as critical of historicism, but then misrepresents, either from confusion or from sincere insult, Strauss as instantiating historicism. (I am unsure he ever engaged with Strauss in substantive fashion elsewhere.)
Second there is a school devoted to "a close and systematic study of words." Riker's criticism of it echoes Isaiah Berlin's (1958) criticism of ordinary language philosophy (recall). T.D Weldon I know primarily as a Kant scholar and as being the supervisor of Wilfrid Sellars. But he is also the author of The Vocabulary of Politics (1953), which in reviews is described as an attempt to apply ordinary language philosophy to politics. A book I, thus, have to read because it is clearly in the event horizon of the black hole of analytic political philosophy whose shadow Rawls has (ahh) blotted out.*
I have to admit that I am puzzled by Riker's inclusion of Friedrich in this category. Friedrich's approach is so eclectic, that I would think he would be hard to categorize. This is not to deny he sometimes focuses on words, too. But this comment (alongside the Strauss as historicist 'mistake') makes me wonder, if Riker actually had carefully studied the schools he is rejecting. Or whether his polemics derive from supreme confidence in his own (sophisticated!) methods. That confidence is not without robust intellectual foundation, but one does wonder if in his polemics with opposing schools there isn't an element of bluster and bluff. (This combination is not unfamiliar to us within analytic philosophy.) I actually suspect that Riker is confusing Friedrich with Felix Oppenheim (who can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be slotted into this category.)
No exemplar of the third school is mentioned. I suspect Talcott Parsons (or those influenced by him) is one of the targets. This school is also engaged in intellectual arbitrage from other social sciences, but Riker finds them wanting. Riker's two criticisms of this approach (not very far removed from his own) are very interesting: first, they produce work that fits social psychology but is in some sense not properly political. One would have liked an extra sentence here because it would have illuminated his own stance toward the subject (or the discipline). Second, on Riker's view political theory ought to be descriptive/empirical (or at least fruitful in generating theoretically salient empirical generations and be an engine for theorizing) and normative/positive. So, the right kind of theory can help us study the political world and tell us how to improve it. (I return to this in the next paragraph.)
These two criticisms do not apply to the fourth school (which is Riker's own). From my perspective what is most interesting here is that Riker rejects the very firm distinction entrenched within economics (in word, less so in deed) since the time of Marshall, Sidgwick, and John Neville Keynes, and articulated by Lionel Robbins (and Milton Friedman) between the positive and normative projects.+ The final paragraph of the review actually explains Riker's own stance on this:
If it is assumed that most men are rational and that the appropriate rational behavior is transparently obvious, then the analysis is entirely positive. If it is assumed that rationality is a goal rather than a fact, then the calculus is normative. If it is assumed that the logic of the calculus is not obvious until it is deduced, then again the analysis is normative. (411)
Of course, the problem here is not the willingness to combine empirical and normative aims, but (to use scientistic terminology) that how to think about circumstances of what is 'transparently obvious' to the theorist/expert may not be so to (ahh) 'most men' and, more important, if, in a political context, the latter have to rely on the former for the deductions in the 'logic.' [As a slogan: Riker takes the relationship between theorist and theorized for granted.]
Be that as it may, lurking in the final paragraph that I quoted at the top of the post is the sense that the fourth school is generating a scientific revolution: "Most important of all...they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past." The fourth school has moved beyond the past and is progressive. (Such claims are common among economists of the age.) Interestingly enough the Nobel committee in economics has also recognized the contributions of this school of 'political theory' (including, in addition to Buchanan, Schelling).
After the polemical first half, the rest of the review of Calculus of Consent "list[s] what are for [Riker] some of the most interesting notions in the essay." (409) One important point is that Riker treats Calculus of Consent (not unfairly) as an advance beyond Downs on the question of what the effect is "of differing intensities of concern about particular issues under the rule of simple majority voting." (410)
From the vantage point of thinking about the nature and evolution of political theory at the middle of the twentieth century, the first, main question is actually rather important:
The main question the authors ask is: On what basis does a rational man, situated in a society created by unanimous agreement, consent to the transfer of a particular activity from private to collective decision-making? This question is, of course, a new and more sophisticated form of the question to which the theory of the social contract provided the answer. (409)
In the spirit of progress (we may say), Riker understands Buchanan and Tullock as having surpassed and made obsolete social contract theory. While the historian in me hesitates to disagree with such a well-informed contemporary of them, Riker somehow misses (presumably for his own polemical purposes) that Buchanan and Tullock themselves present their own work, en passant (but not obliquely) as a contribution to social contract theory. For, throughout Calculus of Consent, they imply both that individuals cannot withdraw from the social contract, as well as (and more important) that "Insofar as participation in the organization of a community, a State, is mutually advantageous to all parties, the formation of a “social contract” on the basis of unanimous agreement becomes possible." (ch. 17; the whole chapter is relevant, including for understanding why they frequently use scare-quotes around 'social contract,' but not always.)** So, the main question by Riker's lights is answered in terms of a social contract analysis according to Buchanan and Tullock. (The character of their social contract is worth exploring in a digression some time.)
Two final quick promissory thoughts connected to Rawls, since I click-baited you here with Rawls. First, there was a pre-Rawlsian political analytic philosophy. (Riker's second school.) Weldon is an example of this. (So is, perhaps, Felix Oppenheim.)++ And it was noticed by outsiders. But Rawls did not respond to it in The Theory of Justice.*** Oppenheim is cited once respectfully in TJ, and Weldon isn't mentioned. Rather, Rawls took the fourth school, the re-orienters, as his interlocuters and rivals. In fact, in TJ, Rawls also cites Black, Downs, Buchanan and Tullock, and Mancur Olson as authorities. And whatever else he is doing, he is also trying to offer an alternative to their project.+++ That's partially obscured to later readers because he doesn't name them much as targets. But it is worth noting they inherited their own normative project from utilitarianism, which is Rawls' official target. And partially obscured by the fact that after the mid to late 1970s Rawls himself emphasized the normative project in Kantian terms and so it's much harder to see TJ as building on and in competition with Rochester and Virginia.
*Nikhil Krishnan uses Weldon to great effect in his "John Rawls and Oxford Philosophy" in his contribution to the recent effort to historicize Rawls in Modern Intellectual Inquiry, but does not discuss him. Forrester (see p. 45 n. 34 on p. 301) cites a more substantive aspect of Weldon's work once in the context of her discussion of obligation and disobedience.
+In practice, lots of economics is normative directly or on the sly.
**As is well known by now, I hope, to my readers Buchanan saw quite some affinity with his own project and Rawls'.
++I do not mean to suggest this list is exhaustive.
***Weldon and Oppenheim are both cited Carl Friedrich is important to Rawls' milieu. As Rawls notes in TJ, Friedrich had edited one of Rawls's papers. But there is no substantive engagement with him. [I am ignoring those like Popper and Russell whose engagement with political philosophy was not central to their professional identity as such.]
+++When I say this I don't mean to suggest that utilitarianism, Arrow, Knight, the long social contract tradition, etc. are irrelevant!!!
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