Human Behaviour and World Politics: A Transdisciplinary Introduction

Preface

The contemporary academic study of world politics is a very diverse one. I am particularly concerned here with that considerable part of it which in a loose sense represents the ‘behaviouralist’ school. By ‘behaviouralism’ I mean the fashion of analysis that flowered in the 1950s and 1960s, principally in the United States, on the strength of three distinct but interconnected ideas: that there should be a scientific, self-consciously theoretical approach to the study of politics; that the study of politics should be founded upon the study of human behaviour; and that the study of politics can be reduced to the study of external, observable phenomena that regularly recur and can be quantitatively assessed. Each of these interests is reflected in recent fashions in the field of ‘international relations’, and is discussed in turn in what lies below. Despite the current critique of the behaviouralist neglect of matters of value, norms or ends, its preoccupation with ‘theory’, with the causes and contexts of human action, and with the empirical analysis of patterns of conflict and war, are of perennial concern.

After several years’ teaching and research in the field I have come to appreciate the need for a study that combines a sufficient breadth of transdisciplinary concerns with a proper regard for the theoretical and analytical endeavours against which these interests proceed. I have tried to meet that need here, as far at least as a single volume might permit. The work is introductory, but it is not in this sense either elementary or complete. Rather it attempts to organise a wide variety of ideas that these might be brought to bear in a comparatively novel way upon the study of global affairs. It introduces topics seldom considered in works of this kind, and makes a sustained attempt to break down the barriers that continue to prevent the inter-disciplinary understanding of politics at the most comprehensive of levels. It summarises what, at several important points, is a scattered body of literature, difficult to compare because of its ill-coordinated character. I have made an effort to render this material more accessible to the student and specialist alike.

My thanks are due to several people who at one time and another read and commented upon sections of the manuscript: Michael Leifer, William Brugger, Norman Wintrop, Norman Feather, Gina Geffen, and Leon Lack; and to Lin Smyth, who typed the separate drafts. They are not solely responsible for the shortcomings herein. Michael Banks first convinced me that the behaviouralists had useful things to say, and I owe him something for that. I would also like to thank the lady in my life, Jan P., who sat on the children and suffered the curtailment of her own research commitments that this work should appear. I dedicate it, with my love, to her.

Ralph Pettman

Research Fellow, Department of International Relations, Australian National University

CHAPTER 1 – The Academic Heritage

The following study is an attempt to map some of the major features of the modern field of international relations, using not the established historical approach, but drawing instead upon the substantive results of diverse social and natural sciences, and upon the work of contemporary theorists, who have developed new analytic and quantitative ways of describing and explaining important aspects of global affairs. It will soon become apparent how liberally I have interpreted the scope of world political concerns. This is an important feature of what follows and it deserves some scrutiny at the outset. Firstly, however, though it seems far from a novel strategy, I shall begin with the question of academic antecedents and discuss briefly the history of the study of world affairs,[*] how that study has changed over time, and the sort of direction in which it now seems to be moving. What one talks about this year in the field is not what one would have talked about five, ten or fifteen years ago, and it is certainly not what will be talked about in five, ten or fifteen years’ time. The rate at which the focus shifts seems to be accelerating too, and a work on theories of human behaviour and world politics like this one already has an antique ring to it as developments in the discipline promise to bypass such preoccupations, at least as they are understood at the moment.

Discussions of interstate relations have venerable antecedents. From the time of Thucydides or Kautilya, through the writings of Machiavelli, Dante, Rousseau, Kant and Clausewitz, among others, we can draw out the threads of a continuing concern with affairs between states, rather than those only within them. Of course the conception and the reality of just what a state is has also changed over time, and the ‘state’ each of these individuals talked about is not what we would necessarily recognise today as a collective actor on the world stage.

Given this tradition, why did E. H. Carr write in 1939,[1] just before the ‘Second World War’[2] that the science of international politics was still in its infancy? The reasons are historical, it seems, and the ‘First World War’ is the watershed. Before the First World War the study of international relations was a comparatively marginal affair, and one has to pick over the great middens of classical scholarship to find those serviceable bits and pieces that might muster as a hypothesis or a prescription about world affairs. After the First World War, however, a substantial body of literature on the subject begins to emerge. In a pointed and characteristically chauvinistic statement, F. Neal and B. Hamlett have argued that: international relations is an American invention dating from the time after World War I when the American intellectual community discovered the world. Like most American essays in regard to the world, it has been enthusiastic, well-financed, faddist, nationally-oriented, and creating more problems than it solves.[3]

Before the First World War nearly all ideas about the global system were neatly filed away under the box for international law, or diplomatic history, or the parent discipline of political thought itself. After 1918, however, a generation of scholars and writers, appalled by the horrors of the conflict just past, began to scrutinise interstate politics in systematic terms. They remained for the most part with discussing international law and organisation, or with the currents of contemporary affairs, and they were predominantly Utopian about international morality and the chances of maintaining peace. The general effect of their Utopian predilections was to reinforce the status quo, to justify, that is, the post-war position in Europe as the best possible disposition of affairs. The League of Nations and the rules of interstate conduct were depicted as the principal means of managing world stability, and it took the Second World War to point out that the Utopian morality so generally espoused was that of the haves against the have-nots, and that there was no natural harmony of interests between men that the ‘truth’ about their affairs could somehow reveal and render acceptable to all.[4]

E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis was the forerunner of the anti-utopian tide. The years immediately after the Second World War, not surprisingly under the circumstances, came to be dominated by the anti-utopians, by the ‘realists’ – those who saw the time between the wars as characterised by an almost total neglect of the factor of power.[5] The Utopian phase of the study of international politics was over. The intellectual structures that were advanced to prevent another violent struggle of this kind, and which made up the bulk of the kiddytot literature on ‘international relations’ as such, had been severely undermined by a gross dose of ‘realpolitik’, by ruthless, dedicated men with armies, economic might, propagandist zeal, and a will to win. They made nonsense of Utopian and moral restraints. The academic palm passed to ‘power’ and to those who saw as their key concern the spelling out of its various components and effects. The main textbook in the field became Hans J. Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations,[6] subtitled the struggle for power and peace, and it survived for many years as a standard reference work. In some respects, and for good reasons, it has never been supplanted. The realist position carried considerable weight – the politics of the cold war, the advent of thermo-nuclear weapons, the vast military and industrial complexes that grew up to service the security of the great nations – each predisposed a power-centred interpretation of international affairs. It was many years before the power-political approach was exposed for the disguised ideology it really was, and its exclusivist and objective aura laid to rest.

Ten years ago, then, a course in ‘international relations’ would have looked something like this:

1. A historical discussion of the antecedents, the origins and development of the contemporary state system.

2. The elements of international law, of diplomatic practice and international organisation.

3. Power politics – the economic, military and cultural components of state power – and war.

4. Colonialism and the retreat of empire. Perhaps revolutionary insurgency.

5. A run-down of recent diplomatic history, and the foreign policies of the major powers.

6. Political geography and political demography, that is, the way states and their populations are distributed across the face of the land, and the effect that distribution has upon interstate affairs.

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It is instructive to compare this list with economic theories of world politics and with the chapter headings given in the contents list of the present work. And it is interesting to speculate what such a list might look like in ten years’ time.

In the late fifties and early sixties a movement gathered strength in the social sciences in general, in the academic field of politics, and the field of American academic politics in particular, that was dedicated to the scientific study of the subject. In an age dominated by scientific technology it is no wonder that students of politics eventually looked to the natural sciences – to the methods of physics and chemistry for example – for clues to help them describe and explain political phenomena. The leading shoot of this movement became known as ‘behaviouralism’, not to be confused with ‘behaviourism’ and the stimulus-response experiments performed by B. F. Skinner and J. B. Watson in psychology. ‘Behaviouralism’, the study of political behaviour whether within states or between them, was the attempt to apply many of the techniques and methods of the natural sciences to political phenomena in the hope that increased rigour in the way facts were handled would generate better, more general and more reliable statements about the subject than had heretofore been the case. As ‘utopianism’ had once given way to ‘realism’, so ‘realism’ and its single-factor account of international politics in terms of power gave way to ‘behaviouralism’ and the search for a science of world affairs.[†]

The history of the behavioural movement in international relations is most conveniently traced through four articles: the first, by Robert Dahl, appeared in the American Political Science Review in 1967;[7] the second, by Hedley Bull, appeared in World Politics in 1966;[8] the third, by Michael Banks, was published in the Yearbook of World Affairs for the same year, 1966;[9] and the fourth, by David Easton, in the American Political Science Review for 1969.[10] The end date clearly sets the ebb point of the behavioural wave, and it simply remains to sort through the wrack and rubbish left behind and to assess what look like the solid gains.

To begin with Dahl, and I quote him: Historically speaking the behavioral approach was a protest movement within political science… a number of political scientists, mainly Americans… shared a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the achievements of conventional political science, particularly through historical, philosophical and the descriptive and intuitional approaches. They believed that:

additional methods and approaches either existed or could be developed that would help to provide political science with empirical propositions and theories of a systematic sort, tested by closer, more direct and more rigorously controlled observations of political events. At a minimum, then, those who were sometimes called ‘Behaviorists’ or ‘Behavioralists’ shared a mood: a mood of skepticism about the current intellectual attainments of political science, a mood of sympathy toward ‘scientific’ modes of investigation and analysis, a mood of optimism about the possibilities of improving the study of politics.[11]

The result, he concludes, was an attempt to improve our understanding of politics by seeking to explain the empirical aspects of political life by means of methods, theories and criteria of proof that are acceptable according to the canons, conventions and assumptions of modern empirical science.[12] The talk of ‘moods’ here is instructive – the line between the behaviouralists and the non-behaviouralists separated optimists and pessimists, and this is often the only clear way of identifying which particular camp a scholar belonged to.

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What is ‘science’? Wherein lies its magic? Why the often uncritical embrace it was accorded here? Perhaps the best way to answer these questions is to press the distinction between science as substance, science as method, and science as aim, that is, the distinction between the intellectual product, the intellectual process, and the intellectual goal.

Science as Substance

As substance ‘science’ is a huge success, the most spectacular and conspicuous ornament of man’s new brain.[13] The products of science have contributed knowledge relevant to politics, most particularly about the mechanism of mind, and via psychology much of that knowledge is readily available to students of political phenomena though not so often employed by them there. The transdisciplinary focus of the present study is one attempt to rectify this neglect. But it is not so much the empirical findings themselves that have attracted the diffidence and deference of students of political behaviour, but the scope and rigour of those findings over the whole range of natural events, including those that constitute man. And this has led many to enquire about prerequisites, and of course, methods as well.

Success seems assured, Thomas Kuhn asserts, once a field of search acquires what he calls a ‘paradigm’, once the majority of its searchers cease to scrutinise events at random and take a common body of belief for granted, once they accept as sufficient the status of some particular body of scientific practice – its laws, theories, experiments and instruments – and allow it to guide their own work and furnish them with criteria of relevance for further exploration.[14] Shared paradigms liberate the committed searcher from fundamental speculation about first principles and basic concepts, and permit that rigid, highly directed enquiry into preselected phenomena which explains much about scientific progress and its cumulative quality. They are universally recognised scientific achievements, Kuhn says, that provide for a while model problems and convincing solutions to a community of practitioners.[‡]

There is something circular in this, with success waiting upon manifest success. However, the circularity is apparent not real. The emergence of a paradigm with the cumulative power it can confer, the crucial index here of scientific maturity, depends upon the agreement of practitioners, and this, at least in the beginning, must be conferred, it cannot be assumed. Old intractable problems must seem to be solved, precision must be enhanced, new predictive capacities must be demonstrated to the satisfaction of most if not all the practitioners in the field, and non-logical and aesthetic criteria such as ‘simplicity’ and ‘elegance’ must be satisfied as well. Once established such ideas promise immediate progress, but at a tyrannical price. They are the framework upon which further research is hung; their validity is established and scientific failure is apt to rebound on the scientist rather than the paradigm. The construction of this first order, consistent within itself and with the experimental or observed facts known at the time, may well come too early, selecting subsequent observations and obscuring more important truths which are then never revealed or remain hidden much longer than they might have been. But science knows no other way. Only in those critical and revolutionary periods when anomalies have become acute, the paradigm is breaking down, and another is taking its place, is enquiry likely to return to matters of first principle.

In its normal state… a scientific community is an immensely efficient instrument for solving the problems or puzzles that its paradigms define. Furthermore, the result of solving those problems must inevitably be progress…,[15] at least of a kind, though the relative nature of these paradigms precludes a definition of such progress in terms of the forward projection of any one of them. Progress is also evident in the abnormal state of theoretical turmoil and paradigm change. Thus one can argue that despite the difficulties involved in comparing the new with the old, cumulation carries across the Gestalt divide of paradigm change, where practitioners can either ‘see’ the alternative or they cannot, and what becomes accepted after the process of paradigm replacement is complete is better than, not just different from, what was known before. However, this does not support any absolutist notion of ultimate truth that science is inevitably drawn towards.

Kuhn has been roundly assailed for his conclusions.[16] Most noticeably Paul Feyerabend has seen in his analysis of the way science is done an implicit methodological prescription of an unsavoury sort. Those who would have a social science, for example, are encouraged to cease their debate about first principles and to make the leap to a ‘normal science’ by collapsing the field of competing theories into one and accepting this as the paradigm for all subsequent study. The effect, however, would be to stifle speculation and to create a conformist body of practitioners who work on detail and no longer on design. We can recognise here something of the behaviouralist recommendations. The effect would probably be pernicious since Feyerabend concludes that knowledge grows not by the puzzle-solving activity of Kuhn, but by the active interplay of various tenaciously held views,[17] that only occurs for Kuhn during scientific revolutions. Rather than foreclose the opportunity to generate new views and advance them in a continuous fashion, we should encourage this process, and find the happiness and the fulfilment of the individual therein: "…we want a methodology and a set of institutions which enable us to lose as little as possible of what we are capable of doing…,’[18] and Kuhn’s idea of science is not it.

While we may agree that Feyerabend has revealed an anti-humanitarian feature about Kuhn’s view, it seems to me that Kuhn has the edge when it comes to depicting realistically how science proceeds. There is a constant tension between the creativity Feyerabend exalts and the constrictions any disciplinary paradigm imposes. The very word ‘discipline’ implies restraint, and it is, as Kuhn argues, restraint to a purpose. We can and should aspire to Feyerabend’s ideal, but in the actual conduct of science we will never realise it because of the foreclosure effect that Kuhn so clearly outlines.

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The question that flows from this discussion is: why has the discipline of politics remained so stunted in its scientific growth? Why has its plethora of competing theoretical assumptions and its multitude of concepts and generalisations failed to converge upon one total paradigm and upon one habit-tradition of puzzle-solving? A number of scholars have in fact attempted to demonstrate that shared assumptions, models and solutions of this kind do exist for the study of politics generally and for world politics in particular – structural-functionalism in comparative government, for example, and power theories in interstate relations – but they seriously over-estimate to my mind the professional acceptance such ‘paradigms’ have enjoyed. Again, one should not forget the separate tradition of Marxist analysis, and in world politics, the comprehensive theories of imperialism. Here analysts do lay claim to a general explanation or set of explanations with predictive power. To all intents and purposes they share a paradigm, but this paradigm, too, enjoys substantially less than universal acceptance. Why this is so is a question of the nature of the subject-matter as such. The study of physical reality is a different realm of discourse from that of social reality – Marxists and non-Marxists alike can agree on the first principles of the structure of the atom, but not on the condition of man and the workings of society. The one can be externalised with some success; the other proceeds immediately from the social reality one is part of, and simultaneously attempts to define. The ‘paradigm’ is already an ideology.

The study of politics has remained at the level Masterman calls multi-paradigmatic, that is:

…far from there being no paradigm, there are on the contrary too many. (This is the present overall situation in the psychological, social and information sciences). Here, within the subfield defined by each paradigmatic technique, technology can sometimes become quite advanced, and normal research puzzle-solving can progress. But each subfield as defined by its technique is so obviously more trivial and narrow than the field as defined by intuition, and also the various operational definitions given by the techniques are so grossly discordant with one another, that discussion on fundamentals remains, and long-run progress (as opposed to local progress) fails to occur.[19]

No comprehensive paradigm has emerged capable of encompassing them all; no single insight has solved the puzzles with which politics abounds; and those put forward as performing this function have failed to bring about the collapse of its competitors, and failed to contribute fundamental insights that most practitioners would accept as necessary and sufficient to guide and inform their subsequent research.

Science as Method

Why then the limited science of political, and hence world political affairs? The answer has been sought in two different directions, and from this point the so-called ‘classical’ and ‘behavioural’ positions, the ‘philosophic’ and ‘scientific’ stances diverge. The ‘behaviouralist’ has sought in the exacting methods of the natural sciences the key to their impressive scope. Substantive success, it is said, is the result of a strict and logical process of enquiry, of analytical rather than intuitive techniques, of ethical neutrality, of public and empirical knowledge, and emulating the features of this process in a studied and self-conscious way ought also to ensure more comprehensive and powerful explanations for politics. ‘Scientific’ use of evidence promises, it is claimed, to cut away the confusion that has characterised political debate for so long, and ought in time to generate the first accepted principles of a successful, paradigmatic ‘science’. Questions about the subject-matter of the enquiry and any intrinsic limitations its complexity or its value-laden character may place upon the utility of scientific methods are treated as irrelevant. Such methods are neutral as to intellectual aim, neutral as to whether, that is, we treat of atoms or men for good or ill, and any limitations in practice can only be realised in practice and not pre-determined before we begin.

The ‘classicists’ have replied that there is nothing new here, that though they have often been to blame for much loose and ill-supported argument, the methods of scientific enquiry are a child of their own. However, the heart of the matter they tend to say lies in the complex, contingent and normative nature of political behaviour. The metaphysical and non-logical assumptions scientists make about the uniform and predictable, or at least probable, quality of the phenomena they study, are inadmissible when we come to explain the performance of human beings.

The behavioural case merits closer consideration. At a minimum, it recommends the application of scientific methods to the subject matter of social science, and it conceives of such methods in an unequivocal way. Independent and dependent variables must be clearly differentiated, their relationship and forms of variance must be specified in precise hypotheses that are empirical, that is, formulated in potentially falsifiable ways and not just as precise statements about the real world. Evidence must be generated, careful observations made, and strict canons of proof applied to all those insights with which analyses of political affairs abound, culling out the ill-conceived to locate a hard core of substantiated theory. At least that is the hope, and to say that the more precise the techniques that are applied the more trivial the findings are likely to be hardly deters the enterprising from their optimistic end.

Ultimately, however, rules of search are not enough. Even if one admits no logical distinction between the phenomena of political science and the phenomena of natural science, methods that are theoretically applicable to politics involve in practice difficulties so great as to impose real limits on truly ‘scientific’ exploration in the discipline. If one argues a fundamental distinction in subject matter as well, the difficulties are compounded. The behaviouralist, then, cannot rest upon the minimal position of method and most of them do not. The inability of methodological measures to uncover unique and generalised substantive conclusions of themselves soon becomes apparent in social enquiry. But then ‘science’ is not just a search for systematic and organised knowledge, it is a desire for explanations, a perspective as well as a process, a generalising mood, an attempt to outline in the end general theories applicable to all phenomena. This is the last of the three categories introduced above, science as goal and purpose, and in reality it comes first.

Science as Aim

This purpose – the desire to describe the universe in an orderly language that enables us to cast forward with some measure of confidence as to what we might expect – is one which most classicists would share. They are equally prone to ask, whatever their prescriptive dispositions might be, of what larger pattern any example of human behaviour is simply one particular instance, and they likewise seek propositions about recurrent phenomena that survive under empirical test over time. They are much less confident, however, that truly generalised propositions will have more than marginal relevance, or that human phenomena are ultimately reducible to a strictly limited number of precise theorems with precise predictive power. They will still look for regularities, and they will still make meaningful generalisations, with explicitly stated premises, but they are unlikely to subscribe to the idea that some fundamental simple order or pattern or set of orders or patterns underlines social behaviour. Such patterns as do exist they expect to be of a less elevated kind. This is not to depict social behaviour as random, impulsive, occurring for no reason and therefore unknowable. It is usually either a more modest assessment of the explanatory potential of the subject-matter, or plain pessimism, or a specific attack on the moral desirability of a generalising imperative at all.[20]

The debate about the relevance to social research of a generalising scientific consciousness leads back to the debate over the propriety of method. Again, though the classicist might accept the wisdom in specifying units of analysis, identifying relevant variables, framing testable propositions and subjecting them to an unambiguous test, he might well question the precision with which key concepts can be made measurable, the precision with which data is quantified, the precision with which categories are defined and models are constructed, or the desirability of any or all such operations. He would contest a priori the claim that universal theory is a conceivable, practical or good end, and he would point up the impossibility of measuring all the relevant variables, or ultimately of rendering findings independent of the observer and the judgements he has had to make.

Why is this so? Why can natural science assume a close correspondence between regularity, ‘significance’, and precise method, and social science cannot? Why, if we confine ourselves to strict standards of verification, can very little of theoretical rigour be said about human society, as has so far been the case? The answer has already been introduced above. The important questions in world politics for example, such as the causes of war, or the attributes of the international system and their effects, respond badly to scientific treatment. The ladder of generalisation, the rungs of theory that one can ascend to encompass and explain more and more, does not reach very far. The pervasiveness of complexity and change, the difficulties of controlled experiment, of separating subject and object from cause and effect, of rendering significant variables in quantitative terms – all undermine the possibility of ‘scientific’ precision.

There is nevertheless a behavioural defence on every point. For experiment one substitutes careful simulation. Quantification can be hedged about and qualified to approximate reality. The process by which analysis itself can intrude upon the events being analysed becomes in turn a fit object for dispassionate scrutiny. The complex and fortuitous quality of events is a challenge, not a source of despair, an opportunity and a motivating force. None of these defences, however, holds the discussion to matters of method alone, and stops the limitations implicit in a subject matter leaking back into the debate. Simulation does not confront it. Qualified quantification has so far failed to measure it. Rigorous methodology is an elaborate ambush set to surround social phenomena but unable in the end to capture their essential characteristics.

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Where does this leave Dahl? The appeal to ‘science’, as he depicted it, was a reaction against a tradition of enquiry couched in descriptive, historical, institutional and discursive terms. It sought to build the generalising aims and the rigorous methods of science into the body of social research, that is, to develop empirical propositions and systematic theories about social phenomena subject to direct and strictly controlled observation and test. The generalising aims and the rigorous methods were meant to initiate a political science of substantive success. There were, however, immediate and obvious problems. At the level of group behaviour it became very difficult to know what to exclude, when and where to eliminate intervening variables in favour of ones that always apply. And, at the individual level, the uniqueness of each human unit and the way that anticipated consequences are major causes of action made scientific analysis, as Quincy Wright early observed, peculiarly difficult.[21]

The further question occurs: are scientific methods and aims, developed to explain and peculiarly successful in dealing with less animated phenomena, wholly inappropriate to the study of social events? The answer is clearly: no. The spirit of scientific enquiry – explicit and self-sustaining – is just as applicable to social and normative questions as to atoms or animal cells. And science-as-substance, as a set of tested observations, has much to contribute to normative judgements and political debate. Values may choose and interpret fact, but fact informs value, and scientific facts can contribute a good deal to the quality of any political argument’s empirical justifications. It is not unrealistic to posit a normative political philosophy, basing its mode of thought on the criteria of science so far as it can and taking its content from the corpus of scientific knowledge where that is possible. Further:

It is the function of political science to state the terms of the political world man has built and the goal of the political philosopher to criticize that world in terms of another ‘world’ that is an intellectual construct. Science can help establish the necessary properties of that world against the contingent, and this is important since necessity is beyond criticism, and it can contribute substantially to our total conception of what the human condition might be.[22]

There is one other feature of behaviouralism, apart from its preoccupations with science, which I have already introduced but would like to reiterate briefly here. This feature is particularly important in international relations because it represents a shift in focus away from the assumptions implicit in that disciplinary label, away from the traditional unit of analysis – the state – to the levels of analysis above and below it. Under the influence of behaviouralism attention has been moved upwards to the whole system, to the globe, and to politics as global politics and only in part as interstate politics. And at the same time attention has been moved downwards to the individual and the way he or she behaves, individually or in groups. States and the groups within them, world organisations of every kind, are made up, after all, of thinking, believing, acting human beings, and one way of describing such organisations is to look upon them as behaviour systems, that is, as individuals related in certain regular ways. These patterns of behaviour can readily be made the focus of enquiry, allowing the formal structure of the group-body itself to emerge therefrom. This is not to deny the reality of institutions, but merely to assert what is self-evident – that they do not exist apart from the persons who inhabit them and whose expectations define social roles.

This change in focus reflects a change in the definition of politics, away from the nouns like government, power, policy, and influence, towards the verbs and the acts of governing, bargaining, obeying, oppressing, fighting and fearing. Politics is seen as ‘transactionalism’,[23] where the basic unit of analysis is some social atom of an ongoing relational sort within its environmental context. There is a frivolous parallel here with theology, where god has suffered a similar transition from noun to verb. I god, you god, we all god. ‘Godness’ becomes a quality of moral conduct, a pattern of behaviour, something toward which human beings aspire, rather than a formative and powerful influence from which they and the universe derive.

On the level of the individual, political behaviour is only one aspect of total behaviour. Our political acts are usually inextricable from what we do out of social, economic or cultural motives. Each aspect of our lives affects the others, and therefore differences in political behaviour should be sought in the whole human being, and the whole explanation leads as already discussed to diverse other disciplines.

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The best-known classical attack on the behavioural pursuit of a ‘science’ of world politics came from Hedley Bull,[24] and so trenchant was it that two leading American academics, Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau,[25] felt obliged to assemble a book of articles by those prepared to discuss and confound it. Bull’s criticisms were not from the ‘realist’ tradition that the behavioural revolt supplanted,[§] but from the historico-philosophical-legal tradition that came before realism and lives on still in a defiant fashion. In essence Bull argued, along lines already pursued, that rigorous proof of general statements about world politics can only be achieved if those statements are insignificant or deal in trivia. Scientific purity is attained only by avoiding the profound questions that we really ought to ask. And when we do ask such questions, our use of evidence is necessarily less than scientific or strict.

In particular, Bull has made a number of charges against behaviouralism, all but one of which can be dismissed as misplaced. For example, he has argued that where international relations ‘scientists’ have been successful they have in fact employed the traditional approach, rather than their own exalted methods. To accept the validity of this criticism one has to accept Bull’s own criteria of success and significance, and these are at best debatable. Further, Bull has argued that political ‘scientists’ are unlikely to make cumulative progress of the sort to which they aspire. This can readily be construed as an empirical question, and though Bull may well be correct, it is not likely to stop behaviouralists from making the attempt. Here lies the line already alluded to between optimism and pessimism. Bull goes on to attack model-building as a positive disservice to the subject. His particular points, however, are those familiar to most practitioners in the field and are usually taken into consideration there. He also takes to task those ‘scientific’ works he sees as distorted by a fetish for measurement, a fair complaint in itself but one behaviouralists are also well aware of and which they actively negate, where appropriate, in their own defence.

Despite such ready replies, a critical point persists in the paradoxical relationship between strict procedures for verification and the ability of an analyst to come to grips with questions of political and moral substance, and on this Bull is not easily deterred.

The best and most modest statement of the behavioural approach still remains that by Michael Banks, and he replies with conviction to the ‘classicist’ assault. The behavioural approach, he argues, was both wider and narrower than traditional analyses. It was narrower in that it sought regularities and patterns of behaviour – it was not so concerned with the unique and the novel. He refers here to what I have already called the generalising imperative, the reflex response that asks of what general proposition is any particular phenomenon just a single case.[26] Only from general propositions was it felt that useful explanations with some predictive power would flow. The behavioural approach was also broader, however, in