An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
This posting will continue this blog’s review of the natural rights
perspective as if from one who advocates it.
And in its review of how the perspective would portray a civics subject
matter, this posting begins to cast its focus on the academic study of politics.
Discipline of Political Science
The
emphasis on the individual, as expressed in this blog’s definition of the natural
rights view, is reflected in the movement within the discipline of political
science since the mid-twentieth century.
Political studies became a more separate study, defining itself as more
of a science in the Baconian sense as it pursued behavioral questions.
Political
behavior became the discipline’s object of interest. Toward the end of the century, this
perspective had a broadening turn to look at the processes of decision-making
and the impact of values and qualitative judgments.[2] A short descriptive history of this
development provides insight into how the discipline influenced what is being
taught in secondary schools today.
Under
the natural rights moral perspective, governmental or collective actions are
seen as legitimate only when they pursue outcomes where individual efforts
cannot meet the requirements facing a group or community. As Michael Sandel points out, it is a view of
governmental action that takes on a consumer perspective.[3] Also, Robert Dahl wrote some years ago, “a
political system is any persistent pattern of human relationships that involve,
to any significant extent, power, rule or authority.”[4]
Led
by David Easton[5] and his development of
systems analysis, the discipline began to analyze political processes, in
behavioral terms. Systems theory became
the prominent perspective in that discipline, first in the 1950s and 1960s as a
heavily behavioral movement and then in the 1970s and 1980s as what Easton
called a post-behavioral revolution[6]
or, as this blogger would argue, opened the discipline to those issues that are
vibrant at a given time – an even more market orientation.
The
former period attempted to apply research techniques and theory building
processes of the natural sciences. The
latter “revolution” was to apply those techniques and to incorporate, in their
analysis, societal problems which were political in nature.[7] Easton writes of this development,
Unlike the great traditional theories of past political
thought, new theory tends to be analytic, not substantive, general rather than
particular and explanatory rather than ethical.
That portion of political research which shares these commitments to
both the new theory and the technical means of analysis and verification
thereby links political science to broader behavioral tendencies in the social
sciences and, hence, its description as political behavior. This is the full meaning and significance of
the behavioral approach in political science today.[8]
Whether
used as the highly scientific mode or under a perspective which emphasized the
political and social issues of a period, the systems approach has been a more
behaviorally based mode of analysis as compared to that used by traditional
political scientists. Whatever the
emphasis in the discipline, American social studies teachers have taken a
systems approach, one that is bent toward a structural-functional form of
analysis.
One
can detect this approach by simply reviewing the textbooks that public schools
utilize in teaching civics at the middle-school level, or American government
at the high school level. This blogger,
in his book From Immaturity to Polarized Politics,[9] provides
an evaluative review of the two leading high school textbooks that demonstrate
this attachment to the systems approach.
He agrees with William
Callahan, who in 1990 observed, “Traditionally … civics courses in American
schools have been more narrowly defined.
They have focused almost exclusively on the structure and function of
government, particularly at the federal level.”[10] That judgment still holds today in American
classrooms. And by doing so, those
courses offer secondary students the opportunity to acquire the information
they need to compete in that “market” known as governance.
No, people don’t
directly use money in this market – although money plays a role – instead, one
uses the currency of power. That is,
those structures and functions with their accompanying processes that are
highlighted in secondary courses have to do with power. More directly, that means the main attention
falls on how individuals and groups influence one another. Power is defined as the ability to make
binding or authoritative decisions over how to allocate values.
Influence is defined as
having the ability to steer, to some degree, those decisions in a manner seen
as beneficial by individuals or groups exerting this ability. In essence it is that ability to get someone
or group to do something that person or group would not do otherwise.[11] These activities – as they become of interest
to civics instruction – are conducted in the context of a system, a
conglomeration of parts (in the form of offices, agencies, and their personnel)
that, to some minimal degree, are organized and interactive.
The political system is
characterized by people holding and espousing competing political values. Each party has the right to participate (each
is equal before the laws that govern this process). These competing values, in turn, seek to prevail
in the form of policies and advancing social, economic, and political
interests.
Most of the time, but
not necessarily, values are exclusive of one another so that not all can be
satisfied (usually due to limited resources).
The main function of the political system, therefore, is to make the
decisions that resolve the differences between or among these values and
preferences and their respective parties.[12]
And with that overall
view, this posting will end. Given this
last descriptive element, hopefully it gives readers a good sense of how the
application of a market model is justified.
The next posting will further this introduction of the natural rights
view and its political systems approach to the study of political science about
how that view has affected civics education.
[1] This presentation continues
with this posting. The reader is informed that the claims made in
this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this
blogger. Instead, the posting is a representation of what an
advocate of the natural rights view might present. This
is done to present a dialectic position of that construct. This series of postings begins with “Judging
Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.
[2]
Stephen L. Schechter and Jonathan S. Weil, “Studying and Teaching Political
Science, in Teaching the Social Sciences and History in Secondary
Schools: A Methods Book, edited by
James C. Schott and Laurel R. Singleton (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996), 137-170
AND for a more detailed review of this history see Robert
Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics: Obstacles in Achieving a Federated Nation
(Tallahassee, FL: Gravitas Civics Books,
2022), especially its Appendix Chapter.
[3] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of
a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1996) AND one detects this bias or view – a view that casts citizens as
“customers” – mostly by the language used to describe governmental delivery of
services, e.g., see “Customer Experience,” Partnership for Public Service
(November 2021), accessed August 7, 2022, https://ourpublicservice.org/our-solutions/customer-experience/.
[4] Robert Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 6.
[5] David Easton,
The Political System (New York,
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David
Easton, A System Analysis of Political
Life (New York, NY: John Wiley and
Sons, Inc., 1965).
[6] John G. Gunnell, “Political Theory
and Political Science,” in The Blackwell
Encyclopaedia of Political Thought,
edited by David Miller, Janet Coleman, William Connolly, and Alan Ryan (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell, 1987), 386-390.
[7] Of more recent development is the adoption of
critical theory by many, if not most, political scientists (and other social
scientists). Generally, the theory
applies broad Marxian ideas and ideals to the study of social phenomena.
Because such theories aim to explain and
transform all the
circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the
broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the
many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of
human beings in modern societies.
See “Critical Theory,” Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (March 8, 2005), accessed August 8, 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/.
[8]
David Easton, “The Current Meanings of “Behavioralism,” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited
by James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:
The Free Press 1967), 11-31, 31.
[9]
Gutierrez, From Immaturity to Polarized
Politics. Available through Amazon.
[10] William T. Callahan, Jr. “Introduction,” in Citizenship
for the 21st Century, edited by William T. Callahan and Ronald
A. Banaszak (Bloomington, IN: Social
Studies Development Center, 1990), 2.
[11]
Robert
Dahl, Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1961).
[12]
Easton, A System Analysis of
Political Life.
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