JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, IV

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

This posting continues this blog’s review of the natural rights perspective from the point of view of one who would advocate it.  That includes describing how it was affected by shifts in the study of politics since the years of the mid-twentieth century.  This addresses the focus that William Schubert’s commonplaces of curricular development places on political science. 

In a few words, the shifts strived to make the study of politics more amenable to scientific methods and later, to address political concerns of a given time – i.e., what would be “popular” issues.  In that vein, this posting starts by asking:  if that study avoids normative concerns, per se – that would be what advances justice, social capital, and civic humanism – then how does it address the motivation that prompts people to abide by the decisions a political system makes?  That is, why would people obey or acquiesce?

          Since systems cannot stand if they rely only on coercive means, that would be too expensive; they must depend on other motivations.  Most people do abide because they judge systems to be legitimate.    The source of legitimacy stems from two factors:  one, people sense or understand the practicality of a systemic process by which to devise decisions, assuming the decisions do not offend any basic beliefs, and two, general acceptances in how systems operate through processes that utilize institutionalized steps.

          Under these conditions, the vast number of citizens will obey the decisions.  But, as the prohibition of liquor in the 1920s demonstrated, even highly legitimate systems, such as that of the United States, at times do issue policies deemed illegitimate.  In that case, vast disregard for the policy is very likely to follow.  Legitimacy, therefore, is a central concern of any political system.[2]

          As such, legitimacy and its related political processes are repeatedly considered by policy makers – at least it is wise that they do so.  Ian Hurd puts this factor into a meaningful context,

 

Actors and institutions constantly work to legitimize their power, and challengers work to delegitimate it. Legitimation is often done by justifying the existence of rulers or their rules in terms of important normative principles of the society. However, legitimation may also be attempted through payoffs and inducements to subordinates. Material incentives and normative appeals are different strategies for legitimation and their success depends on how the audience responds to them. It is not possible to make a general statement about the efficacy of one or the other as a generic legitimating strategy, nor is it possible to say that legitimacy can only arise by following one or the other. By contrast, legitimacy itself is a fundamentally subjective and normative concept: it exists only in the beliefs of an individual about the rightfulness of rule. [3]

 

Therefore, no study of politics or governance can totally dismiss normative concerns, but the natural rights view focuses on what is natural, that is, material incentives.  But all governments depend on their rule reflecting, to some degree, their societies’ norms.

          Hurd continues,

 

It [legitimacy] is distinct from legality, in that not all legal acts are necessarily legitimate and not all legitimate acts are necessarily legal. One would hope for a close coincidence between the two, but it is conceptually necessary to keep the two separate. The possibility always exists that rulers might impose laws which the followers find illegitimate, and this possibility ensures that the two concepts cannot be reduced to one. Moreover, to define what is legal as the same as what is legitimate means that the government would have the power to control the categories of legitimate and illegitimate. This would make legitimacy inherently conservative since it could only buttress existing power relations. In practice, we see many instances in which citizens come to believe that their governments are illegitimate and this creates a serious crisis in governance.[4]

 

This last point was demonstrated not only by Prohibition, but many would point to the current situation in which a good number of Americans question the legitimacy of the last presidential election or the overturning of the Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade.  One result, in terms of the election, was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and one sees growing discontent in terms of voiding abortion rights.

            With that said, a more general study, one civics strives to present, is how policy is formed by political systems – not just republics or democracies, but by all political systems.  Easton incorporates the idea of systems to the study of politics.  Using the concepts of inputs, outputs, feedback, support, demands, and stress, a basic analogy, first to a machine, and later to an organism, was applied to a governmental arrangement within a society.[5] 

What conditions must this systems’ construct address in order to be a legitimate and viable foundation by which to study government in this nation’s schools?  Answering this question takes on several dimensions.  Eugene J. Meehan provides criteria by which social scientists can judge constructs.  While curriculum developers and/or implementers of curriculum have different concerns from social scientists, some of Meehan’s concerns can be incorporated in evaluating constructs for the purposes of classroom use. 

These concerns were previously utilized in this blog to analyze and evaluate the parochial/federalist construct and will be used to support the natural rights construct as well.  The questions, in shortened form, that Meehan’s criteria ask are:  does the construct have scope, power, precision, reliability, isomorphism, compatibility, predictability, and purpose or control? [6]

In other words, given the general goal of a political systems approach, how does its view of government and politics match up with the realities of governance and serve as a vehicle by which to present that reality to secondary students?  According to the construct, those realities manifest themselves through that governance’s structures, processes, functions, and contexts.

A curriculum, to be viable, must have as one of its sources reputable subject matter from a relevant discipline.[7]  What follows in the upcoming postings are the evidences regarding the manners in which this construct addresses its subject matter.  This account argues, in the form of an antithesis – to the thesis, parochial federalism – that the systems approach provides positive or constructive responses to the questions posed by Meehan’s concerns.

That is, those postings will cite an array of evidence that illustrates, describes, and/or explains how the systems approach offers a viable basis for secondary course work in American government and civics classrooms.  This construct has done so since its widespread adoption in the planning and implementation of curricular content in those courses since the 1960s.  The very next posting will focus on the political systems approach, per se.

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[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] 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).

[3] Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy,” Encyclopedia Princetoniensis (n.d.), accessed August 10, 2022, https://pesd.princeton.edu/node/516.

[4] Ibid.

[5] 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.

[6] Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political Thought:  A Critical Study (Homewood, IL:  Dorsey Press, 1967).  Here are Meehan’s concerns:  Does a construct explain as many phenomena related to the area of concern as possible; control the explanatory effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in the relationships among those parts; specifically and precisely treat its concepts, making them clear in their use; explain its components and their relationships the same way time after time; contain a one-to-one correspondence with that portion of reality it is trying to explain; align with other responsible explanations of the same phenomena; predict conditions associated with the phenomena in question; and imply ways to control phenomena in question?

For readers of this blog, this blogger adds two pedagogic questions:  is a construct of such abstraction level that students will be able to comprehend it and is its content motivating to students?

[7] Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1949).

JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, III

 

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.

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[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 21^st 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.