Developments outside the United States

Since the time of Marx and Engels, political scientists have continued to debate the relative importance of culture and economic structures in determining human behavior and the organization of society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Italian economists Gaetano Mosca (1858 – 1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848 – 1923) echoed Marx’s analysis that society was ruled by elites, but they considered this both permanent and natural. They were joined by the German-born Italian political sociologist and economist Robert Michels (1876 – 1936), whose “iron law of oligarchy” declared rule by the few to be inevitable. Mosca, Pareto, and Michels all agreed that the overthrow of the existing “political class” would simply result in its replacement by another, a view that was supported in the mid-20th century by Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas (1911 – 1995) in his “The New Class” (1957). Pareto also contributed the idea (which he borrowed from economics) that society is a system tending toward equilibrium: like an economic system, a society that becomes out of balance will tend to correct itself by developing new institutions and laws or by redistributing power. This approach was adopted by much of academic political science after World War II and was later developed by “systems” theory.

In the early 20th century, the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864 – 1922) treated the state as a fusion of organic and cultural elements determined by geography. Kjellén is credited with coining the term geopolitics (geopolitics), which acquired a sinister connotation in the years after World War I, when German expansionists appealed to geopolitical arguments in support of the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

Although geopolitics still exerts a considerable influence on political science, particularly in the areas of international relations and foreign policy, the discipline of political geography developed into a distinct subfield of geography rather than of political science.

The German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920), who rejected Marx and embraced Tocqueville’s emphasis on culture and values, was perhaps the most influential figure in political science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Marx had proposed that capitalism gave rise to Protestantism: the merchants and princes of northern Europe developed commerce to such an extent that Roman Catholic restrictions had to be discarded.

Max Weber rejected this idea, claiming that Protestantism triggered capitalism: the Calvinist idea of predestination led individuals to try to prove, by amassing capital, that they were predestined for heaven (see Calvinism). Weber’s theory of the Protestant ethic is still disputed, but not the fact that religion and culture powerfully influence economic and political development.

Weber understood that the social sciences could not simply mimic the natural sciences, because humans attach widely varying meanings and loyalties to their leaders and institutions. It is not simply facts that matter but how people perceive, interpret, and react to these facts; this makes causality in the social sciences far more complex than in the natural sciences. To be objective, therefore, the social scientist must take into account human subjectivity.

Weber discerned three types of authority: traditional (as in monarchies), charismatic (a concept he developed to refer to the personal drawing power of revolutionary leaders), and rational-legal (characteristic of modern societies). Weber coined the term bureaucracy, and he was the first to study bureaucracies systematically. His theories, which focused on culture as a chief source of economic growth and democracy, still find support among contemporary political scientists, and he must be ranked equally as one of the founders of both modern sociology and modern political science.

Other scholars also contributed to the growth of political science in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In “The English Constitution’ (1867), the English economist and political analyst Walter Bagehot (1826 – 1877), who was also an editor of Journal “The Economist”, famously distinguished between Britain’s “dignified” offices (e.g., the monarch) and its “efficient” offices (e.g., the prime minister). James Bryce (1838 – 1922), who taught civil law at the University of Oxford, produced one of the earliest and most influential studies of the U.S. political system in “The American Commonwealth” (1888).

The Belorussian political scientist Moisey Ostrogorsky (1854 – 1919), who was educated at the “École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris”, pioneered the study of parties, elections, and public opinion in “Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties” (originally written in French; 1902), which focused on the United States and Britain.

In Paris, André Siegfried, teaching at the “École Libre des Sciences Politiques” and the “College de France”, introduced the use of maps to demonstrate the influence of geography on politics. At first few Britons turned to behavioralism and quantification, instead continuing in their inclination toward political philosophy.

In contrast, the Swedish scholar Herbert Tingsten (1896 – 1973), in his work “Political Behavior: Studies in Election Statistics” (1937), developed the connections between social groups and their voting tendencies. Before World War II the large areas of the world that were colonies or dictatorships made few important contributions to the growth of political science.