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The Necessity of a Non-Reductionist Science of Politics

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Abstract

The major tendency within the discipline of political science has been to try to achieve a science modeled on the natural sciences and mathematics, following the pattern of other social sciences. This tendency has led to many reductionistic efforts to explain political behavior in terms of one or more functions, such as power, linguistic, psychical, or the economic. The institutional community of government and citizens—the political community or state—is thus overlooked or reduced to one or more functions. In critique of this tendency, this paper shows how the work on entities and functions by the Dutch legal philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd illumines the errors of reductionism and points the way to a multi-functional entity science of the political community.

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Notes

  1. Bond (2007).

  2. Bond, “Scientification,” 898.

  3. Bond, “Scientification,” 899.

  4. Bond, “Scientification,” 903–05. For more on the historical development of the “scientification” of political study along different and competing lines, see the volume published by the American Political Science Association and edited by Finifter (1983). My assessment of some of the developments in the discipline can be found in Skillen (1988). I have drawn on that essay for some of the content of this paper. For an introduction to “rational choice” theory as developed in economics, and a critique of that theory’s application to political science, see Caplan (2008, 2007).

  5. My indebtedness to Dooyeweerd should be evident here and is apparent in the following publications in particular: Skillen (2003, 1974), available from University of Microfilms—no. 74-25,413—Ann Arbor, Michigan); and the essay cited above, Skillen (1988) This paper is also indebted to the one presented by Roy Clouser at the July 2008 Metanexus conference in Madrid that expounds Dooyeweerd’s philosophy: “A Blue Print for a Non-Reductionist Theory of Reality.” Dooyeweerd’s most elaborate discussion of the state as institutional political community is in the third volume of his ( 1997, 1957). (Cited henceforth as New Critique, III).

  6. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, III, 414.

  7. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, III, 437–38.

  8. Axelrod (2008).

  9. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 6.

  10. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 6.

  11. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 6.

  12. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 6.

  13. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 7.

  14. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 7.

  15. Axelrod, “Political Science,” 7.

  16. Such a multi-modal analysis of the political community is precisely what Dooyeweerd attempts in New Critique, III, 467–508.

  17. See Clouser’s paper for the Metanexus conference in Madrid cited above in note #5 (2005).

  18. See Dooyeweerd (1960, 1999), Chaps. I and II. See also Polanyi (1958), and Voegelin (1987).

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  1. Center for Public Justice, 2444 Solomons Island Road #201, 21401, Annapolis, MD, USA

    James W. Skillen

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  1. James W. Skillen
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Correspondence to James W. Skillen.

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Skillen, J.W. The Necessity of a Non-Reductionist Science of Politics. Axiomathes 20, 95–106 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-009-9076-1

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