by: Carlos A. Romero

Translation: Carlos Armando Figueredo

The noted political philosopher Isaiah Berlin has published an article in the New York Review of Books that has opened an intense debate on the reach of discipline to understand political problems (1). Although there is nothing new in the debate on power, it is now, as the twenty first century begins, when the premises on which political rationality was grounded to justify its theoretical and methodoligal domain are being questoned. Within this frame, Berlin’s article brings back to life a discussion being pertinent in our days on how to apply scientific methdod to political science.

The relationship between rulers and ruled, the issue of peace and war and the interdependence between reason an lack of reason when having to decide, are just a few problems that many thinkers have tried to know at different times. Nicolò Machiavelli, the founder of modern political studies, pointed out in the fifteenth century the importance of knowledge and its limitations due to the presence of the vicissitudes of history, what the Florentine genius called the controversy between Virtue and Fortune, between knowledge and uncertainty.

Professor Berlin, a person with a long and fruitful trajectory in Oxford and other world known academic institutions, in his essay titled "On Political Judgment" to analyze the meaning of the good ruler. This, the author asks himself if it is fair to qualify a ruler under the efficiency of his administration, under the instruments being offered by scientific method. In this sense asks himself : "Can statesmen be taught something called political science --the science of the relationships of human beings to each other and to their environment-- which consists, like other sciences, of systems of verified hypotheses, organized under laws, that enable one, by the use of further experiment and observation, to discover oher facts, and to verify new hypotheses?"

The author gives a negative answer. As he argues, the influence of natural science cutted short the possibility of widening political knowledge to the extent that in the field of irrationality, that called fortune bu Machiavelli, they were seen as a deviation, as an exception to the rule and the regularities on which it was based.

In fact, it is not fair to contend that statesmen may know the previously identified "last reality". Their merit is, on the contrary, rather that they"do not think in general terms --that is they do not primarily ask themselves in what respect a given situation is like or unlike other situations in the long course of human history (which is what historical sociologists, or theologians in historical clothing, such as Vico or Toynbee, are fond of doing)". "Their merit is that they grasp the unique combintion of characteristics that constitute this particular situation --this and no other. What they are said to be able to do is to understand the character of a paticular movement, of a particular indicidual, of a unique state of affairs, of a unique atmosphere, of some political combination of economic, political, personal factors; and we do not readily suppose that this capacity can literally be taught."

Now then, Berlin tells us that this does not mean that "hold with those who maintain that natural science, and the technology based upon it, somwhow distorts our vision, and prevent us from direct contact with reality -- ‘being’-- which pre-Socratic Greeks or medieval Europeans saw face to face. This seems to me an absurd nostalgic delusion". The author’s argument is that not everything may be known by science. Within this frame, "to demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it is to be blind, and to mislead others. Moreover, there is always the part played by pure luck --which, mysteriously enough, men of good judgment seem to enjoy rather more often than others".

"On Political Judgment" is an important contribution to a debate that has been held for more than fifty years at institutions, faculties and associations having a political science character. Today, it is almost impossible to ignore a discussion not just limiting itself to assess what really belongs to the scientific method and what does not. As Berlin says, it is not a matter of following word by word Freud’s statement that although not all things may be explained by science, no other alternative approach may get to know them. The thing is rather to widen the space of investigative possibilities in our discipline by outright accepting that it is possible and desirable to dedicate oneself to other fields of political life that have their own dimension and development.

In this sense, the discussion on the boundaries of political science has no hold in contemporary world, What is pertinent is rather to go beyond those boundaries, over those obstacles that were laid by the extreme scientific approach resulting from Illustration.

If this were true, political studies would be making a turn never seen before since the discipline’s break from the legal-constitutional guidelines of the early century and their slow transformation into the study of non institutional power relationships. This turn, and, to use a fashionable term, this change of paradigm (if one is to accept that rational paradigm may not know all the contemporary phenomena) must be analyzed and developed.

There are four main factors that must be evaluated. First, we have the phenomenon of the Western State’s decay as a model of leading political organization. The appearance and growth of a multilateral and transnational world and the reanimation of local and decentralized political life give account of it. Second, there is the continuous readapting implied by the incorporation of politically affected phenomena (that is tosay, not necessarilly political in their origin, as the issue of the environment and that of ethnicity) widening the public problems’ agenda and making of the ruling function a complex exercise filled with uncertainties. Third, the very same need pressing those who rule to step out of form when having to make decisions, that is to say the growing inability of the statesman to prevent situations; hence the role played by what Berlin called political wisdom. And last, but not less important, the challenge of understanding, as the new century is about to begin, the role played by the media, by computer science and bio-diversity as leading issues questining the very same roots of social organization inherited from the Modern Age.

Political science, as social science generally, for long were able to see clearly what they were not and what they did not want to study. Now, when their fundamental elements are being questioned --State, government decision making adjusted to reason and law, politics and politicians- political exercises as those being offered to us by Isaih Berlin with "Political Judgment" are a stimulus to keep exploring the conformation of post-politics, the subject of study for political scientist of the twenty first century.

(1) Isaiah Berlin; "On Political Judgment". The New York Review of Books. New York, October 3, 1996, Vol. XLIII, Number 15, pp. 26-30.