After a brief review of the debate that surrounds B. F. Skinner's social and political thought, this essay argues that, even if Skinner's behaviorism is accepted as valid, nonetheless his social and political thought is inadequate and self-contradictory. Skinner's treatment of social organization (or ’sociological problems”) contains two serious, perhaps insoluble, technical difficulties. His treatment of values (or “philosophical problems”) is fraught with contradiction, because he cannot meld what is valued with what leads to survival, because his planners can easily misperceive the objective world, and because he cannot justify cultural survival as the ultimate value. On “political problems,” Skinner is vague and incomplete; he proposes no effective means of “countercontrol”; and his behaviorism does not contain within itself the imperative to any particular type of political system. Because Skinner's social and political thought fails at crucial points, all the problems that Skinner tried to close must be kept open and—whatever may be the technical successes and failures of behaviorism—the answers to some fundamental issues of human life must be sought beyond behaviorism.

Humanist critiques of B. F. Skinner have made valuable contributions to our understanding of his thought, but more attention needs to be paid to his work as potential empirical theory. To evaluate the theoretical merits of Skinner's approach, this paper examines his methodological postulates, his implicit epistemology, and some underlying normative assumptions. It is argued that Skinnerian behaviorism commits a serious error in allowing a methodological presupposition (reduction of the subject matter to observable behavior of the organism) to become a de facto ontology that prematurely forecloses the incorporation of potentially valuable hypothetical constructs at the level of social theory. This theoretical difficulty is critical because the inherent safeguards of science that Skinner proposes as a humane safeguard against misuse would be unlikely to apply to an actual technology of behavior control as employed by political and administrative authorities.