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Social Values and Politics: The Uninvited Guests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

The workings of many factors have wrought political change the world over. Among these, the impact of scientific-technological development upon society has been the most powerful agent of political transformation. Obvious as this has been for a long time, the progress of science and technology continues to outpace political creativity by a broad margin. Increasingly, political institutions are being left to accommodate themselves to the accomplished fact of scientific-technological progress— or to lose their functional significance. The logic of the political which alone can devise and master the social order, has become subservient to the logic of the apolitical. It is as if our society insists upon giving to Karl Marx's crude hypothesis what our economic experience withheld; we are about to validate Marxist determinism by the failure of our political imagination rather than the failure of our economic system. It seems as if the contrivances of science and technology now tell us not only what we should do with them but also how to order our lives. If this appearance is not deceptive — and it is proposed here to show that it is not — political change will befall our society like a natural event beyond man's control. To foreclose a disastrous deterioration of the political order and hence the human condition, it will be necessary to develop an appropriate philosophy of political change and, in the light of such a philosophy, policies which govern the integration of scientific and technological progress — the making of our “tools” — into political development. Part of what follow will be devoted to showing why the political needs to remain primary in order to insure that political change will be beneficial change. At the threshold of political change must stand political will.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1968

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References

* This article was presented as a paper at a meeting of the International Political Science Association at Istanbul, Turkey, 05 28-June 2, 1967.Google Scholar

1 “There exist models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their sub-classes, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relations of ‘forces’ between them. It seems legitimate to ask for a theory, not of systems of a more or less special kind, but universal principles applying to systems in general”. von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, “General Systems Theory”, General Systems, Vol. 1, 1956, p. 1.Google Scholar (Reprinted from Main Currents of Modern Thought, 71, 75, 1955).

2 See Law Whyte, Lancelot, The Next Development in Man (London, 1944) p. 196Passim.Google Scholar

3 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig,op. cita., p. 10.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 10.

5 For the following discussion I am indebted to Professor Gabriel A. Almond's succinct summation of the present state and future hopes of American Political Science. See his Pdresidential Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 09 8, 1966, publisher in The American Political Science Review (12. 1966), 60, 869879.Google Scholar

6 See, Almond, , op. cit., p. 874.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 877.

8 For an elliptic discussion of facts and value — “Should Political Analysis be Neutral?” — see Dahl, Robert A., Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), pp. 104, Passim.Google Scholar