Replies to Schaar and Wolin: I

Was There a Berkeley School of Political Theory?

“…It was a blistering “take-no-prisoners” attack on Strauss and the Straussians. So scathing was their criticism of the book that the editor of the American Political Science Review made the unusual move of sending the typescript to Strauss and his coauthors so that they could reply immediately and in print (Storing et al 1963).…”

The Scientification of the Study of Politics: Some Observations on the Behavioral Evolution in Political Science

“…In a lengthy “review,”John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin characterize the book as “fanatically serious” (1963, 126). Professor Strauss responded that the review was characterized by fanaticism, “precisely the vice of which [he was] accused,” and he suggested that the authors misunderstood the meaning of certain statements that would be “clear to every reader of ordinary intelligence and fairness” (Storing et al. 1963, 153).…”

The Politics of Political Science: “Value-free” Theory and the Wolin–Strauss Dust-Up of 1963

“…Yet it was that very value neutrality--forced and unconvincing, if not explicitly hypocritical, from the point of view of many theorists--that incensed Leo Strauss and those of his colleagues and disciples represented in the Storing (1963) volume; for they believed that behavioralists had rendered their version of social science "value-neutral" at the cost of depoliticizing their subject matter--a dangerous move in a Cold War era where liberal democracy's triumph over totalitarianism was by no means assured. As Steven B. Smith argues in his new study, Leo Strauss was himself a liberal, indeed a liberal who was "deeply skeptical of whether political theory had any substantive advice or direction to offer statesmen" (Smith 2006) (take note, critics today who want to saddle Strauss with putative "Straussian" disciples in the Bush Administration).…”

“…The publication then in this journal of the stinging debate between Leo Strauss, (1962, Herbert J. Storing, (1963), and their proxies and Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar (1963) who were ostensibly offering a standard Review review essay of Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics both set the stage for and managed to upstage the epistemological debates over the behavioral revolution that constituted the positivism battles (what German philosophers had dubbed the Positivismussstreit) of the 1960s and 1970s. Storing's (1963) intent was to criticize scientism through a series of specific critiques of the new political science's favorite fields: voting studies (critique by Walter Berns); public administration on the model of Herbert A. Simon (critique by Herbert Storing himself); Arthur Bentley's "group approach" (critique by Leo Weinstein); and Harold Lasswell's concept of sci-entific propaganda (critique by Robert Horwitz).…”