There is a particular kind of book that indicts its author more surely than its subject, and this is one of them. Contemporary Political Science in the USA and Western Europe is a Soviet survey of how Western scholars study politics — a careful, well-read, sometimes genuinely sharp anatomy of behaviouralism, systems theory, pluralism and elite theory as they were practised in America, Britain, France, Italy and West Germany. Its charge against that scholarship is single and relentless: that for all its instruments and its claims to be "value-free," Western political science cannot see the class nature of the state it lives inside, and so serves power while believing itself neutral. The charge is often true. What makes the book worth reprinting is that it was written by scholars of a state that permitted no independent study of its own power at all — men who could name the American ruling class with precision and were forbidden, on pain of their careers, to ask the same question at home. The instruments they spend four hundred pages dismantling are exactly the ones that would have exposed the society they wrote from. That is the argument of this introduction.
The English text is Progress Publishers' of 1985, translated from the Russian by James Riordan. It is a collective work — the closing pages of the Introduction name eight authors, N. N. Deyev, S. A. Yegorov, G. V. Gazenko, V. G. Grafsky, P. S. Gratsiansky, B. A. Kurkin, E. N. Ozhiganov and V. V. Smirnov — theorists of the kind the Academy of Sciences' apparatus in the theory of state and law produced, writing from within what the book itself calls "the Marxist-Leninist science of government and law." It carries no single editor's name and reads throughout as a committee product: seamless, unsigned, institutional.
Date the thought, not the spine. The book's freshest primary event is the eleventh World Congress of the International Political Science Association, held in Moscow in August 1979 — an occasion the authors treat as a landmark and return to more than once. Its citations run thickly through the 1970s and thin out sharply after 1980; a stray 1982 reference is about the latest, and the substance of the argument was plainly settled by then. This is a manuscript closed around 1982 or 1983 and issued in English two or three years later, which matters for what it does not contain. The word "Reagan" does not appear. Nor does "détente," even to mourn it. The book reaches print in 1985 — the year of SDI's first appropriations, of the Euromissiles fully deployed, of the downing of KAL 007 still fresh and the Geneva summit not yet held — at the coldest point of what contemporaries were already calling the second Cold War. Its subject is the ideological machinery of the adversary; its timing could not be better; and it is serenely unable to notice that a book proving American political science serves American power was itself commissioned to serve Soviet power in the same contest. The reflex it diagnoses so acutely in others is the one it cannot perform on itself.
Who was it for? Not, this time, the sympathetic Western reader the series has learned to stop assuming. This is an internal Soviet genre — the kritika burzhuaznykh teorii, the critical survey of bourgeois theory — written for graduate students, cadre and specialists who needed to know the enemy's literature and to know, in advance, the correct verdict on it. The Introduction says as much: the study is called for "by both the necessity for well-reasoned criticism of its concepts and by the requirements posed by the further development of Marxist-Leninist social science." One reads Dahl in order to refute Dahl. That the refutation is often intelligent does not change the fact that the conclusion was fixed before the reading began.
The book's frame is stated on its first page and never relaxed. Politics, following "Lenin's definition of politics as the area of relations of all classes and strata to the state and government," is the science of class power; the state is, in the classic formula, an apparatus of class rule; and any account of politics that does not begin there is not merely incomplete but ideologically interested. From this vantage the whole edifice of American empiricism appears as a single evasion. Its cherished neutrality is a pose. Its methods — surveys, correlations, systems diagrams, game theory — are so much machinery for describing the surface of a class society while declining to name its base.
The strongest form of the charge falls on David Easton and the systems theorists, and here the book quotes a fellow Soviet scholar, V. Y. Chirkin, to drive it home: "To preserve the system is Easton's foremost idea which, if we translate it into class language, means providing recipes for adapting the capitalist establishment to changing conditions." A theory that takes the stability of the existing order as its highest value has, whatever its equations, chosen a side. The same verdict is passed on the elite theorists by way of another Soviet authority, A. A. Galkin, who is quoted to the effect that "recognition of the existence of the elite and a special mechanism for its interaction has turned into an apology for the elitist system." And the Conclusion generalises the whole: "For all their pretensions at objectivity and value-free (i.e., non-class and non-party) ideals," Western political scholars range "from conservative and ultimately apologist in regard to the status quo to liberal and even radical." The parenthesis is the doctrine in miniature — value-free is glossed as non-class, and the non-class standpoint is declared impossible. To claim it is already to have taken the conservative one.
There is real force in this, and we will come back to how much. But note first what the argument quietly assumes. It works by holding up, against the American scholar's professed neutrality, the reality of the class he cannot see — the bourgeoisie whose interests his "value-free" science protects. The move depends entirely on there being a hidden ruling group whose existence the target's method is designed to obscure. It is a superb instrument. The only question the book never permits is where else that instrument might be pointed.
Consider what the authors do with the pluralism-versus-elitism debate — the central quarrel of American political science in these years, opened by C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite in 1956 and continued through Robert Dahl's Who Governs? and the "ruling class" school of G. William Domhoff. The book handles this material with evident relish, and its sympathies are unmistakable. Against Dahl's pluralism — the thesis that in a city like New Haven "a number of different sets of leaders governed," no single group in command — it insists that the pluralist's talk of "norms" and "rules of the game" is a mystification, and that beneath the shifting coalitions sits an unchanging fact: "Monopoly capital and its instrument—the state—continue to be the real subject of power in bourgeois democracies." Dahl's refusal to look for that real subject earns his work, in the authors' phrase, "an apologist tenor." Mills and Domhoff, by contrast, are handled gently, almost as allies; Domhoff, tracing the power elite to a "social upper class which owns a disproportionate amount of a country's wealth," is said to come "close to the Marxist position."
Read that against the society the authors lived in and the page turns to glass. Everything the book praises in Mills and Domhoff is a technique for finding the real distribution of power in a society whose formal institutions conceal it — for asking who commands, and who is commanded, behind the constitution and the ballot. Everything it condemns in Dahl is the refusal to ask that question. And the one society on earth to which the authors were absolutely forbidden to apply Mills's method was their own. The Soviet Union had a nomenklatura — a self-selecting stratum of perhaps a few hundred thousand, its membership a state secret, its privileges of housing, supply and access unmeasured and unmeasurable in any Soviet publication, its power over appointment total. It was, on the book's own definition, precisely a "power elite": a group "aware of its privileged status" that disposed of the state without owning it. A Soviet Domhoff, had one been permitted, would have "come close to the Marxist position" by studying it. No Soviet Domhoff was permitted. The word nomenklatura does not occur in these pages, nor could it. The tools the book most admires are the tools its own state existed to keep unused.
This is not a rhetorical trick played on the authors from outside; it is the structure of their discipline. The book is candid, in its first pages, that "the Marxist-Leninist science of government and law monistically combines in itself philosophical, sociological and juridical aspects" — that is, that in the USSR there was no autonomous political science, empirically studying the actual distribution of power, but a single fused doctrine that derived its conclusions from historical materialism and took the leading role of the CPSU as an axiom rather than a datum. There was a Soviet Association of Political Sciences; it hosted the 1979 congress; it published yearbooks. But "political science" in a one-party state is a science with one forbidden object, and it is the object that matters most. The behaviouralists the book scorns at least studied real elections, real legislatures, real interest groups, however narrowly. The Marxist-Leninist science of government studied the state of the workers and peasants that its own funding depended on calling by that name. Of the two, only one had made the study of who actually governs a hanging offence.
The pattern is not peculiar to this volume; it is the house method of the whole kritika genre, and the reader who has the companion introductions will recognise it at once. Gennady Osipov's Sociology (Progress, 1969) performs the identical operation one discipline over: it demolishes Western "social stratification" theory for mapping "a pyramid of social inequality" while refusing to examine "the very base of the pyramid — sacrosanct private property," an objection that works only against societies with private property and, by its own logic, should have left the stratification of a propertyless USSR with nothing to describe — which is exactly why the instrument had to be broken. And the US Two-Party System volume (Progress, 1988) shows the mirror image: a Soviet analysis of American politics that is largely correct, and correct because American radicals had reached it first, describing two parties of one ruling class engineered to keep an independent workers' party off the field. The Soviet Americanists could see the machinery of exclusion in Washington with great clarity. What none of these books could do — what the system that commissioned them existed to prevent — was turn the lens around.
There was, in fact, a political science of the Soviet bureaucracy. It had been written half a century before this book, by a man the authors could not cite and would not name, and it is precisely the empirical, non-formal study of "who governs" that they applaud in Mills and forbid at home.
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) asks, in the flat language of the discipline, the question the Marxist-Leninist science of government was built to suppress. Its ninth chapter is headed, without euphemism, "Is the Bureaucracy a Ruling Class?" — and it answers by doing exactly what the book demands of a serious analyst of power and denies to itself: it looks past the legal form to the real relation. "The means of production belong to the state," Trotsky writes. "But the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy." Formal ownership tells you nothing; command tells you everything, and command had passed to a stratum he described as "the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society." He traced its origin not to malice but to defeat and exhaustion — "the new commanding caste rose to its place upon this wave" of demoralisation after the failed revolutions of the 1920s — and its consolidation to the machinery of appointment and the destruction of the Left Opposition. This is Domhoff's question, pressed onto the USSR: who is the upper stratum, how is it recruited, what does it dispose of, and by what means does it hold what it holds. It is the study Contemporary Political Science treats as the summit of honest Western scholarship when the object is Connecticut and as literally unthinkable when the object is Moscow.
The point is not that Trotsky's answer is beyond argument — his category of the bureaucracy as a stratum rather than a class was contested within the anti-Stalinist left for decades, and remains so. The point is narrower and sharper. The book convicts American political science of a blindness to the class basis of its own state. That conviction is only available to authors who possess the technique of seeing through formal institutions to real power. They possessed it; they wielded it against Dahl with skill; and they were the servants of a state that had made its own use of that same technique a crime. The reply to the book is not a rival doctrine. It is the book's own method, returned to sender.
None of this would matter if the criticism were merely ritual, and it is the standing temptation of a series like this to pretend that it is. It is not, and honesty requires saying where the book is right.
It is right about value-freedom. The claim that a social science can float above politics, describing without judging, was a genuine pretension of mid-century American behaviouralism, and the book is correct that in practice it slid toward endorsement of the status quo — that to take the stability of a given order as one's baseline is already a political act. That this critique was a commonplace of Western thought too does not weaken it; the book knows as much, and reaches for Western witnesses to make it. It quotes Sheldon Wolin — no Marxist — to the effect that the reigning systems and communication theories "are unpolitical theories" that offer "no significant choice or critical analysis of the quality, direction, or fate of public life." It quotes Alvin Gouldner that "much of the history of Academic Sociology … is unintelligible except as a response to and a polemic against Marxism." It relays Marvin Surkin's mordant typology of the behavioural scholar as New Mandarin, Public Advocate and Persuasive Neutralist, the last content, in Heinz Eulau's phrase, "to understand and interpret the world, not to change it." These are the discipline's own dissidents, and the book has read them.
Which points to its real and unexpected virtue: it passes the citation test. This series has learned to ask whether a Soviet critique reads its opponents in the original or merely characterises them from Soviet digests, and by that test Contemporary Political Science is among the honest volumes. Dahl is cited to Who Governs? and Modern Political Analysis; Mills, Domhoff and Kornhauser to their own texts; Easton, Almond, Lipset, Wolin, Gouldner all quoted from source and page. The authors did the reading. When they say Dahl argued that no single group governed New Haven, they can show you where he said it. That is more than several of this series' targets can claim, and it is the ground on which the book's better judgements stand.
And it is right, finally, about the entanglement of the discipline with power — the plainest and least ideological of its findings. The Conclusion observes that political scientists are appointed "to the 'brain centres' of political parties, the biggest monopolies and their cartels, and to other loci of political power," and that the demand for their expertise tracks the "normal reproduction of political relations in a class-antagonistic society." A discipline whose graduates staff the National Security Council and the RAND Corporation is not floating above politics, and to notice this is not paranoia but observation. American radicals — Mills first among them — had noticed it too. On this the book is simply a competent witness, and where it is a competent witness it should be read as one.
The tragedy, and it is a tragedy rather than merely a hypocrisy, is that everything the book sees clearly about the American academy was equally true, and more dangerously true, of the Soviet one. The Marxist-Leninist science of government and law also staffed its state's brain centres; also reproduced, faithfully, the political relations of the society that funded it; also mistook the ideology of its own order for objective science. Its authors were, in the exact sense of their own indictment, "conservative political scientists engaged exclusively in describing and analysing prevailing power institutions" — only the power they conserved was not in Washington. They wrote a devastating account of a mirror and never once looked into it. Six years after the English edition appeared, the state whose power they could not study had ceased to exist, brought down in part by men who had finally begun to ask, out loud, the forbidden question the book taught its readers to ask about everyone but themselves.