The Political Science Ideology

Mark Carey seems to sniff a red under the bed in last week's rave about attacks on his beloved Political Science Department. To him, and no doubt Professor Murphy and many other Pol Sci staff members would agree with him, Neil Gray and other critics merely want students to be indoctrinated with Marxist thinking, Marxist analysis, and Marxist politics. He spurns a discarding of "all pretensions of impartiality" without examing how impartial the present teaching is. Partiality doesn't have to appear in the form of either opting for private enterprise or socialist enterprise. It can take many shapes and forms as was pointed out by "Ignor" in Volume 39 number 22. He/She pointed out that the "institutional" approach is ideological because it accepts the institutions as having some value in themselves outside the economic system which they are serving, and it also accepts that they are the centre of power.

This sort of approach b totally bankrupt if you are professing to be studying "political science" and not "political ideology". But what is a science? Surely this is what we should be investigating. Is a science the son of description of political institutions that occurs over and over again in the Political Science Department, or does it mean analysing society and the political struggles taking place so that we can gain a fundamental understanding of how society works and the forces that propel it along? Unfortunately, I think the second alternative would be the death blow for most of the Political Science staff - it would mean that they would have to think, instead of simply regurgitating the same old statements (eg the transfer of "power" from parliament to cabinet) every week.

Mark Carey struck on a good point when he urged people to leave dialectical materialism alone "indefinitely" because "it stops us getting on with the business of cleaning up the world". By "clearning up the world" he is obviously adopting the view of the International Politics section of the department (notably Professor Murphy) that conflict and struggle are bad and we must concentrate on stopping it. Conflict is inherent to any political system, because politics, and consequently history, are a series of struggles which will always end in the triumph of one side or the other. So, we measure various institutions' success in terms of how much conflict they have managed to cover up or south over, while ignoring that in the process they are probably holding up history.

Mark then goes on with sword in hand to criticise the "Marxists" for not being honest about the intellectual foundations on which they would like various courses to be conducted. But, it seems to me Mark that in fact not one lecturer in the Political Science Department has ever told me of the theoretical foundations on which his thinking is based. It seems that if your basis is the relevent one of any particular society, then you don't have to come out into the open to be criticised and debated against. All the lecturers in the Political Science Department have very clear theoretical foundations (a basic support for the status quo) but will do anything to avoid thinking about it, knowing that there are very few students who will ever brave challenging a theory that is shrouded in their superior position as teacher, and also the thinking that the education system has handed us for the last 20 years.

After taking the time to write such a long letter defending all that was good and proper it is most disappointing to see you end up with the old "if you don't like it, lump it" argument in relation to Pols 102. Just because a "Marxist analysis of the relation between the Senate and the Executive" was not promised, doesn't mean that students can't demand it. A crude ideological analysis of the United States wasn't promised either, and look what we got! Also, Political "Science" 102 was promised and once again we were cheated out of anything that could possibly be called "scientific".

I think that students in the Political Science Department (and students in Sosc, who seem to be questioning basically the same things) should force lecturers to come out into the open and state their theoretical bases, so that Political Science can be debated in an honest way, and in future we may one day have a social science that is truly a science.