Behavioralism

International Studies Compendium, 2012

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Inanna Hamati-Ataya
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American University of Beirut
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Introduction
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Behavioralism is a paradigm that became predominant in American social sciences
from the 1950s until well into the 1970s. Grounded in a belief in the unity of science
and the unity of human behavior, Behavioralism developed scientific, quantitative
methodologies for the study of political processes, and opened up the discipline to a
wide range of theories and methods imported from the social and pure sciences.
Because they believed that political phenomena could be subjected to the methods of
science, Behavioralists turned their back on the normative legacy of the discipline and
replaced Political Philosophy with the Philosophy of Science, thereby setting new
standards for the formulation of concepts, hypotheses, theories, and protocols for
empirical testing. Although Behavioralism’s paradigmatic reign did not last beyond
the 1980s, it has transformed the discipline so profoundly that it remains to this day
an essential, albeit implicit, component of its identity.
Because of Behavioralism’s inscription in different socio-intellectual contexts
that are all relevant for understanding its emergence, development, content and impact
on Political Science and International Relations, and for the understanding of which it
is also relevant, a reference essay on Behavioralism necessarily takes multiple risks
and has to avoid several pitfalls. The first is to present the tenets of this school of
thought independently of the specific socio-intellectual context of both the American
society and the American Academy, thereby offering an unreflexive, de-
contextualised and a-historical account that fails to convey the relationship between
cognitive consensus and socio-historical constraints, and that simultaneously fails to
reconstruct the meaning this particular research program had for its main actors and
opponents. Alternatively, the danger is to give context too great a weight in the
assessment of the content, value, and contributions of Behavioral(ist) research,
thereby imprisoning it in its own historicity, and failing to appreciate the intellectual
importance of its scholars’ input, of the profound dilemmas they raised, and of the
equally legitimate objections they faced.
At a second, related level, one has to avoid succumbing to the existent
disciplinary narrative of IR, which is the only social science to view and tell its story
as a succession of “great debates,” with all the dichotomies, oppositions, and
narratives of exclusion and conflict such written history entails. Insofar as
Behavioralism was a contending party in IR’s “second debate,” it is particularly
difficult to extract it both from the textbook histories of the field, and from its
scholars’ institutionalized memory of it. While this can be said of all the theories,
paradigms and cognitive doctrines that populate IR textbooks, it is especially

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problematic for Behavioralism, which is often viewed as having “professionalized”
the discipline (Waever 1997). Any reference to Behavioralism will therefore be
inevitably inscribed in intellectual and discursive strategies that aim to assess the
development of IR as a cognitive field of production, as well as its identity as an
autonomous academic discipline.
With these problems and constraints in mind, this essay presents
Behavioralism as a historical contribution to, and reflection on, recurrent and
fundamental cognitive problems in the field. The essay starts with the context in
which Behavioralism emerged, then engages the Behavioral Revolution in American
Political Science and presents its main epistemic, ontological, and axiological tenets.
It then moves more specifically to Behavioralism in IR, and to the terms of its
“second debate.” The essay concludes with an assessment of Behavioralism’s legacy
in a post-behavioralist era.
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Behavioralism in Context:
An American School of Thought
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“Behavioralism” finds its disciplinary and intellectual roots in “Behaviorism,” a
school of Psychology founded by James B. Watson and influenced by the work of
physiologist Jacques Loeb (Lasswell 1950:553). Behaviorist Psychology “attempted
to resolve the dispute about the content, structure, and processes of human
consciousness by evading all questions about the content of the ‘little black box’,”
focusing instead “on the relationship between the stimulus as it acts on the black box
and the black box as it reacts to the stimulus” (Merkl 1969:142).
It thereby followed the lead of Animal Psychology, which operated on the
basis that introspective inquiry being impossible, one could only study animals’
behavior (Mead 1934). The logic of extracting the study of human beings from
introspection and from the limited and problematic understanding of the inner
workings of the human mind and volition therefore became particularly attractive for
social psychologists, who considered that unlike intentions, motivations, ideas or
beliefs, behavior could be understood with a great measure of rigor and objectivity if
the right scientific methods were applied. As Behaviorism, and then Behavioralism,
developed, these limitations were progressively waived and Behavioralists started
concerning themselves “with the processes of cognition, feelings, and with
evaluations of human consciousness” (Merkl 1969:143). (On the differences between
Behaviorism and Behavioralism, see Easton 1962).
In the United States, Behavioralism spread from Psychology to the rest of the
social sciences, gaining a stronghold at the University of Chicago, which became
from the 1950s onwards a place where some of the most renown Behavioralists
coexisted with some of their most renown and strongest opponents. In Political
Science, the Chicago School, led by Charles E. Merriam, had since the 1920s
explicitly criticised the “established tradition” of “institutionalism” for its limitations
and its inability to produce a rigorous understanding of political processes (Truman
1969:50). “Anxious to secure federal financing for social science research, but

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apprehensive that some unenlightened ‘persons confound social science and
socialism’,” its scholars coined the term “behavioral science” and shifted the
ontological focus of Political Science research to the concept of “political
behavior” (Somit and Tanenhaus 1967:183) (For early Chicago School research, see
Gosnell 1937; Lasswell 1936, 1948; Merriam 1939, 1945; Merriam and Gosnell 1949;
Schuman 1935).
For some Behavioralists, “the existence of some key attitudes and
predispositions generated in the American culture” such as “pragmatism,
factmindedness” and “confidence in science” (Dahl 1969[1961]:69) explain the
success of Behavioralism in the U.S. In the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 1950 report on the state of “Contemporary
Political Science” in the world, Harold Lasswell thus writes that “[i]n America, one
does not appreciate political theories that do not lead to any empirical study and have
no influence on the conduct of public affairs…Americans respect science and
technology, and our specialists in political science dream of a field where authority is
founded on experimental results and not on dialectic alone” (Lasswell 1950:552 – my
translation; see also Merriam 1950:255 and Cook 1950:83 in the same volume). These
statements are meaningful at least because of their performative nature and as
illustrations of the new spirit that had taken hold of American Political Science,
which, in its Behavioral branch, was pursuing the project of a “science of politics” as
it was conceived at the turn of the 20th century, thereby breaking away from the
philosophical roots of the discipline.
Whether or not the “American culture” can be credited for the “rapid
flowering of the behavioral approach in the U.S.” (Dahl 1969[1961]:69), the
impression that Behavioralism is a specifically American phenomenon is shared by
both American and non-American scholars, as manifested in Hedley Bull’s (1966)
critique of Behavioralist IR. Similar scientific research had undoubtedly been
attempted elsewhere – e.g., British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson’s theory of
war (see Rapoport 1957) – but the United States provided a definitely more favorable
milieu for the propagation of such an intellectual movement. Behavioralism’s success
can, however, better be explained by the convergence of the interests and concerns of
American social scientists on the one hand, with those of the American government
and public agencies on the other. In post-1945 America, government officials needed
reliable input from scientific disciplines that would help them understand the roots
and causes of different social, national, and international problems, assess their
possibilities for action, and predict or anticipate future outcomes and changes. At the
time, Economics was the only social science to have gained such credibility in the
eyes of academics and politicians alike.
American social scientists, on the other hand, were keen on demonstrating the
relevance of their fields of study for practical social problems. In this specific socio-
intellectual setting, Political Science suffered from a composite complex of inferiority
and an acute existential crisis over the “state of the discipline,” which were due to a
combination of several factors:
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the discovery that the talents and skills of political scientists were not highly
valued by governmental personnel officers; the disconcerting realisation, by

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 those who did spend some time in the public service, of the profound
difference between the “accepted wisdom” of the profession and the reality of
the governmental process; the inability of traditional political science to
account for the rise of fascism, national socialism, and communism, or to
explain the continuation of these regimes in power; a growing sensitivity to,
and unhappiness with, the basically descriptive nature of the discipline; and a
knowledge of apparent advances in other social sciences and a mounting fear
that political science was lagging behind its sister professions. (Somit and
Tanenhaus 1967:184)
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Electoral processes and voting behavior, in particular, had been subjected to
sophisticated and impressive analyses by sociologists and social psychologists who,
with the use of survey methods, were turning their craft into a very appealing
empirical science.
Quantitative studies were themselves facilitated by the development and wider
use of computers, which made it possible to use complex mathematical and statistical
computations. Behavioralist political scientists therefore imported from other
disciplines the successful methods they thought would ground their analyses in
scientific and rigorous methodologies. This explains the emergence of a new
generation of scholars who were trained in cognitive areas that had never before been
relevant to Political Science itself, such as Mathematics, Physics, Biology,
Economics, Sociology and Psychology.
The specific impact on American Political Science of Sociology and
Psychology was also triggered by the arrival in the 1930s of a significant number of
European – mainly German – émigrés, who brought with them a new intellectual
culture that exposed their American colleagues to the works of Weber, Marx,
Durkheim, Freud, Pareto, and others, to a new philosophy of knowledge (logical
positivism) and to a wide range of analytical concepts and social theories that would
be crucial to the development of Behavioral science (Dahl 1969[1961]:69; Somit and
Tanenhaus 1967:184).
Most of these European scholars were in fact radically opposed to
Behavioralism (Gunnell 1993, 2006), with the notable exceptions of Heinz Eulau and
Karl Deutsch. The intellectual tradition that travelled with them to the U.S. took on a
different meaning and served very different research agendas. At the University of
Chicago, where Leo Strauss and Hans Morgenthau battled for the preservation of the
philosophical legacy of the discipline, the Department of Political Science was
producing a new generation of influential Behavioralist scholars who would bring
prestige to the Chicago School and to the entire discipline – most notoriously, Harold
Lasswell (1936, 1948), V.O. Key, Jr. (1956, 1968, 1969), David B. Truman (1951),
Herbert Simon (1947), Gabriel Almond (1950), David Easton (1953, 1965), Quincy
Wright (1942, 1955) and Morton A. Kaplan (1957). Behavioralism became prominent
at Harvard with Karl Deutsch (1963) and Sidney Verba (1961), Almond’s collaborator
(Almond and Verba 1963), at Yale with Robert A. Dahl (1961) and at Stanford with
Eulau (1966, 1977, 1986; see also Eulau, Eldersveld and Janowitz 1956; Eulau and
Wahlke 1978; Eulau, Wahlke and Buchanan 1962; Eulau and Prewitt 1973).

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 Behavioralism also benefited from the support of the major American funding
agencies. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) established in 1945 a
Committee on Political Behavior that was chaired by a Behavioralist and was
naturally “behaviourally inclined”. The Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations
played an important role in promoting Behavioral research, the latter having its own
Behavioral Science Program. Behavioralist scholars soon monopolized the allocation
of grants, to the point that “access to public funds was largely limited to the social
sciences deemed worthy of the appellation ‘behavioral sciences’” (Somit and
Tanenhaus 1967:185).
The 1950s proved to be a turning point for Behavioralism in both American
Political Science and American IR. It was not unusual after that point for
Behavioralists to occupy the most prestigious and influential positions in the
profession, including the Presidency of the American Political Science Association
(APSA) and membership in the SSRC. While Political Theory and its normative,
ethical tradition of inquiry had constituted the core of the discipline since its
establishment in the U.S. (Gunnell 1993), Behavioralism succeeded in marginalizing
and even stigmatizing philosophically oriented scholars, thereby monopolizing much
of the American scholarly production of the field. It also profoundly reshaped its
cognitive tenets, terminology, methodologies and scholarly ethos, while redefining its
relationship to the other social (and the non-social) sciences. (For further readings on
Behavioralism in the development of Political Science, see Crick 1959; Somit and
Tanenhaus 1967; Baer et al. 1991; Gunnell 1993; Easton 1997).
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The Terms of the Behavioral Revolution
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For the Behavioralists as well as their critics, the debate around Behavioralism was
grounded in the opposition and tension between “innovation” and “tradition” (Eulau
1969). The Behavioral Revolution starts as a declared “protest” (Dahl 1969[1961])
against “traditional” Political Science, which it views as being both too descriptive
and too speculative, lacking rigor and ambition, and incapable of analytical
theorization and therefore of cognitive growth. David Easton (1953) famously
diagnosed the discipline as undergoing a deep “malaise” that made its practitioners
incapable of justifying their institutional existence and intellectual relevance to the
problems of the age. For the Behavioralists, the problem originated in the discipline’s
attachment and grounding in both Philosophy and History, which prevented it from
developing rigorous explanations of specific political processes, and grounded its
discourse in general and obscure assumptions wherein concepts such as “human
nature” and “power” remained hermetic to scientific explanation.
The answer to the discipline’s crisis was delineated in Easton’s (1962:7-8)
definition of the Behavioralist creed, which is subtended by a belief in both the unity
of science and the unity of human behavior:
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 1. Regularities: There are discoverable uniformities in political behavior
[that]…can be expressed in generalizations or theories with
explanatory and predictive value.
2. Verification: The validity of such generalizations must be testable, in
principle, by reference to relevant behavior.
3. Techniques: Means for acquiring and interpreting data...need to be
examined self-consciously, refined, and validated.
4. Quantification: Precision in the recording of data and the statement of
findings require measurement and quantification…
5. Values: Ethical evaluation and empirical explanation involve two
different kinds of propositions that, for the sake of clarity, should be
kept analytically distinct…
6. Systematization: …[T]heory and research are to be seen as closely
intertwined parts of a coherent and orderly body of knowledge…
7. Pure science: …[T]he understanding and explanation of political
behavior logically precede and provide the basis for efforts to utilize
political knowledge in the solution of urgent practical problems of
society.
8. Integration: Because the social sciences deal with the whole human
situation, political research can ignore the findings of other disciplines
only at the peril of weakening the validity and undermining the
generality of its own results...
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The Science of Political Behavior and Processes
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The first important tenet of Behavioralism is that the social sciences can be as
“scientific” in their methods, modes of explanation and conclusions as the “pure
sciences,” the same understanding of “science” prevailing in both. The objective,
then, was to discover regularities and patterns of behavior similar to the “laws”
observed in nature. Given that social organization and human behavior are governed
by dynamic processes rather than static patterns of repetition, the scientific models
that were emulated were those of Biology, where systems are conceptualized on the
basis of their functions and interactions with their environment, rather than those of
Physics, where explanation derives from the effect of “covering laws” of behavior on
the properties of individual or aggregate bodies. This explains why systems theory
(Easton 1953, 1965; Kaplan 1957) and cybernetics (Deutsch 1963, 1978) became
predominant in Behavioralist literature, as they provided Behavioralists with the
conceptual framework for the study of political processes in terms of social
adaptation, equilibrium, information processing and homeostatic regulation. (On the
influence of scientific paradigms on Political Science, see Schubert, Alker and Zinnes
1983).
The realm of Political Science per se was therefore epistemically conceived in
Positivist terms, insofar as science concerns itself with “givens,” that is, observable
facts or, at most, observable manifestations of non-factual phenomena. “Behavior”
therefore took ontological precedence over such notions as “human nature,”
“freedom,” “reason,” or “power.” This Positivist epistemology, however, should be

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understood as defining the realm of science, not of knowledge in general. Although
many Behavioralists adopted Positivism and even Scientism as comprehensive
attitudes toward the social world, most of them did acknowledge that Behavioral
science cannot encompass the realm of understanding, and that many dimensions of
human behavior and politics can only be grasped by relying on historical,
philosophical, and even ethical inquiry. This point was misunderstood by most of their
opponents, and by most commentators in both Political Science and IR, who
indiscriminately collapse Behavioralism and Positivism, thereby including the former
in any critique of the latter. The Behavioralists’ aim in fact was to delimit the realm of
scientific explanation, and extract those phenomena that could be explained
scientifically from the over-arching paradigms of philosophical or historical
understanding, which precluded the development of a rigorous empirical knowledge
of social reality.
Insofar as social processes can be objectivated scientifically, the observer has
to operate a separation between what can and cannot be observed and agreed upon
through the methods of science. The datum of Behavioral science should therefore be
amenable to measurement, quantification, testing and replication, which explains the
introduction of mathematics for the purpose of formulating rigorous relationships
among clearly defined variables. To the extent that regularities can be discovered,
Behavioralism aspired not only to explain past or present behavior and processes, but
also to predict or anticipate future ones, based on a precise assessment of the weight
different variables take in different settings. The development of analytical theories,
wherein variables are “operationalised” and related to each other within specific
“boundary conditions,” should therefore be validated by empirical testing. Those
variables that cannot be tested – either directly or indirectly – cannot be retained by
Behavioral science.
This epistemic attitude was opposed to two modes of inquiry. The first is the
descriptive model of historical investigation, which is necessarily concerned with
singular, rather than recurrent, phenomena. This is related to the difference between
synchronic and diachronic analysis. (Eulau 1969:6). While history constitutes the
Behavioralist’s “laboratory,” it cannot spontaneously generate any explanation unless
the comparative method is used to assess the effect of changed historical conditions
on the behavior of individuals or social groups. Comparison, in turn, requires the
identification of both constants (parameters) and variables, so that it becomes possible
to “measure” variations and say something meaningful about what makes different
social systems evolve and how change operates.
The second mode of inquiry Behavioralism rejected is that which aims for
“transcendental truths” and characterizes philosophical, normative and ethical
discourse. More specifically, it intended to extract Political Science from the
speculative, a-historical and universalizing narratives of Philosophy, which does not
allow for “intersubjective validation” of knowledge of the social world (Eulau
1969:11). It is this specific aspect of Behavioralism that most radically alienated
“traditional” scholars, such as Leo Strauss, who considered that Behavioralism
(identified as Positivism) implied “a depreciation of prescientific,” “common sense”
knowledge. The aim was no longer to attain an “absolute knowledge of the Why, but
only” a “relative knowledge of the How” (Strauss 1969:104, 97).

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 Heinz Eulau (1969:18-9) provided a good conceptualization of this duality,
thereby also highlighting Behavioralism’s self-awareness of its own limitations:
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Perhaps it is best to think of the study of politics as an ever expanding set of
concentric circles, with a core that undergoes change very slowly, if at all, and
with a periphery that is ill-defined and forever changing. At the core we find
the most traditional of approaches...Here the search is for Truth, with a capital
“T,” and for eternal knowledge. At the periphery we encounter the agenda of
behavioral science which, unlike any other agenda, knows no limits…because
the method of science does not know final knowledge. Here inquiry is
undertaken as much to reduce ignorance as to discover truth. What knowledge
emerges is assumed to be partial, possibly temporary, contingent on the state
of science, and always probabilistic. As science reduces ignorance, it may
know what is not the case; it does not arrogate to itself knowledge of the truth.
In this sense, behavioral science is without firm boundaries and its agenda is
never exhausted.
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Within this cognitive framework, Behavioralism developed a specific
language, and a novel terminology largely imported from other sciences.
Behavioralist works characteristically start with very detailed definitions of concepts
and variables used, and a clear statement of the research questions investigated, with
clearly defined hypotheses and protocols for testing them. The shift from “traditional”
to “scientific” research is exemplified in Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan’s
(1950) Power and Society, which became the first Behavioral work to broadly impact
the discipline and was famously criticised by Morgenthau (1958:19-20) as a
“monstrosity” that reflected a “thorough misunderstanding of the nature of political
theory and its relationship to empirical research.” A comparison with Morgenthau’s
Scientific Man Versus Power Politics (1946) reveals the shift operated by the
Behavioralists in terms of terminology, background literature, and methodology.
As they developed new bridges connecting them to the rest of the social (and
non-social) sciences, the Behavioralists further alienated those scholars who
considered that Political Science was a discipline whose central object of study –
power – distinguished from all other fields of inquiry. From a Behavioralist
perspective, the ontological focus on “political behavior,” which is merely one type of
“social behavior,” precluded any such intellectual and institutional “autonomy.”
Interdisciplinarity was both an epistemic and an ontological necessity, and many
Behavioralists in fact denied Political Science the status of academic “discipline.”

Values, Judgment and the Ethos of Behavioral Science

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In retrospect, the Behavioralists’ extensive discussions of methodological questions
were due to the absence of such discussions in “traditional” Political Science.
Methodology was by no means pursued as an end in itself. Although the
Behavioralists widely contributed to the introduction of the philosophy of knowledge
and science in the disciplinary literature, their aim was to improve the concepts and
methods of research for the purpose of empirical and practical relevance. For their

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critics, however, the stress on methodology, methods, and the technicalities of science
was shifting attention away from the most important and meaningful questions, most
of which appealed to the “judgment” of the scholar rather than to technical standards
of inquiry. In the process of “achieving science,” Behavioralists thus remained “open
to the charge of strenuously avoiding that dangerous subject, politics” (Bay
1969[1965]:140) and were even accused of turning “the students of political science
into political eunuchs” (McCoy and Playford 1967:9).
This general impression was more specifically related to the central question
of the relation of values to knowledge, which was one of the most central points of
contention between the Behavioralists and their critics. Here again, criticism was
addressed to the positivist underpinnings of Behavioralism, that is, to the delineation
of the epistemic and ontological realm of inquiry within whose boundaries
Behavioralism consciously limited itself. Eulau summarized Behavioralism’s
axiological stance with respect to three important questions pertaining to values:
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First, on the question of whether values can and should be studied by the
methods of science, the answer is an unequivocal “yes,” just as the answer is
“yes” to the question of whether behavioral science can assess the
consequences of alternate policy choices. Second, on the question of whether a
“value-free” social science is possible, the answer is “no,” though the
exclusion of value considerations in the form of biases that distort scientific
inquiry is desirable. And third, on the question of whether behavioral science
can arrive at judgments of what is “good” and what is “bad,” the answer is that
it cannot – that such judgments are, indeed, the task of ethics as a separate
enterprise. (Eulau 1969:11-12)
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The Behavioralists had thereby adopted Max Weber’s position (see in
particular Easton 1953:221), which is based on the “logical heterogeneity” between
“statements of facts” and “value-judgments” (Weber 1949a[1917], 1949b[1904]).
Their central concern was to extract value-judgments from scientific explanation
proper, and guarantee that regardless of the context of discovery, the logic of
explanation would remain unaffected by personal or collective value preferences
(Kaplan 1964). The stress on methodology, wherein value-control became an
important standard, was meant to separate science from ideology, and critically raise
the scholars’ awareness of their own preferences, assumptions and biases, and of how
these polluted the scientific process (Greene 1970). Some Behavioralists (such as
Dahl) even adopted the strategy of clearly stating their preferences to their readers at
the beginning of their analyses. Much of these positions entailed a validation of the
American democratic system. The criteria for making such judgments were, however,
rarely articulated (Bay 1969[1965]:122).
The real disagreement among Behavioralists was over the “behavioral
scientist’s own involvement in the issues of the day,” a classical dilemma for all social
scientists, including Weber himself (Weber 2004[1918/1919]). Since “there is nothing
in the logic of science that compels the scientist to commit himself to one of several
conflicting public purposes – or to withhold his commitment,” “commitment is as
defensible as its opposite…In this respect, then, the scientist must come to terms with

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his own moral conscience. Neither science nor philosophy can legislate his course of
action” (Eulau 1969:12).
Disagreement over the scholar’s ethos as a social agent was combined with a
general tendency to confuse “value neutrality” (cognitive objectivity/impartiality)
with “ethical neutrality” (moral disengagement/indifference), two notions that became
subsumed under the generic expression “value freedom” (Hamati-Ataya 2011). Much
of the debate between the Behavioralists and their opponents revolved around this
confusing notion. With the rise of the culture of Positivism in American academia, the
ethos of social and moral “disengagement” prevailed (Gunnell 1993:223), and the
more nuanced understanding of the relation of values to knowledge that
Behavioralists had earlier offered was not only blurred but swept away by the
pressing concerns of empirical research. (For a later defense of Behavioralism’s
concern with values, see Searing 1970 and Rogers 1977).
A typical example of the confusion between “value neutrality” and “ethical
neutrality” is found in Strauss’ critique of Behavioralism, which also reflects the
general impression that Behavioralists have by and large taken the discipline toward a
disengagement from its most central ethical concerns: “Positivistic social science is
‘value-free’ or ‘ethically neutral’: it is neutral in the conflict between good and evil,
however good and evil may be understood…moral obtuseness is the necessary
condition for scientific analysis” (Strauss 1969:98). For Strauss, this resulted directly
from Behavioralism’s rejection of common sense and dialectical knowledge: by
adopting the “perspective of the scientific observer,” Behavioralists had forgotten the
equally legitimate and equally necessary “perspective of the citizen” (Strauss
1960:106).
These attacks on the Behavioralist ethos were not restricted to the debates
among political scientists. Behavioralists from all disciplines were accused of hiding
their implicit collusion with power behind the veil of “value freedom.” In the 1960s, a
general “dissident” movement developed in American social sciences, leading to the
establishment of such associations as the Radical Caucus in Sociology, the Sociology
Liberation Movement, the Union for Radical Political Economists and the Caucus for
a New Political Science, which considered the “sciencizing” of the discipline as a
pursuance of “politics by other means” (Surkin and Wolfe 1970:4). The general
impression was that “the rigorous adherence to social science methodology adopted
from the natural sciences and its claim to objectivity and value neutrality function as a
guise for what is in fact becoming an increasingly ideological, non-objective role for
social science knowledge in the service of the dominant institutions in American
society” (Surkin 1970:14).
After having succeeded in significantly altering the cognitive attitude of
political scientists by stressing on the importance of conceptual and methodological
rigor, Behavioralism was now faced with the dilemmas arising from its flirtation with
Positivism. In a reflexive awakening that is rare among scholars enjoying the
authority and prestige of their dominant paradigm, Easton (1969) himself, then the
President of the APSA, offered such a critical assessment, acknowledging the need for
moral evaluation and philosophical inquiry, and for a new, “post-behavioralist
revolution.”
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Behavioralism and IR’s “Second Debate”
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The Behavioral Revolution is known to have launched IR’s second “great debate.”
After the founding debate between “Realism” and “Idealism” over the what-question
concerning the discipline’s subject-matter (Spegele 1996:xv-xvi), the second debate is
unanimously viewed as being about “methodology” and the how-question (Vasquez
1983:19; Jackson and Sørensen 2003[1999]:45). This view is based on the idea that
most Behavioralists were Realists (Brown and Ainley 2005:33) who “challenged not
the picture of the world that the realists had provided but the realist conception of
what constitutes an adequate scientific theory and the procedures to ‘verify’ that
theory” (Vasquez 1983:23).
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The Modelling of International Processes
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With the establishment of IR’s first “paradigm,” Realism, the idea that world politics
followed some “objective” laws and trends that the discipline was expected to
discover and explain was a familiar and widespread assumption. This made IR “an
obvious candidate for the application of the scientific method” (Crawford 2000:30).
In their seminal 1950 reader Principles and Problems of International Politics,
Realists Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson thus included a text by Nicholas
Spykman (1950[1933]) that delineated the difference between Science and History:
“what is true of one apple only is an historical truth; what is true of apples in general
is a scientific truth. The historical interest lies in the unique quality of the individual
apple, the scientific interest, in the qualities which it has in common with all apples.”
For Spykman, the “problem of science is to find out how things work,” and this is
precisely what the Behavioralists intended to do. Behavioralism was therefore to a
large extent a natural development for IR – the pursuance of Realism’s scientific
aspirations. The disagreement between Behavioralists and some Realists concerned
the belief in the unity of science, that is, that the same methodologies and standards
applied to both the physical and social sciences. Particularly controversial were the
introduction of quantitative analysis and the use of statistics.
Quincy Wright’s (1942) A Study of War may be considered the earliest
Behavioralist works in American IR, and an important achievement for the Chicago
School itself (see also Wright 1955). In the following decade, Behavioralism imposed
its marks in the discipline, with such as works as Richard Snyder et al.’s (1954)
Decision-Making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics, which
became, with James Rosenau’s (1966) essay “Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign
Policy” and Margaret and Harold Sprout’s (1956) Man-Milieu Relationship
Hypotheses in the Context of International Politics, a paradigmatic reference for
Foreign Policy Analysis (See also Rosenau 1971). In 1957 were published the two
most influential texts, Morton A. Kaplan’s System and Process in International
Politics, and Karl Deutsch et al.’s Political Community and the North Atlantic Area.
These two studies announced the general trend of Behavioralist IR scholarship: a
primordial concern for the philosophy of science (and knowledge), the use of

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concepts, theories and methodologies developed in other sciences, and a reliance on
quantitative data and analyses. (Important Behavioralist contributions are found in
Knorr and Verba 1961 and Rosenau 1961).
Kaplan’s System and Process signified the shift operated by Behavioralism in
IR. Often viewed as a Realist for his contribution to the conceptualization of the
“balance of power,” he significantly rejected the use of “power” as a meaningful
concept for theoretical and empirical analysis, and hence turned his back on all the
classical literature of Realist IR that borrowed so heavily from Political Philosophy.
Kaplan adopted instead systems theory as developed by W. Ross Ashby in his Design
for a Brain (1952), and treated the “international system” as a type of “homeostatic
multistable system” that could regulate itself by changing its internal variables to
search for better stability. Kaplan envisaged six different types of “international
system” in a state of equilibrium, characterized by a different organization of their
unit-actors (national and supranational) and a different distribution of capabilities
across the system. Two of these had existed (the “balance of power” and “loose
bipolar” systems), and the remaining four were properly modelled for the purpose of
explanatory and predictive analysis. Richard Rosecrance (1963) would later follow
Kaplan’s example and identify eight historical models of the international system
between 1740 and 1960. “Anarchy” was thus no longer conceived as a monolithic
ideal-type for conceptualizing either the international system or international state
behavior.
Deutsch also turned his back on Realism’s legacy and adopted
communications theory and cybernetics to analyse “security communities.” Unlike
Kaplan, he relied heavily on statistical analyses, which became his central
methodology for testing hypotheses. Both Kaplan’s and Deutsch’s approaches to
equilibrium and stability were grounded in the “holistic,” “homeostatic analogy,”
whereby equilibrium results from dynamic regulatory processes that operate within
the system’s functional units. This differed significantly from the “individualist,”
“market analogy” that was later used by Kenneth Waltz (1979), wherein equilibrium
is the “unintended consequence of rational individual action” (Guzzini 2002[1998]:
37).
Behavioralism’s openness to the other sciences was not restricted to its
borrowing of their techniques and cognitive frameworks of inquiry. IR itself became
open to specialists from other disciplines, such as economist Kenneth Boulding (1962,
1975), physicist Herman Kahn (1960, 1962, 1965), or mathematician Anatol Rapoport
(1963, 1989). John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s (1944) Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior became a reference for Behavioralist IR scholars, and Nobel
Prize winner Thomas Schelling developed Game Theory for the study of strategy and
arms control (Schelling 1960, 1966, Schelling and Halperin 1961). By and large,
quantitative analysis became a primordial methodology for Behavioralist IR, leading
to such research projects as the workshop on comparative international systems
analysis Kaplan set up at the University of Chicago (Kaplan 1968), J. David Singer
and Melvin Small’s The Correlates of War Project (1963), which led to a series of
handbooks such as The Wages of War, 1816-1965 (1972), or the Dimensionality of
Nations Project (see Online Resources).

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 The focus on quantitativism should, however, not preclude an appreciation of
the important developments Behavioralism introduced into IR. The Behavioralists
opened up the discipline to a wide range of theories and paradigms that proved to be
very useful, and even necessary, for producing a more sociological discourse on world
affairs, drawing on communications theory, the sociology of organizations and
administrations, and the like. This introduced the important distinction between
“action theories” of foreign policy and “interaction theories” of international systems
(Holsti 1971:168). Behavioralism also operated a significant transformation in the
way IR scholars perceived the international system and its alleged rational and unitary
actors – the states. Graham T. Allison’s (1971) The Essence of Decision revealed the
weight of conflicting administrations in foreign policy decision-making processes;
Deutsch’s and Kaplan’s own works stressed on the importance of information as a
determining variable for evaluating and explaining states’ behavior – and therefore
states’ “rationality” itself; Kaplan’s System and Process and Rosenau et al.’s (1969)
Linkage Politics contributed to reversing the Realists’ distinction between the
domestic and the international, by showing their mutual influence in the realm of
policy-making.
By the 1970s, Behavioralism had become the leading paradigm in IR. While
Morgenthau still ranked first among IR scholars, he was followed closely by Deutsch
and Kaplan, whose System and Process became the second “classic” of American IR
after Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations (Finnegan 1972). Like their colleagues in
the other social sciences, the Behavioralists were, however, under attack on all fronts.
As they pushed the scientific agenda farther than their Realist predecessors had done,
they found themselves in the middle of a debate that aggregated against them not only
the more classical Realists, but the latter’s critics as well. This also coincided with a
general awareness that IR had become specifically American in nature, and there was
nothing more American than Behavioral IR itself.
!
The “Bull-Kaplan Debate”:
!
IR’s “second debate” is the first one to involve a real, albeit difficult, discussion
among its protagonists. It also addressed the most fundamental and recurrent
questions for the discipline, insofar as it touched upon such issues as the nature of
knowledge, science, theory and explanation; the level-of-analysis and unit-of-analysis
problems; the relation to history; the social role and responsibility of science, as well
as the ethical dilemmas its practitioners face. Most, if not all, of the issues that would
feed IR’s following debates and controversies had already been discussed by either
the Behavioralists or their critics. The debate itself, however, often turned into a
dialogue of the deaf. The intellectual origins, background knowledge and perspectives
of its protagonists were too different to permit the adoption of a common language
that would sustain the discussion. As a result, there was a great deal of
misunderstanding on both sides.
The Behavioralists’ critics were particularly annoyed by the extensive use of
quantitative analyses, which they viewed as reflecting a properly positivist approach
to international reality. Stanley Hoffmann (1960:46-47), who had been a disciple of
Raymond Aron, and who shared Aron’s Weberian, interpretative perspective, saw it as

!13
a return of the “old and mistaken [Durkheimian] habit of treating social facts like
things,” leading to a “mechanistic” social science wherein “men and societies are
reduced to communication systems, without much concern for the substance of the
‘messages’ these networks carry.” Equally problematic for him was the focus on
stability and equilibrium: “since purposes and values other than preservation of the
system are left out…the status quo becomes an empirical and normative pivot.” For
Hoffmann, Kaplan’s systems theory was merely “a huge misstep in the right direction
– the direction of systematic empirical analysis” (Hoffmann 1960:40).
It is, however, Hedley Bull’s defense of the “classical approach” that
disciplinary history remembers the most. The second debate is often referred to as the
“Bull-Kaplan debate,” following an exchange between the two authors in World
Politics (Bull 1966, Kaplan 1966) that occupies a central place in Knorr and
Rosenau’s (1972[1969]) “second debate” reference volume Contending Approaches
to International Politics. This is a symbolic but nonetheless misleading reduction of
the overall picture. It is symbolic because it reflects the idea that Behavioralism was
an American intellectual project whose assumptions and objectives remained
incomprehensible beyond the circle of its American practitioners, as Bull himself
keenly noted. It is nonetheless misleading because, of all the scholars associated with
Behavioralism in IR, Kaplan is the one who least fits the profile. Not only did he
never use the term “Behavioralism” or any of its variations, he also shared with its
critics their rejection of Positivism as a philosophy of knowledge, pursuing his
critique of Positivism further than any of its “classical” opponents (See Kaplan 1969,
1971, 2000). This important epistemic stance has, however, been widely ignored in
the discipline (with the exception of Spegele (1982), and Hamati-Ataya (2010),
(Forthcoming 2012)).
Bull’s critique (1966:20-21) was addressed at a wide variety of works
representing “the scientific approach” – including Kaplan’s, von Neumann and
Morgenstern’s, Schelling’s, Deutsch’s and Richardson’s – which all “aspir[e] to a
theory of international relations whose propositions are based either upon logical or
mathematical proof, or upon strict, empirical procedures of verification.” Against their
assumptions and methodologies, Bull defended the “classical approach” to theorizing
that “derives from philosophy, history and law, and that is characterised above all by
explicit reliance upon the exercise of judgment” and by the assumption “that if we
confine ourselves to strict standards of validation and proof there is very little of
significance that can be said about international relations.” Bull also made explicit
some unspoken reasons that explained British scholars’ radical rejection of
Behavioralism, which many of their American counterparts probably shared but never
expressed so bluntly or so honestly. These included “feelings of aesthetic revulsion
against [Behavioralism’s] language and methods, irritation at its sometimes arrogant
and preposterous claims, frustration at our inability to grasp its meaning or employ its
tools, a priori confidence that as an intellectual enterprise it is bound to fail, and
professional insecurity induced by the awful gnawing thought that it might perhaps
succeed” (Bull 1966:23).
Some of Bull’s main propositions against Behavioralist IR were common
among the latter’s critics. Their main objection concerned its positivist leanings,
which promoted scientific methodologies and a “fetish for measurement” at the

!14
expense of “the only instruments that are at present available for coming to grips with
the substance of the subject,” namely, “intuition” and “wisdom” (Bull 1966:26, 31).
For Bull, the scientific approach had added nothing meaningful to the understanding
of international relations that could not be, or was not already, revealed by the
classical approach. More importantly, by turning their back on History and
Philosophy, the “scientists” had “deprived themselves of the means of self-
criticism” (Bull 1966:37). This particular point would become central two decades
later in IR’s “third debate” (Lapid 1989) between the next generation of “scientific”
IR scholars – the Neorealists – and their Critical critics (see in particular the exchange
between Kenneth Waltz (1986) and Richard Ashley (1986) and an exposition of the
general problem in Hollis and Smith (1991)).
Morton Kaplan took on the task of responding to Bull’s and others’ criticisms
against the “scientific approach” (Kaplan 1966). His reply is the most incisive
counter-attack found in the literature. Kaplan pointed out Bull’s tendency to subsume
under a general, ill-defined and misunderstood category a wide range of approaches
that differed greatly in terms of logical reasoning, mode of inference, theoretical
framework and level of analysis (Kaplan 1966:12-13). As one of the proponents of the
“scientific approach,” Kaplan was better equipped to identify and assess these
differences, and his criticism only amplified Bull’s acknowledgment of the
“traditionalists’” ignorance and incomprehension of what the “scientists” were doing
and, more importantly, of what science was and entailed. These comments extended
even to the content of these approaches, as Kaplan easily demonstrated that authors
like Bull and Hoffmann had either not read, or not understood, the new theoretical
imports such as Game Theory (Kaplan 1966:14).
His second line of argumentation addressed the very modes and methods of
inquiry that the “traditionalists” claimed as their own, superior tools, namely,
historical and philosophical inquiry, and intuition. Whether conscious or not, the
implicit result of Kaplan’s critique is an “appropriation” of the central “traditionalist”
scholarly values, in the form of a tu quoque argument that turned these very values
against their own position. Responding to the attack on the scientists’ disregard for
History, he thus noted that
!
[t]he vaunted sensitivity to history that the traditionalists claim…is difficult to
find. Those traditionalists who have done a significant amount of historical
research…confine themselves largely to problems of diplomatic history that
are unrelated to their generalizations about international politics…or to more
specialized problems that are idiosyncratic. This is not an accident but is a
direct product of the lack of articulated theoretical structure in the
traditionalist approach. It is ironic that the traditionalists are so sure that they
alone are concerned with subject matter that they are unaware of the extent to
which those applying the newer approaches are using history as a laboratory
for their researches. This development is unprecedented in the discipline and is
a direct product of the concern of those using scientific approaches for
developing disciplined and articulated theories and propositions that can be
investigated empirically (Kaplan 1966:15-16).
!
!15
 Kaplan also argued that Philosophy was given greater attention by those who
pursued “scientific” rather than “traditional” approaches. Although he did not spell it
out clearly, he was mainly referring to the Philosophy of Knowledge and Science,
rather than to the Political Philosophy that “traditionalists” such as Bull were keen on
preserving. His criticism, which focused on the “speculative” dimension of the
“traditionalists’” philosophical assumptions and statements, nonetheless encompassed
all philosophical inquiry:
!
The traditionalists talk as if the newer methods have excluded philosophy as a
tool for the analysis of international politics. Unfortunately few of them…have
demonstrated any disciplined knowledge of philosophy; and many of them use
the word as if it were a synonym for undisciplined speculation. There are
many profound questions that in some senses are genuinely philosophical; the
systems approach, among others, is related to a number of philosophical
assumptions…There are, moreover, some important mistakes that ought to be
avoided. Political theory ought not to be called philosophy merely because it is
formulated by a man who is otherwise a philosopher unless the ideas have a
genuine philosophical grounding. If the ideas are merely empirical
propositions, as in the case of most philosophical statements used by
traditionalists, they stand on the same footing as other empirical
propositions…Even if some matters of concern to international politics are
profoundly philosophical, not all are. It is essential…to address the proper
methods to the proper questions and not to make global statements about
international politics, as do the traditionalists, which assume the relevance of
the same melange of methods regardless of the type of question. (Kaplan
1966:18-19; for Kaplan’s philosophical writings, see Kaplan 1969, 1971,
1976a, 1976b, 1989[1984], 1992, 2000, 2006)
!
Most ironic perhaps was Kaplan’s “scientific” treatment of the notion of
human “intuition,” which he extracted from the romanticized narrative of the
“traditionalists” by reminding them that “intuition” itself was an object of science,
that its intervention in the cognitive process could only be understood by applying the
methods of science, and that it was actually being studied by precisely those scientific
approaches that the “traditionalists” neither understood nor wanted to understand
(Kaplan 1966:3-5).
Kaplan’s third line of argumentation addressed the rationale and methodology
of the “scientific approach,” whose objective is to produce statements that can be
subjected to empirical validation, rather than speculative generalizations. Science is a
process of trial and error wherein theories and models are used to test hypothetical
propositions. The content of these theories should therefore not be confused with
reality itself. And if the attempt to construct models is not made, knowledge remains
based on speculations that, however attractive, inherently logical, or intuitively
correct, cannot permit the advancement of knowledge and therefore of appropriate
social action. That the “traditionalists” should be appalled by the mere attempt to test
some propositions about the social world could, according to Kaplan, only be
explained by their misunderstanding of the scientific endeavor itself: “The

!16
traditionalists mistake explicitly heuristic models for dogmatic assertions. They
mistake assertions about deductions within the framework of a model for statements
about the open world of history” (Kaplan 1966:20). This disjunction between the
respective views of the proponents of “science” and of “tradition” provides a good
analytical grid for assessing much of the discussion, confusion, and controversy that
surround IR’s “second debate.”
!
!
Behavioralism in a Post-Behavioralist Era
!
!
Some scholars have recently called for a revival of Behavioral IR as a sub-field
concerned with the explanation of the behavior of leaders, rather than states, thereby
refocusing Behavioralism on the individual as a unit of analysis, and on the
underlying processes that account for political judgment and decisions (James 2007;
Mintz 2005, 2006, 2007; Walker 2007). It is too early to say whether such a research
program can reclaim Behavioralism’s place among the leading paradigms of IR, or
whether the discipline is ready to welcome such a revival. The historiography of IR
shows, indeed, that Behavioralism’s history, identity, and purpose have somehow
been warped in the institutional memory of the discipline, and contemporary IR
scholars may be sceptical as to the value of a renewed engagement with a school of
thought that textbooks generally depict as a defeated empire. Some concluding
remarks are therefore in order.
Behavioralism has undoubtedly contributed to the development of political
and international theory by promoting – or restoring – the unity of the social sciences,
and more generally, by opening them up to the philosophical problems they share
with the physical sciences. In Political Science and IR, the Behavioralists’ concern for
conceptual and methodological rigor has raised scholars’ awareness of the inherent
ambiguities, biases and value-preferences that subtend their intellectual production, as
well as their standards for analytical rigor and practical usefulness to the world they
attempt to explain, and sometimes reform. Behavioralism, in short, “has made the
discipline more self-conscious and self-critical” (Somit and Tanenhaus 1967:190).
Self-consciousness, however, is historical and therefore relative. Nowadays,
Behavioralism is often viewed as belonging to the discipline’s least reflexive past.
This mainly results from the systematic confusion of Behavioralism with Positivism,
the latter being critiqued for combining the two greatest sins post-positivists could
envisage: an epistemic “instrumentalist” “bias towards objective explanation” and a
consequent “moral non-cognitivism” that leads to an inevitable “moral
scepticism” (Spegele 1996:7; Frost 1996:12-13).
Early Behavioralists were, however, neither oblivious, nor indifferent, to either
the problem of truth or the problem of values. In the current state of the discipline,
where the discussion between positivists and post-positivists has reached a dead-end,
while postmodernism threatens to make the whole debate about truth, objectivity, and
values meaningless, it is worth reconnecting with this generation of pioneers who
pondered on the difficulties of conceptualizing the political without losing sight of the
dilemmas of science and social action. Putting Behavioralism itself aside, as well as

!17
the context and stakes that were specific to the socio-institutional moment that saw its
emergence, it is the work of some specific scholars such as Easton, Eulau, and Kaplan
that is worth re-reading today. One might find in their oeuvre a rigorous, responsible,
and courageous attempt to improve our understanding of political reality without
surrendering to the easier options of either asserting transcendental truths with no
concern for their empirical accuracy or impact on human life, or of offering a loosely
descriptive account of the world from an uncritical, common-sense perspective. If IR
students are willing to free themselves from the “isms” imposed by the culture of
disciplinary history and the textbook narratives of “great debates,” a critical and
contextual engagement with these great scholars may help them develop a deeper
understanding of the recurrent theoretical and philosophical problems they are bound
to face as social scientists.
!
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Keywords
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!
Science – Positivism – Second Debate – Values – Methodology – Chicago School –
Theory – Models – Quantitative – Easton – Kaplan – Systems Theory – Cybernetics –
International System – Equilibrium – Realism
!
!
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!
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Online Resources
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Correlates of War Project: At http://www.correlatesofwar.org/. Includes archives of J.
David Singer and Melvin Small’s original project, with an updated data collection
covering different aspects of war and conflict. Accessed November 22, 2010.
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EUGene: At http://www.eugenesoftware.org/. D. Scott Bennett and Allan C. Stam’s
Expected Utility Generation and Data Management Program. Generates and manages
data for quantitative analysis of war and international relations. Accessed November
22, 2010.
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Paul Hensel’s International Relations Data Site: At http://paulhensel.org/data.html/.
Provides links to on-line data resources for IR research. Accessed November 22,
2010.
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Center for Systemic Peace: At http://www.systemicpeace.org/. Quantitative studies
and databases on societal and systemic conflicts. Accessed November 22, 2010.
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The Centre for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo: At http://
www.prio.no/CSCW/. Research and data on national, international, and transnational
dimensions of civil wars. Accessed November 22, 2010.
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Political Database of the Americas: At http://pdba.georgetown.edu/. Comprehensive
data collection on the politics and institutions of the Americas. Accessed November
22, 2010.
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The Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research: At http://www.hiik.de/
en/index.html/. Research and analysis of national and international political conflicts
based on the COSIMO (Conflict Simulation Model). Accessed November 22, 2010.
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Dimensionality of Nations Project: At http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/
studies/5408/. Rudolph J. Rummel’s project on Dyadic Foreign Conflict Variables
1950-1965, containing data on conflict behavior. Accessed May 2, 2011.
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