The Use and Abuse of Social Science for Policy

Abstract

Whriting in this journal two decades ago, J. David Singer outlined the promise of a "scientific" approach to international relations theory.1 It was a rare time of conscious methodological and epistemological reflection within the discipline, and Singer was an influential proponent of the "behavioral revolution" then in evidence throughout political science. Singer's target was the work of "classical" or "traditional" scholars such as Hans Morgenthau, Arnold Wolfers, Raymond Aron, and George Liska — the founders of modern international relations theory itself. His complaint was neither with the topics these theorists chose to analyze, nor with the conclusions they drew, but with the methodologies they relied upon. As Klaus Knorr and James Rosenau summarized in 1967, in the battle then underway between science and tradition, "it is the mode of analysis, not its subject matter, that is the central issue."2 Behavioral scientists like Singer argued that the mode of classical analysis was inherently flawed because it could provide no assurance of objectivity. Traditional international relations theory, though insightful