Jurisprudence for a Free Society. - book reviews

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Oct, 1995  by John D. Montgomery

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Myres McDougal and the late Harold Lasswell planned this work, essentially in its present form, in the 1950s. Toward the end of their careers, their life-long collaboration reached its climax in this encyclopedic culmination of their two lives' work and that of their closest colleagues. Even these 1600 pages still do not fully embody the range and power of the policy sciences tradition they created, though among other things they do provide an introduction of great potential value to students of comparative politics.

The contributions that Lasswell's Chicago-Yale policy sciences group has made to the study of human aspirations, beliefs, and behavior transcend the body of legal and constitutive theory defined by the title. Legal theorists are not its only debtors. Political scientists are obligated to it for concepts and operational techniques ranging from content analysis to structured theoretical insights into international relations.(1) Psychologists who would dabble in politics can, if they choose, incorporate insights from their early empirical work.(2) Sociologists and anthropologists can find nourishment in its framework for interpreting and influencing social change.(3) From their earliest formative years, these policy scientists have displayed a workmanlike skill at observing actual human behavior, current, emergent, and configurative, whether in the wards and political games of Chicago's municipal government or in the confused international functions that make up the world order. Even in the 1930s, Lasswell's canvas was so vast that it baffled several of the major political science departments with which he was associated, none of which could find it in their hearts and minds to grant him tenure. In his own time, however, he found intellectual refuge in Yale's mighty and diverse law school and his most collegial partnership in the person of the equally energetic Myres McDougal.

The Lasswell edifice (McDougal will not object to this designation of their joint work) is cavernous but hardly unstructured. Its architecture is a Gothic construct of involuted symbols, gargoyles, and soaring arches, so prominently displayed that some distinguished observers have been known to dismiss it as an empty taxonomy in spite of the political convictions it has served. Indeed, there is a flavor of disembodied abstraction in the specialized vocabulary used by Lasswell and his colleagues. Reading Lasswell, some may say, is a little like reading algebra: an exotic taste, one to be cherished only when it is useful.(4) (Fortunately for the newcomer to these parts, only a little of the present work is in Lasswellian algebra). Algebra or no, it is impossible to read this statement without doing some learning and rethinking.

These two volumes apply a body of knowledge that is so intricately structured and so comprehensive that quite apart from its utility as a guide to law as policy, it is also a school of thought. Several of our leading universities can still display ornaments from the Policy Sciences school, a Garry Brewer and Ronald Brunner here and a William Ascher and Michael Reisman there, whose works make extensive use of the Lasswell canon but yet retain the originality and unique insights of their authors. The journal Policy Sciences, still edited in the Lasswell tradition, continues to be one of the most influential publications in the field. At this writing, McDougal continues to pursue the familiar search. There is no longer a Lasswell, or even a Karl W. Deutsch or Daniel Lerner in our midst, to be sure. And in their absence, other leading journals are pursuing different perspectives in the continuing effort to improve public policy. Yet there is a rising sense of dissatisfaction with the narrow focus of these otherwise highly sophisticated efforts. This volume poses a challenge to each of them: how can these fragmented, uncontextual approaches produce cumulative knowledge about policy? Can the policy sciences framework reveal the light that lies beyond their tunnel visions?

The Lasswell-McDougal book treats the Policy Sciences tradition as more than just one among several competing approaches that bear names like Public Policy, Public Choice, and Policy Analysis. It suggests that the turmoil that characterizes these fields is caused by their haphazard assimilation of borrowed intellectual riches. For their epistemological inspiration most current policy analysts have drawn at random on economics, moral philosophy, sociology, and psychology as they have considered the problems that concerned Lasswell so deeply. The price for this enrichment is a restricted world view. By identifying the problems worthy of their study along rigorous, self-defining theoretical lines, they have produced a sequence of increasingly complex but unrelated tunnels leading to different destinations. This narrowness is, of course, fully recognized by policy analysts. Few among them will deny that the world is diminished when economic values and rationalities force them to exclude other potentially persuasive and sometimes even more compelling rationalities? Economists are gradually improving their performance as forecasters, but even within their narrow confines, their results are still contradictory and their prescriptions uncertain. How long can minimalist policy teaching and research ignore ultimate goals like human dignity?