The Physiology of Politics: Presidential Address, Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

Abstract

Our organization is known as the Political Science Association, and yet the subject to which it is devoted lacks the first essential of a modern science—a nomenclature incomprehensible to educated men. Other sciences employ terms of art which are exact because barbarous, that is remote from common usage, and therefore devoid of the connotations which give to language its richness and at the same time an absence of precision. But the want of an exact terminology is not the only defect of our subject. It suffers also from imperfect development of the means of self-expansion. The natural sciences grow by segmentation, each division, like the severed fragments of an earthworm, having a vitality of its own. Thus in zoölogy and botany we hear of cytology, histology, morphology and physiology, expressions which correspond, perhaps, with aspects of our own ancient, yet infantile, branch of learning.The first of the divisions already mentioned, cytology, deals with the cell as the unit of structure, and bears thus an analogy to the study of man as an individual, a social being by nature, no doubt, but considered from this point of view as a separate personality; to some extent at least as an end in himself. It corresponds rather to psychology than politics. Histology, if I am correctly informed, is concerned with the tissues made by the organic connection of many cells, the substances of which the body is formed, and by means of which its manifold operations are conducted. We may fancy that it has its counterpart in sociology, that science of which the late Gabriel Tarde remarked that it was named before its birth, although the time had come when it ought to be born.