Hines, Samuel M., Jr. "Politics and the Evolution of Inquiry in Political Science." Politics and the Life Sciences 1, 1 (July, 1982):5-16.
[Five commentaries and author response, pp. 17-37]
Introduction. Although we may be pessimistic (with good reason) about contemporary politics, especially as it effects the prospects for the survival of the human species in the long run, we can be more optimistic about the study of politics from a life science perspective. Certainly the two are related. Becoming optimistic about the former may depend in part upon the further development of biopolitics and of the biobehavioral and life sciences generally.
In 1982 we mark the appearance of this journal as a forum for communication among members of an "invisible college" (Crane, 1972) of scholars interested in fundamentally interdisciplinary and life-science-informed studies of political life. Conceived in 1980, the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences was institutionalized in 1981 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. At that same meeting "politics and the life sciences" was recognized as an organized subfield in the discipline, and the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences offered its first set of panels as an unaffiliated group. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that biopolitics has become a sort of growth industry, at least from the standpoint of the number of individual contributors and bibliographic entries contained in the latest compilation of The Literature of Biopolitics (Somit, Peterson, Richardson, Goldfischer, 1980; Peterson, Somit, Slagter, 1981).
During this growth period of nearly two decades substantial and important advances have been made in the empirical study of politics and the life sciences. Of particular note are the efforts of those concentrating on the specification of somatic variables and psychophysiological indicators of political behavior including Tursky and Lodge at Stony Brook, Wahlke, Watts, and Wiegele. Equally important have been the attempts by Barner-Barry, Masters, Willhoite, and Glendon Schubert to apply concepts and methods from ethology and the study of animal behavior to human politics. Empirical work has also been undertaken in the area of public policy with Corning developing survival indicators and James Schubert testing relationships between nutrition, protein intake, food aid, violence, and political development. All of these efforts have extended the scope of analysis in political science and lent rigor and system to the study of political behavior and public policy.
Having thus indicated a sense of optimism, I must also add that there are reasons why we should be worried about the future of biopolitics. My major worry is that biopolitics is not sufficiently integrated as an evolutionary perspective. A second worry stems from my belief that students of biopolitics do not yet realize the full potential of this perspective to bring more unity to inquiry in political science than has been in evidence in some time. This potential can be sensed and enhanced only if we remain attentive to the core assumptions of biopolitics and to the critical role played by the theory of evolution in guiding research in biopolitics. Thus I see the major purpose of this article to be the demonstration of a vision of the whole of biopolitics. In addition to treating biopolitics as "whole cloth," I will also attempt to analyze its subdivisions and indicate why it is possible for this invisible college to fission unless we become more self-conscious about our common purposes and joint efforts. My final worry, addressed at the end of this article, concerns what I perceive to be an unfortunate neglect of the teaching of biopolitics. We need to develop a survival strategy and a program for disseminating information about biopolitical research so that we can find our niche in the political science curriculum.
In the course of this article I shall argue the following. (1) Biopolitics, if it is to realize its potential, must be reflexively self-critical and must endeavor to interact (discourse) with other perspectives or frameworks within political science pursuant of "common ground." (2) This is possible only if biopolitics remains sensitive to the historical development of political science and of science generally as a distinctive form of human activity. (3) Biopolitics is and should remain a broad, umbrella-like perspective that reflects and orders contextually the variation within political science, including variations in concepts, methods, forms of explanation, modes, and objects of inquiry. (4) Biopolitics can potentially and should explicitly try to demonstrate its capacity to explain, if not resolve, some of the recurrent controversies (usually expressed as dichotomies) within political science, notably the relationship of facts to values and empirical to normative theory. ( 5) Biopolitics should reflect both a theoretical and applied orientation to its subject matter. That is, biopolitics should be both a rigorous science and policy science. This is necessary because both science and politics are forms of human activity critical to human survival and hence central to the study of evolution and to the evolutionary process. (6) In order to flourish, biopolitics must find its niche in the curriculum of political science¾ and soon.