Human Nature in Politics: Third EditionWallas, Graham
Science
Human Nature in Politics: Third Edition
Wallas, Graham
Political ethics; Politics, Practical
For the moment, therefore, nearly all students of politics analyse
institutions and avoid the analysis of man. The study of human nature by
the psychologists has, it is true, advanced enormously since the
discovery of human evolution, but it has advanced without affecting or
being affected by the study of politics. Modern text-books of psychology
are illustrated with innumerable facts from the home, the school, the
hospital, and the psychological laboratory; but in them politics are
hardly ever mentioned. The professors of the new science of sociology
are beginning, it is true, to deal with human nature in its relation
not only to the family and to religion and industry, but also to
certain political institutions. Sociology, however, has had, as yet,
little influence on political science.
I believe myself that this tendency to separate the study of politics
from that of human nature will prove to be only a momentary phase of
thought, that while it lasts its effects, both on the science and the
conduct of politics, are likely to be harmful, and that there are
already signs that it is coming to an end.
It is sometimes pleaded that, if thorough work is to be done, there
must, in the moral as in the physical sciences, be division of labour.
But this particular division cannot, in fact, be kept up. The student of
politics must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human
nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely
he is to be dominated by it. If he has had wide personal experience of
political life his unconscious assumptions may be helpful; if he has not
they are certain to be misleading. Mr. Roosevelt's little book of essays
on _American Ideals_ is, for instance, useful, because when he thinks
about mankind in politics, he thinks about the politicians whom he has
known. After reading it one feels that many of the more systematic books
on politics by American university professors are useless, just because
the writers dealt with abstract men, formed on assumptions of which they
were unaware and which they had never tested either by experience or by
study.
In the other sciences which deal with human actions, this division
between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
it is not found. In criminology Beccaria and Bentham long ago showed how
dangerous that jurisprudence was which separated the classification of
crimes from the study of the criminal. The conceptions of human nature
which they held have been superseded by evolutionary psychology, but
modern thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology into the
service of a new and fruitful criminology.
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