IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/bjposi/v3y1973i01p123-128_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

‘The Scientific Status of Political Science’—Rejoinder

Author

Listed:
  • Ake, Claude

Abstract

Since the two critiques [Iain McLean, Samual Postbrief, ‘"The Scientific Status of Political Science†— Two Comments,’ II (1972), 383–8] have little in common, I shall answer them separately beginning with McLean's. The main difficulty with McLean's argument is that he assumes that we know, or can know, that there cannot be a science of politics or, better still, laws of political behaviour as rigorous as the laws of the natural sciences. His assumption is supported by familiar arguments: men are not as passive and as homogeneous as silver nitrate; men have free will and could wilfully go against the predictions of the social scientist if only to show him that their behaviour cannot be predicted.

Suggested Citation

  • Ake, Claude, 1973. "‘The Scientific Status of Political Science’—Rejoinder," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 3(1), pages 123-128, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:3:y:1973:i:01:p:123-128_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0007123400007730/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:3:y:1973:i:01:p:123-128_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jps .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.