Charles Merriam - American Political Ideas, 1865-1917

The work of Charles Merriam occupies an ambiguous place in the study of American democracy. He is scarcely read today among ordinary readers and among scholars he is probably more often cited than seriously read. This ambiguous status is unfortunate for a number of reasons. The most obvious should begin with the observation that he was the doyen of American political science between the two world wars when many of the most formative characteristics of academic social sciences were taking shape: characteristics that were to dominate for the remainder of the century. This was the period when science and progress became virtually synonymous in the social sciences. As much as any single scholar during this period, Merriam set the standard for how American democracy should be studied within the academy. It was also during this period, and very much under the influence of scholars such as Merriam, when the liberal-progressive critique of the founders, the critique that included Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, and others, became the orthodoxy of a new political science; a science of politics that saw itself as more scientific than that of the original founders. The heart of that critique, insofar as it turned on methodological questions of how to study American government, was in turn very much the work of Charles Merriam. Any account therefore that seeks to understand why that period was so pivotal in the interpretation of American democracy must necessarily include a study of Charles Merriam and his influence.

Merriam is both interesting and important as an author because of his pivotal role in helping to make progressivism the mainstream basis of American political science. But perhaps the more important, and overlooked, element in his thought that merits rereading his work lies elsewhere. It is that he represents the first comprehensive effort by a scholar in the liberal-progressive tradition to survey the entirety of American political thought and to locate specifically where and how the liberal-progressive science of politics fits into the American tradition writ large. He gave to the liberal-progressive tradition one of its first complete narrative accounts of itself. It was an account, it needs to be noted, and that represented a purely academic account of politics, with all of the strengths and weaknesses implied in such an approach, as opposed to the practical politics of the founders. This aspect of Merriams thought has been largely overlooked even by scholars who have taken a particular interest in his work. His specific political philosophy and his criticism of the founding principles of the American regime have largely been obscured by his advocacy of scientific political science and his general reputation as one of the founders of the behavioral persuasion in the social sciences. But this distinction between what is sometimes referred to as normative and scientific political theory is arbitrary and artificial; it is rooted in specifically academic categories that are seldom reproduced in the world of practical politics. It needs to be remembered that for Merriam theory was the center of how he understood political science, and nowhere in his work is this factor better or more thoroughly explored than in his early studies of the development of American political thought since the founders.1

Insofar as the behavioral persuasion is presumed to be more scientific than its predecessors, the heirs of Merriam have tended to overlook what is typically regarded as his normative, and hence non-scientific, political science. But it is precisely that normative impulse behind the liberal-progressive critique of the American founders that most needs attention. The scientific political science of Merriam aimed at neutrality as the proper scientific attitude in the study of American democracy, and Merriams academic heirs have tended to assume the validity of his methodological foundations. In this regard Merriams early work may be described as a door that opens into some of the most fundamental interpretive problems of American democracy. But what is not always appreciated is how much Merriam himself worked out the more philosophical basis for his approach to scientific political science in these two volumes of American political thought before the behavioral revolution he did so much to foster. These two aspects of his work, as an interpreter of the American political tradition and as a precursor to the later scientific study of politics, are bound together by an umbilical cord, the cutting of which, leads to a distortion of each part. This observation is true of American political thought in general: thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder, and if we wish to understand the action of late twentieth-century American politics we first need to understand the thought that was father to that action.

It is in this context that we turn to Merriams philosophical critique of the founding political science of American government. His two volumes on the development of American democracy, A History of American Political Theories (1903) and American Political Ideas, 18651917 (1920), remain one of the most comprehensive efforts from within the liberal-progressive tradition to understand the full sweep of American political thought since the founding. What other scholars such as Beard did piecemeal, for example, by focusing on the economic motivations of the American founders, Merriam did to American political history in its entirety, from the founding down to his own day. And unlike Beard, Merriam was not out to reduce political thought to a single element such as economics alone; his thought aimed to encompass the whole of modern social science. And although Merriams two volumes were written as separate and distinct works, they should be read in tandem for the reasons noted above. The political science of the liberal-progressive tradition has roots and assumptions that are born in this period and nurtured by scholars such as Merriam. His mature work was driven by a concept of science that remains very much the idea of science as it has been understood in the academy since its heyday when Charles Merriams Chicago School of political science was seen as the promise of a new science of politics.