An Interview with Robert Putnam: On the Big Questions of Political Science and Method

 

By: Elizabeth L’Arrivee

Furman University, January 25, 2024 

 

Elizabeth: Your book, Bowling Alone, was the first political science work that really caught my attention because it seemed like you had a different methodological approach than other political scientists. How would you describe your approach? 

 

Robert: Interesting question — I have several things to say. Part of it is I do believe in what I would call engaged political science, that is, political science that is grappling with really important questions that ordinary people are concerned about, as distinct from some very good political scientists, people whose work I admire, that are working on what I would call “toy problems.” That is, they have a well-defined issue, but who the hell cares about what the answer is? And I think that political science has an obligation — at least some of us, some of the time — have an obligation to be working on big questions that ordinary people care about and not just some little mathematical puzzle or something. I don’t mean to be dismissive of those who do worry about mathematical puzzles. It’s very important to the development of our techniques, but substantively, we academics live a very cushy life, and we have a moral obligation, I think at least part of the time, to be working on questions that ordinary people care about. Because after all, the ordinary people, they’re the ones who are paying our salaries, even for the private university, certainly for the public university.  And so it does seem to be that we have an obligation to take them seriously. 

 

So that’s the first point and I, certainly in this in the work that I’ve done in the last 40 or 50 years, maybe more than that, have constantly tried to do both serious work but work that is addressed to big questions. And that’s not easy, of course. And you could be wrong and even usually be wrong, and there’s always a question of me pushing my own agenda. There was a very good discussion we had earlier here in the Tocqueville Center about how you can guard against allowing yourself to promulgate as truth something that is really just your personal opinion. You must take precautions against that, the most important of which is to subject yourself to peer review so that the people who, let’s say, you know, Joe Smith over here that are listening to me, he or she doesn’t have any idea if I’m making things up. Well, they can trust me because I’m making myself open to and vulnerable to criticism by people who really do know when I’m making it up or not.  

 

Elizabeth: Political philosophers are guided by the big questions, which are not the questions that everyone does ask, but that anyone from anywhere can ask. And these are not trivial questions, but the questions that drive us, that matter to us. What’s more, there’s only a hope of answering that question if you have a method by which to answer it, and a community to help you answer it — through argument, rigorous examination, debate, diversity of opinions, and receptiveness to criticism, as you mention. How did you come to have this approach to political science?

 

Robert: After college I went to Oxford for a year to study something called PPE, politics, philosophy and economics. It turned out that I had such a good undergrad education that I was actually not learning anything about politics, because the stuff I was reading at Oxford on politics was the stuff I’d read as a college sophomore at Swarthmore. So I was very frustrated and that’s not because of me, but it was really my very good education. But in those years, especially, Oxford was really good in philosophy. The dominant philosophy at that point was analytic philosophy. Basically, the idea was that philosophy was sort of a game about words, but I thought well, as long as I’m here and it’s good, I might as well spend the rest of the semester studying philosophy, then decided that I would go back to graduate school in America, to Yale, as it turned out. But my wife Rosemary and I were still there for two terms, so what should I do? And the answer was — at least much of the answer was — I should read philosophy.  

 

To read philosophy means there you have a tutor and the tutor each week sets you a topic on which you should write. Stick with me because I think I’m going to surprise you. But the philosopher I started working with, there was a guy there named Alasdair MacIntyre, and as you know he is extremely interesting. First of all he’s super smart. Secondly, the way that Oxford works is for one hour each week I met solely with him and I literally read a paper I had written. The paper would be 5-10 pages on some tough topic that he’d sent me and then he would rip it apart. I mean, he was out for you — you would be lucky if you got through the first page of your paper. It was bizarre. 

 

Now the other thing you need to know, which you probably do know about Alasdair, is that he’s had an extremely interesting trajectory. He began life as a Marxist. And he was a serious, committed Marxist. I’m not talking about his politics. Well, maybe his politics too, but he was very, very committed to his Marxist philosophy. And then, sometime in the early 60s, he sort of transformed himself and became a Catholic and a conservative. He became a Catholic personally, but also he became a conservative Catholic philosopher. And probably that’s how you know him. And I was there just as he was making that turn. So it was unbelievably interesting for me. Because he didn’t say to me, I’m in the midst of a big turn. But he was. I was getting the first year of his Catholic turn! I mean, in retrospect, I just know he was really interesting. And I’m certainly not Catholic. And I was not a conservative but he is. He’s also very smart, so he did not try to impose his views on me, but he did impose on me and thank God he did, but he didn’t impose his view. He conveyed to me that you had to be answering really big questions. It sounds like I was escaping your question, but I’m trying to explain why I’m not. This is relevant to the question of why I practice political science the way I do. 

 

And I’m certain I took him, and I took Catholic moral philosophy, much more seriously than almost any other political scientist in my generation, maybe than any other political theorist of my generation, because what I knew of political philosophy was the making of early MacIntyre. 

 

And I don’t know whether Catholicism is mumbo jumbo, but he’s not mumbo jumbo. He’s a very hard-nosed guy. I thought I might surprise you with that and it’s probably relevant also to the question you asked about why I have often been very focused on big questions. It’s not quite a part of my theory of engaged political science, rather it’s somehow related to that idea that we have the good fortune to be thinking about really big questions, and it’s a shame to waste that opportunity by looking only at little toy mathematical problems. I do not see a distinction between asking really big questions like, What makes democracy work? How can you get a democracy? and also worrying about numbers, making sure you got the numbers straight. I think those directly relate.  

 

Elizabeth: When it comes to Tocqueville and Darwin, you argue in your talk that rather than deducing their theories conditionally from a preconceived premise or hypothesis, they really looked in detail at empirical facts and created their theories on the basis of those facts. Could you elaborate a little on how you understand their methodology, and how it relates to your own approach?  

 

Robert: I recognized that unusual skill because that’s the skill that I aspire to, right? To be both really careful about making sure of getting exactly measured things straight, but then also try at the same time to be thinking about the bigger picture. But there’s a passage in our piece about a parade that Tocqueville attends in Albany. He was taking notes, so we have this record of what he was thinking at the time. And the most amazing thing is that the notes are not detailed but it’s very clear he’s constantly going back and forth between describing exactly what’s happening in the parade — like which banners are being carried by different groups in the parade — and comparing that to what would be happening in France on a similar occasion, and then in the very next sentence of his notes he’s talking about big philosophical things, not just this thing he’s seeing. 

 

I tried a metaphor to describe this — my co-authors others never thought this metaphor worked — but I used the following metaphor. I’m going to try it again, because I still think it’s a good metaphor. Do you know what a scrim is? A scrim is a semi-transparent screen that drops in a play. So you’re watching a play and the scrim comes down, which is a screen that is gauze or something like gauze. You can see through it. But on the other hand, if the light is shining just right, you don’t see through it. You see what’s painted on the scrim.  A good producer or a good director will allow you to see two things at once, you’re seeing whatever is happening in the background, and you’re also seeing what’s being shown onto the screen. And so I thought of what he was doing there as if it were being shown on the scrim we’re seeing. Him describing what we’re seeing there, the flags coming by and the bystanders walking to this 4th of July parade or walking in the parade, but then instantly we’re also coming back and seeing on the scrim, you know, American democracy and how that compares to French life. 

 

We’re describing in our paper the fact that both Tocqueville and Darwin seemed simultaneously to be worried very much about the facts and the bigger picture. Of this particular lizard, or, you know, where exactly the fossil is. You know corals are on the reef and and at the same time, you’re seeing that against this much bigger set of questions about what’s the meaning of life? Or how did life begin? Or how do you make democracy work? Those sorts of things. Now, I want to be careful. I don’t want to put myself in the same category as Tocqueville or Darwin. But I pride myself on trying to do that in my own work, trying to worry about getting the details exactly right. About, you know, whether we’re equal or not equal or any of the millions of specific details of my work. But I also try to see that against the backdrop of a larger set of questions. And I kind of pride myself on that now. Did I learn that from Tocqueville and Darwin? Not exactly — because I had not, until we did this essay, really studied Tocqueville or Darwin in detail. But I think I probably recognized myself in them. Because theirs is an approach I’ve aspired to. 

 

Interview was edited for length and clarity.