The policy sciences may be conceived as knowledge of the policy process and of the relevance of knowledge in the process. Professional careers in the theoretical branches of policy analysis have been typically academic and include professors of political science, jurisprudence, political economy, and public administration. One novelty of recent decades has been the prodigious multiplication of policy careers having little direct contact with traditional policy theory, though grounded in some specialized knowledge of the physical, biological, or cultural sciences. New specialties have arisen that affect the procedures of the policy making process itself, such as the handling of computerized information.Whatever their origin policy scientists appear to be converging toward a distinctive outlook. Contextuality calls for a cognitive map of the whole social process in reference to which each specific activity is considered. Problem orientation includes five intellectual tasks: goal clarification; trend description; analysis of conditions; projection of future developments; invention, evaluation and selection of alternatives. There is also a distinctive synthesis of technique, guided by principles of content and procedure.A distinctive identity image is evolving in which the role of the mediator-integrator among men of knowledge and between knowledge and action is becoming more explicit.Policy science careers have come into existence with little fanfare and little awareness of an identity in common or of a distinctive outlook or synthesis of skills. We are, somewhat belatedly, engaged in appraising these developments and proposing future lines of growth. Hence our current interest in the emerging conception of the policy sciences. As a working formula I describe the policy sciences as concerned with two separable though entwined frames of reference: knowledge of the policy process; knowledge in the process.1

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The garrison state is a "developmental construct" about the future course of worldpolitics, whose function is to stimulate the individual specialist to clarify for himself his expectations about the future as a guide to the timing of scientific work. The trend of the time is away from the dominance of the specialist on bargaining, who is the businessman, and toward the supremacy of the specialist on violence, the soldier. Methods: It is probable that the ruling elite of the garrison state will acquire most of the skills that we have come to accept as part of modern civilian management. Particularly prominent will be skill in the manipulation of symbols in the interest of morale and public relations. Unemployment will be "psychologically" abolished. Internal violence will be directed principally against unskilled manual workers and counterelite elements who have come under suspicion. Incomes will be somewhat equalized in the interest of maintaining morale under modern conditions of socialized danger. The practice will be to recruit the elite according to ability (in periods of crisis); authority will be dictatorial, governmentalized, centralized, integrated. Value distribution: The power pyramid will be steep, but the distribution of safety will be equalized (the socialization of danger under modern conditions of aerial warfare). The income and respect pyramids will be between the other two-each pyramid flattened at the top, bulged out in the upper-middle and lower-middle zones. Value produiction: The elites will seek to hold in check the utilization of the productive potentialities of modern science and engineering for nonmilitary consumption goods. The rate of production will be regularized. Production will be affected by the tendencies toward rigidity in a military state, but these effects will be largely neutralized by the skill groups of science and technology.

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My intention is to consider political science as a discipline and as a profession in relation to the impact of the physical and biological sciences and of engineering upon the life of man. I propose to inquire into the possible reconciliation of man's mastery over Nature with freedom, the overriding goal of policy in our body politic.In the interest of concreteness I shall have something to say about past and potential applications of science in three areas: armament, production, and evolution.It is trite to acknowledge that for years we have lived in the afterglow of a mushroom cloud and in the midst of an arms race of unprecedented gravity. Here I shall support a proposition that may at first evoke some incredulous exclamations. The proposition is that our intellectual tools have been sufficiently sharp to enable political scientists to make a largely correct appraisal of the consequences of unconventional weapons for world politics.