OTHER: Social Research to Test Ideas: Selected Writings of Samuel A. Stouffer. Samuel A. Stouffer. Introduction by Paul F. Lazarsfeld

Abstract

965Starting from Norbert Wiener's thesis that "society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it" (The Arman Use of Eocnran Beings, p. 16), Karl Deutsch has produced an ambitious and highly abstract work which attempts both to suggest a program for future political science research and to reformulate certain traditional philosophical political positions. Political systems, which Deutsch views as being charged with the task of steering and manipulating human behavior, must collect information about internal and external conditions, process and store it, and render decisions on the basis of it. Thus the author believes that the models of cybernetics, communication flows, and feedback processes (as developed through work with electronic guidance and communication systems) will prove to be suggestive, productive, and economical analogies for the qualitative and quantitative study of political systems.The first quarter of the book contains an interesting discussion of the nature and usefulness of analytical models in social science and brief critiques of such models as those of organism, mechanism, game theory, and the mathematical models of Rashevsky, Zipf, and others. Much of the rest of the book, however, consists of extended analogies as the author skips rapidly from machine to individual to society in order to compare phenomena (such as feedback, learning, goal-seeking, creativity, consciousness, will, integrity, autonomy, self-awareness) in one level of organization with their supposed parallels in the others. We wish the author had, instead, devoted more time to the problem of operationalizing some of his ideas, or a t least had focused on one real case for extensive analysis. Since he did not, we are left with some serious questions. Will the same model and equations be useful for relatively closed and tightly structured electronics systems produced by men to fulfill pre-set goals, and open, multi-functional, relatively loosely structured human societies? Can we ever effectively measure the messages received, contained, and recombined in the minds of rulers, officials, intelli-