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To the Editor:

In his review of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences [October 1968], Professor Ben B. Seligman devotes four sentences to a comment on my article in the encyclopedia. Since there is something incorrect in each of the four sentences, perhaps the record ought to be set straight.

Professor Seligman first refers to the term behavioral science “as a substitute for ‘social science.’” Leaving aside his use of the singular (and my article notes this as an important difference), Professor Seligman could have learned from the very first sentences of the article that the terms are by no means synonymous. In his second sentence he calls me “a leading ‘behaviorist,’” without seeming to appreciate the great difference between Watsonian behaviorism and the current meaning of the term, the behavioral sciences (also mentioned in my article). In the third sentence he again misuses the term and suggests that the Ford Foundation made “huge grants” conditional on its use, whereas the Foundation (for which I administered the Behavioral Sciences Program) made many non-huge grants and never conditioned any grant in this way. Finally, in his fourth sentence, Professor Seligman again makes the Watsonian error, and apparently not having read page 42 of the article, states that the Foundation's “approach” was “applied to the whole range of the social sciences.”

I don't want to suggest that these are terribly momentous matters, but one would hope that a reviewer would give better evidence of having read if not pondered the article reviewed, rather than ride his own prejudices. More importantly, if Professor Seligman's ratio of inaccurate statements to sentences is as high in the rest of his review, he has done both the encyclopedia and your readers a disservice.

Bernard Berelson
President, The Population Council
New York City

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To the Editor:

Mr. Seligman is entitled to his view that he prefers a more “humanistic” to a more “scientific” approach to the social sciences . . . although I do not find his discussion of this important problem over-subtle. But he is not entitled to carelessness to the point of incompetence. Mr. Seligman says the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences “has no counterpart to the two massive introductions” of the older Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. That may be true, but if he had read the introduction in the new encyclopedia, he would not have questioned the selection of which living writers are included and which excluded from the biographies. On p. xxv of this introduction, the editor describes the difficulties of including still-living “greats” and sets forth the “1890 rule.” Mr. Seligman might have quarreled with that rule, but certainly a careful reviewer would at least have noticed it. Another item: Mr. Seligman writes that “The entry on Malthus says nothing of Malthus's theory of gluts. . . .” Yet the biography of Malthus (Volume 9, page 549) states: “Although Malthus's fame in the nineteenth century was based squarely on his theory of population, his modern reputation with economists rests rather on his prescient opposition to the Ricardian doctrine of the impossibility of ‘general gluts.’” The rest of the paragraph following this sentence (some fourteen lines), continues on Malthus, Keynes, and “gluts.”

There was a time when academic social scientists read COMMENTARY'S critiques of their work with respect. But who would care to waste his time nowadays, when Mr. Seligman asks for attention?

Bernard Barber
Department of Sociology
Barnard College
New York City

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Mr. Seligman writes:

One of the more observable attributes of behavioralists is their pedanticism. The distinction Mr. Berelson makes between social science and behavioralism is a case in point. In his encyclopedia article he includes among the former anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology. For the behavioral rubric he adds aspects of biology, geography, psychiatry, and the law. Well, to a social scientist who examines human affairs in the round, who refuses to let his perspective be circumscribed by predetermined boundaries, the latter are quite important and need to command his attention, just as history should command his attention (my historian friends tell me, and perhaps with good reason, that they prefer to be classified with the humanities). Mr. Berelson's distinction is useless; worse yet, it is downright harmful. If one is to study man in his situation, not as a subject for somebody's microscope, the terms social science and behavioral science are, to all intents and purposes, synonymous.

The origin of “behavioral” is described by Professor J. G. Miller in an article he contributed to The State of the Social Sciences (edited by L. D. White): “About 1949 a group of scientists at the University of Chicago, some of whom have now moved to the University of Michigan, began to consider whether a sufficient body of facts exists to justify developing an empirically testable general theory of behavior. To refer to the biological and social fields involved, we coined the term ‘behavioral sciences.’ We adopted this phrase, first, because its neutral character made it acceptable to both social and biological scientists, and second, because we foresaw a possibility of someday seeking to obtain financial support from persons Who might confound social science with socialism” (emphasis added). This paragraph was followed by a citation of Senator Fulbright's assurance to the Congress in 1946 that the National Science Foundation would not identify social science with “politics, socialism, or some form of social philosophy.” What price scientific neutrality!

Of course, Berelson is a leading behavioralist. If the label came out as behaviorist, I was not suggesting that he is a psychologist. I know his work quite well, including that compendium, Human Behavior: An Inventory of Scientific Findings, which he co-authored in 1964. If one wanted a good illustration of the philosophic filiation between behaviorists and behavioralists he could do no better than to consult that volume. Both are concerned only with the observable in the fatuous belief that quantifying man and his behavior tells us something deeply significant. It is this intellectual fad against which I wrote and against which many of our younger social scientists are now rebelling. It is high time Berelson and his colleagues awoke to the real state of the world.

It is good to know that the Ford Foundation made small grants; it would be good to know also how many grants—large or small—were made to institutionalist economists or phenomenological philosophers. Berelson's page 42 in his encyclopedia article tells us that the “key event” that gave impetus to the spread of the word “behavioral” was “the development of a Ford Foundation program in this field.” The “program areas,” he says, affected political science, economics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Is this not the “whole range of the social sciences”? Was there some other social science to which Ford failed to pay attention?

My review was really an invitation to readers to see for themselves. No doubt there are some who would feel comfortable with the dominant positivist, behaviorist, behavioralist theme that pervades virtually every page of the encyclopedia. But why are these scientists so defensive? Are they beginning at long last to suspect that theirs is not the last word in human wisdom? Or is it that the decline in foundation grants has taken some of the arrogance out of their starch? They take criticism like a person with exposed nerve ends that have been scratched, crying out in agony that they have been misunderstood. So it is with all pedants.

Mr. Barber's anger, which leads him to search for equally tiny hooks from which to display his distemper, is another matter. Had my original article been printed in its entirety, I'm sure he would have become even more disturbed. Unfortunately, space limits necessitated that my piece be sharply cut. There are many more strange things in the Encyclopedia than those on which I commented in print.

The publisher's decision to omit any discussion comparable to the two long introductions in the older social-science encyclopedia hinged on his discovery that there were fewer thumb marks on the average on those pages than elsewhere in the one library set he had examined. Even Mr. Barber will agree that counting dirty fingerprints is hardly a scientific procedure; most positivists will concede that it is a poor measure of reader behavior. It seems to me that something was lost in deciding to forego the introductions. Alvin Johnson, who edited the 1930's set and has been a sometime adviser to the present one, once remarked that such lead articles would have been quite useful. They would have at least highlighted the editors' conception of the state of the social sciences; in their absence one has to distill that state from the entries themselves. Having done so, I conclude that contemporary social scientists are like a bunch of birdwatchers trying to measure flight patterns from the incidence of treehopping. . . .

For the gaffe on Malthus I offer a mea culpa under extenuating circumstances. The dozen lines on gluts, out of a total of 340 lines in the article (or 3.5 per cent to be scientific about it), are buried in a mass of italicized bibliographic citations, with the remainder (96.5 per cent), all on population theory. This suggests that my characterization of the author's attitude toward Malthus is not far off the mark. Mr. Barber may impugn my eyesight (after 17 volumes, spots do appear in one's vision), but I do love my Malthus. . . .

The age rule to which Mr. Barber refers is a stupid one. The consequent exclusion of a Friedrich Hayek and a Joan Robinson underscores its stupidity; anyone who cares about developments in economic thought knows how important they have been to the advancement of the field. Or consider the omission of entries on Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons, to take two examples from Mr. Barber's own discipline. My point is that impact and influence would have been a more reliable guide than an arbitrary year of birth. . . .

No doubt, assembling an encyclopedia is a difficult task. Often the useful and the useless are to be found side by side. While there are many good items in the Encyclopedia (and my review pointed to them) there are others that can be described only as deplorable. . . . Mr. Barber's snide comments remind me of the ancient Chinese attitude toward debate: He who strikes the first physical blow admits that he has lost. He may not wish to read COMMENTARY any longer, but then he will have performed surgery on his nose to punish his physiognomy.

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