For the management of social policy has come to include the methods of funding research and of persuading the political managers of social policy which Merriam, more than any other single figure of his generation, came to master. The entrepreneurial Merriam domi nates my account, not because it is the only aspect of his career worth exploring, but because it seemed to me the crucial aspect, perhaps the only one capable of defining his real significance, for his times as well as for ours. There is, in his Socratic fragments, the material a Plato could shape into the system he himself never actually defined:Īnd I would not wish even to imply that it could not or should not be done, only that I am no Plato. An intellectual history based upon the Merriam corpus itself seemed to me to threaten to distort him into a Thorstein Veblen or Frederick Jackson Turner by giving his own sense of political science, as I understood it, a methodological precision he himself never managed to give it. Such a statement makes it seem easier to describe than it is, and touches on dilemmas raised by many of the decisions which have gone into the structuring of what I suppose can only loosely be called a biography.
Merriam was an academic entrepreneur whose extraordinary sen sitivities to the ideas of his times were combined with a willingness to govern the resources available for the development of those ideas to produce a phenomenon rare even in its day: a genuine school of thought. White, and Quincy Wright, to name only a few of the figures in the peak generation, as well as in an equally stellar list of students who have managed the profession for the last four decades. His own bibliography is extensive but his reputation as a methodological innovator cannot be made to rest on it very securely, any more than it did during the active phases of his career.1 Readers searching for clearer evidences of a school of thought developing in the political science of the 1920s and ’30s can find what they want in the writings of Harold Gosnell, V. No one work of his attests to this as effectively as do the generations of students he helped train at the University of Chicago. Merriam is generally acknowledged to be the father of the behavioral movement in political science. Hoover: Recent Social Trends Planning and the New Deal The Purposes of Planning Planning the End 14.Įd Merriam of Iowa An Education for Politics Harper’s University The Scholar in Politics The Shock of War The Aftermath An Organization for Social Research The University and the Chicago School Civic Education Social Studies and Public Education The Social Sciences and Mr.
To my parents, Anne and Aaron Karl, for sharing with their children their love and their respect for one another, their commitment to the future Arthur Mann Advisory Editor in American History Merriam’s New Aspects o f Politics, published by the University of Chicago Press. Among his writings are Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal and the Foreword to the third edition (1970) of Charles E. Karl is professor of history at the University of Chicago. Published 1974 Printed in the United States of America international Standard Book Number 0*226-42516-9 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-5731īarry D. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1974 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. (P h o to : M offett S tu d io, C h ic a g o, Illinois)
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