Samuel Beer on Marxism (or Marxism on Samuel Adams Beer?)

["Michael Hoover" <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

below is from longer piece by sam beer
lamenting declining use of history in
u.s. political science...

beer was long-time harvard poli sci
prof, pretty influential within
discipline, particularly 1960s book
on british politics he mentions at
end of excerpt...

an institutionalist, beer has argued
that elected legislatures principally
serve legitimation (shades of habermas)
rather than representation function
& (contra anthony downs' 'rational
choice' theory of political democracy)
that significant differences exist
between parties (ie, dems & reps
in u.s.)... additionally, his
analysis of role & influence of
pressure groups in shaping
contemporary public agenda was
among initial polic sci efforts...

politically liberal, beer touts
'the west's' commitment to 'free
inquiry' in contrast to communist/
fascist 'totalitarianism' (jfk
was going to appoint him
ambassador to uruguay, lbj picked
someone else after kennedy's
assassination)...

methodologically, beer's work is
marked by attempt to synthesize
historicism & systems theory
associated with talcott
parsons... michael hoover

Beer:
In contrast with a strictly behavioristic approach,a
more forbidding and  also  more instructive denial of
a causal role for thinking comes in the Marxist
package. ( For a quick summary of my critique of
Marxism, you can look at the introduction to the
edition of The Communist Manifesto  which I did for
The Crofts Classics in 1955.)Here ideas have great
immediate power as ideology ,which, however, is  only
a "reflection" or "echo" of economic structure which
alone causes change from age to age according to the
laws of its objective development revealed in Marxist
theory.While  Marxism can can be seen as a variety of
behavioralism, it surely does not exclude the study of
history. On the contrary, its conception of how the
"laws" of social behavior will change from stage to
stage, e.g.feudalism to capitalism, is a formidable
and instructive challenge to the social scientist
blinkered by his parochial concern with only the data
of here and now . Indeed, this eye-opening experience
may lead the neophyte in social science to explore how
 those powerful  ruling ideas of an age may well have
a non-Marxian origin, conceivably as themselves the
dynamic force in development, as presumed in the
Hegelian scheme which Marx turned upside down. At the
same time, the Marxian emphasis on structure,the
compulsions of the situation, great or small, is an
indispensable supplement to the purely
legal-constitutional approach of some political
science. .It certainly encouraged me, as in those
articles you mention, but even more in my books, to
look for the situational as well as intentional, the
structural as well as cultural  aspects of process. I
worked up what I called a cultural/structural method,
deployed in my Modern British Politics ,especially,
pp. 403-409 on "Latent Function and Operative Ideal"
and "The Laws of Political Concentration" and  Britain
Against Itself,   Introduction,pp.3-5,  and  Ch. IV,
pp.107-110.".

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