Back to Square One: The History and Promise of the Policy Sciences

This chapter traces the progression of the policy sciences during the last half of the twentieth century. The policy sciences are characterized by a long past but a short history. For a discipline whose intellectual seeds were sown in the 1940s, the policy sciences have achieved remarkable success in altering the landscape of academic and government organizations. The articulation and subsequent practice of the policy sciences have depended on the complex interaction of academic and social influences. American pragmatic and instrumental philosophies had a profound effect on the development of the social sciences. In H. D. Lasswell initial vision, the policy sciences were explicitly problem oriented and utilized broad contextual approaches. The policy sciences, almost from their very conception, have been explicitly normative in their content and concern with human value. The evolution of policy sciences must also be partly attributed to political and social events that surrounded their development.