| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Ernst Haas Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Your father was a scientist. You chose social science. What do you think is the difference between being a social scientist and being a scientist? Is there a comparison there worth talking about?
Oh, there's a comparison worth talking about, but it's a comparison which social scientists find, on the whole, depressing. They tend to compare themselves to the extremely successful sciences, particularly physics. To a lesser degree, biology; but that's going to change pretty soon, I think. Biology is going to become the exemplar against which the social sciences are going to be found to be wanting.
There has been for the last fifty years, roughly, a dominant trend in most social sciences to try to work as closely to what social scientists understand natural scientists to be about. To emulate them. The emulation is, at best, fragmentarily successful. Usually it's unsuccessful, which causes a great deal of soul searching among social scientists, "What are we doing wrong? How come we're not as successful as natural scientists?" You want me to go on with this?
Please, go ahead.
To which my response has become -- it wasn't always this -- my response has become that the comparison is very unfair. That the natural sciences are a great deal easier to be successful in than the social sciences.
And why is that?
There are many reasons, but the simplest reason is this: in the social sciences, the things we study, that is to say, human beings, don't stand still, they talk back to the people who study them. Molecules don't talk back. Cells don't talk back.
And they also are influenced by what you write.
They are sometimes.
You chose social science, and then, in particular, you chose political science. What is it about politics that makes it a unique phenomenon worthy of special study?
Again, I don't want to give a general answer, because I don't think there is any. But my personal answer is that politics, among the social sciences, to me, initially, was more attractive because it allowed for the study of how people choose to change things. It's not precluded in sociology, you do that in sociology, too. But most sociologists don't do that. They study why things are the way they are. Okay, that's fine. That has to be done. Political scientists do that, too. But my preference was to study things as they are, trying to understand why it is that they are the way they are as a step toward understanding how they might be changed.
Within political science, you chose international relations. Is the reason for that obvious given what we've already discussed?
No, it isn't obvious. Because the same general argument that I've made so far could be applied to other parts of political science. I chose international relations, I think, because of personal background and personal involvement. If it hadn't been for my earlier life experiences, I probably would not have chosen international relations.
And interestingly enough, you chose to think about these issues as opposed to becoming active in politics about those issues. Can you explain that choice?
Sure. I love the ivory tower. And I don't have too much use for the real world. I experienced the real world in the army, and I said, "Well, that's the way it is. Okay, I survived, fine, I did pretty well. That doesn't mean I want to repeat it. I would like to find myself a niche in which I would not have to do the kinds of things people in the real world have to do." Specifically, I didn't want to have to find a line of business where I had to compete with other businessmen in the same field. That didn't attract me in the least. And I didn't want to go into government service because that meant taking orders from others, which I didn't feel like doing either, so that left academia.
So what does it take to do political science?
What does it take to do political science?
Skills, virtues? I mean, somebody wants to do it. They'd better be alert to the fact that they have to ...
Well, I don't think that the skills and virtues necessary for political science are different from other social sciences.
Okay. So what are they, then?
First of all, the ability to delay gratification. You don't get rewarded immediately for what you do. It requires the ability to achieve a certain amount of emotional independence from what other people think of you. Or, in other words, in contemporary jargon, enough self-esteem so that you don't care too much what other people think of you. It requires unusual powers of concentration, else you don't get the work done. And it involves a sense of commitment to the life of the mind. If you haven't got that, you're going to be unhappy in the profession.
In your work, your students and your relationship to them, have been very important to you. I should note here that thirty-three published dissertations have resulted from your collaboration with graduate students, and twenty-three unpublished, which were central to the careers of the writer. How have the students affected your work and what did you get out of those relationships?
Well, that, of course, varied enormously from encounter to encounter and from student to student. Under the best of circumstances, we became close friends. This happened enough to make me feel very, very good about those relationships. In maybe 15 percent, 20 percent of these cases, the dissertations were good enough that they actually taught me something I didn't know before. Because this is not normally the case. You may pick up a little bit here and a little bit there, but it isn't very significant. Around 15 percent, 20 percent of the cases, I would say, I picked up something ... I learned something significant. Which is not bad, considering this business. And those are the good, positive things of which I'm proud and terribly pleased with.
There's another benefit, which I want to make explicit, which is somewhat more instrumental in character. One of the responsibilities of a trainer of graduate students is not just to make as good an academic out of them as you can, but also to find them a job. The more students you train, the better they are, the better the jobs are that they're going to get placed in, the more extensive your network for placing the next generation of students.
So, it's a complex system ...
It is a complex system.
... that you wind up creating.
Right.
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