Call an Umpire, Quick!

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Michael Hirschorn berates Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth for "simply not playing by political science rules." Quick--call an umpire!

Schell's book was important precisely because it did not accept the terms of debate set by political scientists. Why should we, after all? Political science is merely one way of looking at the world. If Schell wanted to write a book purely to win the faculty of the Kennedy School to his side, then I suppose his failure to adopt their "rules" would be a rhetorical weakness. But it's clear Schell hoped to shift the ground of argument entirely to an ethical and moral plane, from which the "political science rules" which Hirschorn appears to hold sacrosanct appear unnatural, if not murderous. The structure of his book was to "simply say things are awful and then prescribe the best of all possible worlds," as Hirschorn puts it, but to say that things are intolerable and then point to the only tenable solution. Politics no doubt is the art of the possible, and that may be all that interests Hirschorn: Schell aimed to change what people imagined to be possible--first by showing that the extinction of mankind is an imminent possibility, then by trying to persuade people that an end to the arms race must be made a possibility.

This kind of argument, of course, isn't political science at all--it's good, old-fashioned editorial journalism. We turn to the practitioners of this dying art when the political scientists, office-holders, and bureaucrats who run our society become myopic and need the aid of minds less mired in the supposed "possible." Hirschorn himself could assume this role, if he'd lift his nose from the rulebooks. Scott A. Rosenberg '81