George Edward Gordon Catlin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Although a native of England, George Edward Gordon Catlin (1896–1979) was a principal contributor to the transformation of American political science that took place during the 1920s.

At the beginning of World War I (1914–1918), Catlin left New College, Oxford, to join the London Rifle Brigade and serve in France. After his return to Oxford, his prize essay on Thomas Hobbes was published as a book in 1922. Although he was offered opportunities to remain in England, he chose, in 1924, to complete his graduate work in the United States at Cornell University, where he was instrumental in creating the political science department and was also offered a faculty position. A short time later, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Council invited him to go to New York City and study the issue of prohibition. He eventually published Liquor Control in 1931, a book that contributed to the movement to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. While conducting this research, he met Charles E. Merriam and Harold Dwight Lass well, prominent members of the Chicago school of political science. He subsequently became deeply involved with many American political scientists who were dedicated to propagating a new science of politics and whose perspective was linked to a commitment to practical application, which Catlin believed had been lacking in the English curriculum and its devotion to history and the traditional study of the state.

What in part attracted Catlin to the American scene was the growing emphasis on empirical research as well as the normative theory of democratic pluralism, which was becoming a central dimension of political science. His 1927 book, The Science and Method of Politics, advanced a conception of a rigorous science of politics, which, although ultimately dedicated to serving practical concerns, should distinguish between factual and ethical claims. It was also one of the first works to urge the application of economic theory to the analysis of political behavior. In 1930, Catlin published A Study of the Principles of Politics, which again emphasized the need to turn away from typical studies of political philosophy and the humanities and toward the development of a naturalistic interdisciplinary science of society. He continued, however, to argue—for example, in Systematic Politics (1962) and Political and Sociological Theory and Its Applications (1964)—that such a science should be devoted to the utilitarian goal of social change.

Catlin left Cornell to return to England in 1935, but he subsequently was a visitor at many colleges in the United States and elsewhere, including two years in Canada at McGill University. He published many scholarly articles and political essays and more than fifteen books, but much of his later life was devoted to practical politics and to causes such as peace and world government, the Atlantic community, the European market, and Indian independence. He was both a candidate for the Lab our party in England and an adviser to Wendell Wilkie during the 1940 election in the United States. Catlin was knighted in 1970, and in 1972 he published his autobiography, For God’s Sake, Go!

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