Comparing The First AI Revolution And The Legacies Of Political Behaviorism

The First AI Revolution and the Legacies of Political Behaviorism
During the Second World War, political science in the United States came into its own as the study of order. This meant that the study of politics was less textual and canonical, leaving behind its philosophical and legal-historical orientation, and instead was put in service of the state to understand political behaviour and social cohesion. This project even drew in many of the European émigrés such Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and other political refugees who proverbially ‘had to pay the rent’ and spent their war time activities seeking to extend and model personality, propaganda, and the influence of information exchange. This project borrowed significantly from psychology and organizational economics, but it was also influenced by nascent behaviourism.

F. Skinner, reduced animal behaviour to the simple set of associations between an action and its subsequent reward or punishment. This approach was considered ‘historical’ insofar that one could apply an empirical statistical analysis to predict the future as a function of the past. Here only directly observable behaviours could provide a valid basis for scientific study; in this respect the intentions behind those behaviours were difficult, if not impossible to assess, so attempts to draw conclusions one way or other, to speculate, was insupportable and therefore to be avoided. With its success, there were spillover effects for other disciplines, and became the foundation of what Robert Dahl called the “behavioural revolution” in the social sciences. Herein, the behaviourial axiom was that human behaviour is determined by environmental or cultural forces without reference to specific mental functions or