If individual university disciplines are directly subsidized by the state or business enterprise and continue to have and expand contractual relationships with these sources of funds, the result is nearly certain. Not only will the subjects so favored have a distorted growth in response to the needs of the system but those involved with tend to identify themselves increasingly with the goals of the contracting agencies and enterprises.

VERNON objects, and many political scientists would probably agree, that government grants carry a "very broad, very loose mandate." "When the government gives someone funds for economic development research." Vernon said, "there are no instructions. It helps us to understand the development process, and they just get the output" of the research.

But Vernon admits that "if they thought we would produce an attack on the U.S. government, the likelihood of our getting funds would be reduced."

At present, the most important point is that the government and the researcher were interested in the same problem, defined in the same way: if the researcher were interested in another problem, or a different formulation of the problem, he would not have received the funds. This government research grant would be for the purpose of "understanding the development process." not for determining whether it should be initiated, under what conditions, or by which government. Essentially the development problem is transformed into a technical question with the underlying issues obscured or taken for granted.

The hidden political questions in social science research can also be seen by considering advisory work performed for the government. Vernon feels that most consultants with government agencies lends the adviser an opportunity to press for "new initiatives, bright departures" in established policies. A political scientist who gave advice on counter insurgency warfare or political development in Vietnam. for example, would probably justify his activity by saying that he was merely offering technical assistance: the question of whether the policy was appropriate was irrelevant to his own technical, non-ideological role. By saying nothing about the purposes of counter-insurgency warfare, he has been "politically neutral."

Again it is important to note that the political scientist and the government are interested in the same problem, formulated in the same way. The social scientist's research has been designed in such a way that he can easily slip into an advisory role for the government. Although his own research has been "value-free," it actually depends on assumptions about policy which the government shares but makes explicit. By taking an established point of view as a frame of reference for his work, the political scientist can pursue what seem to be neutral, objective studies.

IT IS possible to imagine a prevailing viewpoint which would expose the basic value judgments implicit in the decision to do counter-insurgency research. In Gulliver's Troubles, for example, Stanley Hoffman discusses a possible international system which would require

not only the sharpest possible reduction of interstate violence, but also a gradual withdrawal of one state from the manipulation of another's domestic policy. A world in which some leading powers tried to prevent revolutions in other societies and others tried to forwent them would be exposed to all the dangers that revolutionary wars create even in today's wold.... Universal involvement in revolutions would make moderation impossible.

In such an atmosphere, research on counter-insurgency warfare would contradict the general consensus, and its purposes would be critically examined.

In an essay called "Common Sense and Theories of International Relations," Hans J. Morgenthau has examined both the tendency of political scientists to refrain from considering the basic policy questions about their research fields, and the practical, political effects of their "neutral" research:

I Current theories of international relations operate within a social context in which truth, superstition, and different conceptions of ends and means struggle for influence upon thought and action. It is not by accident that they are lavishly supported by foundations, highly prized by academic institutions, and influential at least at the margins of governmental action. For they perform two important ideological functions, one for themselves, the other for the official doctrines of international relations.

The contemporary theories of international relations provide a respectable shield behind which members of the academic community may engage in non-controversial theoretical pursuits. International relations in our period of history are by their very nature controversial. They require decisions concerning the purposes of the nation and affecting its chances for physical survival. By leading with the subject matter but not with the issues underlying these decisions without actually doing so....

Although contemporary theories of international relations are by and large neutral with regard to the great controversies over truth and superstition and different national ends and means, they inevitably tend to support the status quo, that is, the official doctrine.... By saying nothing against it,

Social studies can be viewed as neutral about values and purposes if the observer stays within the value framework in which the research is conducted. Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man discusses the character of social science which does not question the basic values underpinning its investigations:

If the given form of society is and remains the ultimate frame of reference for theory and practice, there is nothing wrong with this sort of [social science].