Remarks on political philosophy -- Lectures on Hobbes -- Lectures on Locke -- Lectures on Hume -- Lectures on Rousseau -- Lectures on Mill -- Lectures on Marx.

To succeed, political science usually requires either prediction or contextual historical work. Both of these methods favor explanations that are narrow-scope, applying to only one or a few cases. Because of the difficulty of prediction, the main focus of political science should often be contextual historical work. These epistemological conclusions follow from the ubiquity of causal fragility, under-determination, and noise. They tell against several practices that are widespread in the discipline: wide-scope retrospective testing, such as much (...) large-n statistical work; lack of emphasis on prediction; and resources devoted to ‘pure theory’ divorced from frequent empirical application. I illustrate, via Donatella della Porta’s work on political violence, the important role that is still left for theory. I conclude by assessing the scope for political science to offer policy advice. (shrink)

This article explores the emergence of the American 'political scientist' around the turn of the twentieth century. It first recovers the network of beliefs that ordered the tradition of historico-politics -- an intellectual tradition that in the 1880s constituted a dominant field within newly professionalized American social inquiry. The article then charts the divergent responses of turn-of-the-century scholars to the declining persuasiveness of core organizing beliefs of this tradition, responses through which the earlier field split along now-familiar disciplinary divides, (...) as 'political scientists' emerged with a disciplinary identity distinct from that of 'historians'. (shrink)

A distinction between the “hard” and “soft” scientific disciplines is a modern commonplace, widely invoked to contrast the natural and the social sciences and to distribute value accordingly, where it was generally agreed that it was good to be “hard,” bad to be “soft.” I trace the emergence of the distinction to institutional and political circumstances in the United States in the second part of the twentieth century; I describe varying academic efforts to give the contrast coherent meaning; I (...) note the distinction’s uses in disciplines’ reflections on their own present and possible future status; and I document the consequential circulation of the antonym in settings where resources for science were distributed. To follow the history of the “hard–soft” distinction is to open a window on changing sensibilities about what science is, what values are attached to it, and what it is for. I conclude with speculations about more recent changes in the value-schemes implicated in the “hard” and the “soft” and about pertinent changes in the place of the “soft” human sciences in governance and production. I envisage a possible future in which the commonplace distinction might wither away. (shrink)

Methodologists in political science have advocated for causal process tracing as a way of providing evidence for causal mechanisms. Recent analyses of the method have sought to provide more rigorous accounts of how it provides such evidence. These accounts have focused on the role of process tracing for causal inference and specifically on the way it can be used with case studies for testing hypotheses. While the analyses do provide an account of such testing, they pay little attention (...) to the narrative elements of case studies. I argue that the role of narrative in case studies is not merely incidental. Narrative does cognitive work by both facilitating the consideration of alternative hypotheses and clarifying the relationship between evidence and explanation. I consider the use of process tracing in a particular case (the Fashoda Incident) in order to illustrate the role of narrative. I argue that process tracing contributes to knowledge production in ways that the current focus on inference tends to obscure. (shrink)

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, (...) the philosophy of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove. (shrink)

This innovative book examines the fundamental continuities in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 through 1834 to demonstrate his importance as a political philosopher and to recover romanticism as both ...

Full institutionalization of sociology, anthropology and political science occurred in Argentina in the late 1950s. While sociology started out as an established field having radically broken with the past of the discipline, both anthropology and political science established linkages with traditional versions of their fields. Although there were differences between them, the three disciplines evolved through a process of frequent crises, resulting mostly from military interventions at the national level. Institutionalization brought with it an expansion of (...) the labor market and the opportunities for obtaining research funds, thus generating growing professionalization. This expansion as well as the response of social scientists to repression in universities was strongly related to links with foreign foundations and international organizations. Until 1983, the dramatic history of the social sciences was marked by disappearances and exile. In recent years the three disciplines have grown and diversified. (shrink)

This edition focuses on Aron's lifelong attempt to bridge the gap between knowledge and action and to understand the dialectical relationship between history ...

Aron addresses fundamental questions about society, power, freedom, ideology, economics, and international politics.

Hume's Politics provides a comprehensive examination of David Hume's political theory, and is the first book to focus on Hume's monumental History of England as the key to his distinctly political ideas.

Case study research was once the primary methodology of research in political science. The shift to other methodologies in recent decades suggests has led to a devaluing of these approaches. This article explores six roles for case studies in the social sciences and argues that an understanding of the multiple aims of research supports a methodological pluralism that includes case study research.

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the political ideas of founding figures of West German political science by engaging with formative texts from the post-war period of neo-Aristotelian, Critical Theory, ordoliberal and catholic perspective. It is argued that these early German political scientists coincided in the diagnosis of living in a thoroughly politicized post-liberal age. They rejected the separation between empirical and normative political science and devised heterogeneous disciplinary approaches that can be classified as republican, power-realist, and (...) expertocratic. Although democracy was an important point of reference for some of them, it is not tenable, contrary to older historiography and contemporary self-image, to describe early West-German political science as a Demokratiewissenschaft in overall terms. (shrink)

The problem of social order is the question of what holds complex and diverse societies together. Today, this question has become increasingly urgent in the world. Yet our ability to ask and answer the question in a helpful way is constrained by the intellectual legacy through which the question has been handed down to us. In this impressive, erudite study, Henrik Enroth describes and analyzes how the problem of social order has shaped concept formation, theory, and normative arguments in (...) class='Hi'>political science. The book covers a broad range of influential thinkers and theories throughout the history of political science, from the early twentieth century onwards. Social order has long been a presupposition for inquiry in political science; now we face the challenge of turning it into an object of inquiry. (shrink)

Summary This article approaches post-war debates about the relationship between normative political theory and empirical political science from a French perspective. It does so by examining Raymond Aron's commentaries on a series of articles commissioned by him for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique on this theme as well as through an analysis of his wartime dialogue with the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Following a consideration of Aron's critique of contemporary approaches to (...) this issue in France, we discuss his own distinctive attempt to draw normative theory and empirical science into the same orbit by tracing the interaction of these two elements in his work from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe conceptual history of politics in post-WWII Germany is connected to the history of academic political science. From the Bundestag plenary debates both the controversies on the political science itself and the contributors of both contemporary scholars and the ‘classics’ of the understanding of politics can be studied. The digitalisation of parliamentary debates opens up new chances for conceptual research in this regard. The article studies the conceptual commitments in the use of the discipline (...) titles and actors, and looks at who is mentioned in debates, for example, political scientists in early West Germany, and political theorists, Formulae from Weber’s Politik als Beruf seem to be most frequently evoked in the Bundestag. (shrink)

Americans have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to this ongoing dialogue, thereby (...) playing a significant role in political education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American democracy. Using the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved from a focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state, through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s, up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence, yet again, in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental question about popular sovereignty: Does democracy require a people and a national democratic community, or can the requisites of democracy be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms? (shrink)

The article substantiates the possibility and necessity of the development of the political science of war in Russia as a relatively independent branch of political science. To solve this problem, a retrospective review of the emergence and development of a political component in the system of scientific knowledge about war is provided. This process was controversial in Russia. Some credible thinkers, including military scientists, denied the science of war as such. The study of war (...) as a political phenomenon was usually disregarded. Eventually, in the pre-revolutionary period, there prevailed the free-from-politics paradigm of understanding war. Such an approach had negative consequences for political elite, training of military personnel, and public consciousness, which was especially evident in the period of social disasters. During the Soviet period of history, as a result of the indoctrination of social sciences, the politicized study of war had prevailed, which also did not ensure its holistic perception and had negative consequences in the preparation and handling of military force. A comparison of the approaches of military science and social sciences shows that they study the phenomenon of war in fragments, within the framework of their method. At the same time, many valuable scientific works on philosophy, sociology, and psychology of war have been prepared. In conditions when it is generally recognized that war is a continuation of politics, the undeveloped political science of war is illogical, its absence does not provide a holistic perception of this complex phenomenon. The article concludes that nowadays Russia has the necessary prerequisites and conditions for the development of the political science of war. (shrink)

This article concerns the relevance of postfoundationalism, including the ideas of Michel Foucault, for political science. The first half of the article distinguishes three forms of postfoundationalism, all of which draw some of their inspiration from Foucault. First, the governmentality literature draws on Marxist theories of social control, and then absorbs Foucault’s focus on power/knowledge. Second, the post-Marxists combine the formal linguistics of Saussure with a focus on hegemonic discourses. Third, some social humanists infuse Foucauldian themes into the (...) New Left’s focus on culture, agency and resistance. The second half of the article then describes a research program that may bring together these varieties of postfoundationalism. This research program includes aggregate concepts that overtly allow for the constitutive role of meanings in social life and the contingent nature of these meanings. The concepts are: situated agency, practice and power. A postfoundational research program also needs concepts that demarcate a historicist form of explanation, that is, concepts such as narrative, tradition and dilemma. Finally, this research program contains specific empirical focuses to link these aggregate and explanatory concepts back to governmentality, post-Marxism and social humanism. (shrink)

Historically, American political science has rarely engaged popular culture as a central topic of study, despite the domain’s outsized influence in American community life. This article argues that this marginalization is, in part, the by-product of long-standing disciplinary debates over the inadequate political development of the American public. To develop this argument, the article first surveys the work of early political scientists, such as John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, to show that their reformist ambitions largely precluded (...) discussion of mundane activities of social life such as popular culture. It then turns to Harold Lasswell, who produced some of the first investigations of popular culture in American political science. Ironically, however, his work – and the work of those who adapted similar ways of speaking about popular culture after him – only reinforced skepticisms concerning the American public. It has thus helped keep the topic on the margins of disciplinary discourse. (shrink)

From Machiavelli, Luther and Calvin to Spinoza, the Levellers and Rousseau, the author takes readers through the formation of the modern state all the way to the Age of Enlightenment, revealing the ideas of liberty, equality, human rights ...

This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the (...) ideals of the Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled. (shrink)

The Politica as a specific genre of academic reflection on civil life developed from the later sixteenth century and flourished until at least the mid-seventeenth century, especially at universities in the Holy Roman Empire and where their influence was felt, as in the Dutch Republic. Theologians, Philosophers, Jurists, and Medical Doctors contributed books. Aside from few and only with difficulty accessible surveys, and a few individual well-researched authors, research into this genre remains a task for the future. This survey collects (...) contributions from a number of senior and younger researchers and their various approaches and arguments. In particular, by providing examples of the heterogeneity of current research, it serves as an introduction to the genre and to a more complete assessment of the development of Early Modern political thought. The volume also stresses the importance of this genre for several transformations of political thought in the Early Modern Age. (shrink)

Like many disciplines, the study of political philosophy has, to a large extent, been the study of modern western political philosophy, particularly liberalism, utilitarianism, and socialism. As a consequence, the study of comparative political philosophy is still in its infancy. The contributors to this volume move beyond this Eurocentric bias to facilitate and exchange perspectives originating in European, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic communities. They document the responses to the perilous transition from "tradition" to "modernity" and address the (...) commonality of human distress which characterizes such momentous transition. With respect to the central theme of transition, Comparative Political Philosophy is unusual in its coverage of so many eminent political philosophers--Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Hegel, Marx, Confucius, Mao Zedong, Kautilya, Gandhi, Farabi, and Khomeini. The book will be of interest to those interested in political theory, intellectual history, philosophy, as well as the general disciplines of political science, history, and area studies. "The book should appeal to readers across the disciplinary boundaries.". (shrink)

Annotation. Examining the emergence of modernity within the philosophical and political debates of the sixteenth century, Religion and the Rise of Modernity resumes the analysis of the "great confusion" introduced in Volume IV of History of Political Ideas. Encompassing a vast range of events ignited by Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, this period is one of controversy, revolution, and partiality. Despite the era's fragmentation and complexity, Voegelin's insightful analysis clarifies its significance and suggests the lines of change converging at (...) a point in the future: the medieval Christian understanding of a divinely created closed cosmos was being replaced by a distinctly modern form of human consciousness that posits man as the proper origin of meaning in the universe. Analyzing the most significant features of the great confusion, Voegelin examines a vast range of thought and issues of the age. From the more obvious thinkers to those less frequently studied, this volume features such figures as Calvin, Althusius, Hooker, Bracciolini, Savonarola, Copernicus, Tycho de Brahe, and Giordano Bruno. Devoting a considerable amount of attention to Jean Bodin, Voegelin presents him as a prophet of a new, true religion amid the civilizational disorder of the post-Christian era. Focusing on such traditional themes as monarchy, just war theory, and the philosophy of law, this volume also investigates issues within astrology, cosmology, and mathematics. Religion and the Rise of Modernity is a valuable work of scholarship not only because of its treatment of individual thinkers and doctrines influential in the sixteenth century and beyond but also because of its close examination of those experiences that formed the modern outlook. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 21 I argue that Leo Strauss’s critique of political science has been deeply misunderstood. Moreover, once the true nature of Strauss’s critique is clarified, I argue that he does not provide a viable alternative to contemporary political science. Instead, his philosophy has mostly justified a “great books” approach to the study of politics, which has contributed to the self-isolation of political theory from the rest of political science. Political (...) theorists should seek new ways forward that more substantively engage the concerns of the mainstream of the discipline. (shrink)

As one reads the classic works of political philosophy one is limited to books written by male authors. When reading interpretations of these authors it seems that the male philosophers were only concerned with the male citizen. Arlene Saxonhouse argues that these classic authors, from Plato to Machiavelli, while they praised the world of male public action, also recognized that the public world was not the totality of human existence. These authors, Saxonhouse says, saw that a private sphere which (...) included women existed, and that that sphere set limits upon and defined the possibilities of the public world. She argues further that the authors did not ignore the female, rather it is the inadequacies of modern scholarship that have made them appear to have done so. This volume shows how women have been an integral part of political philosophers' vision of the world, not a scattered side show in certain philosophical works. (shrink)

Histories of science in India are revisitations of the colonial question. Science is ideology to be unraveled and exposed—as modernity and progress making or violence and oppression making—depending on where you stand on the interpretive spectrum. It has been seen as ideologically driven practice, as a mode of knowledge production whose history is inseparable from the social and political uses to which it is tethered. In the colonial as well as the postcolonial context, science and (...) technology have been seen as the “ideology of empire,” “tools of empire,” “tentacles of progress,” and “reasons of state.” Yet science and technology are practices and bodies of knowledge that inhabitants of the subcontinent have engaged with enthusiasm, that they have used to invent themselves in their global, national, and individual lives. We know remarkably little about the histories of these complex engagements. A departure from current historiographical preoccupations is called for to map and explain the lives, institutions, practices, and stories of science on the subcontinent as they connect with, and where they break away from, the world at large. (shrink)

This groundbreaking volume casts light on the long shadow of naturalistic monism in modern thought and culture. When monism's philosophical proposition - the unity of all matter and thought in a single, universal substance - fused with scientific empiricism and Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, it led to the formation of a powerful worldview articulated in the work of figures such as Ernst Haeckel. The compelling essays collected here, written by leading international scholars, investigate the articulation of monism in (...) class='Hi'>science, philosophy, and religion and its impact on a range of social movements, from socialism and early feminism to imperialism and eugenics. The result is a broad and comprehensive chronological, disciplinary, and geographic map of a century of monism, as well as a bellwether for innovative new directions in the interdisciplinary study of science, religion, philosophy, and culture. (shrink)