The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences

Chapter Five: Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics: Or What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about it

C H A P T E R F I V E Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics: Or, What’s Wrong With Political Science and What to Do about It OUR MANDATE is to engage in navel-gazing about the condition of political theory.1 I confess that I find myself uncomfortable with this charge because I think political theorists have become altogether too narcissistic over the past half-century. Increasingly, they have come to see themselves as engaged in a specialized activity distinct from the rest of political science—either a bounded subdiscipline within it or an alternative to it. Political theorists are scarcely unusual in this regard; advancing specialization has been a hallmark of most academic disciplines in recent decades. When warranted, it facilitates the accumulation of knowledge in ways that would not otherwise occur. In many physical, biomedical, and informational sciences, the benefits are visible in expanding bodies of knowledge that were scarcely conceivable a generation ago. Specialization also has proceeded apace in the human sciences, seen in the proliferation of dedicated journals, professional organizations and sub-organizations, and esoteric discourses notable for their high entry costs to the uninitiated. Here tangible advances in knowledge are less easily identified, however. In political science, even when the new subfields fly interdisciplinary banners (as with the new political economy in much American and comparative politics, the turn to social theory in international relations, or to approaches from moral philosophy in theorizing about justice), those who have not paid the entry costs would be hard-pressed to understand—let alone evaluate—the alleged contributions of the new specialized fields. 1 Originally written for the thirtieth anniversary issue of Political Theory in which all contributors were asked to address the question: “What Is Political Theory?” Vol. 30, No. 4 (August 2002), pp. 596–619. W H A T ’ S W R O N G W I T H P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E 179 The specialization that has divided political philosophy from the rest of political science has been aided and abetted by the separation of normative from empirical political theory, with political philosophers declaring a monopoly over the former while abandoning the enterprise of “positive” political theory to other political scientists. This seems to me to have been bad for both ventures. It has produced normative theory that is no longer informed, in the ways that the great theorists of the tradition took it for granted that political theory should be informed , by the state of empirical knowledge of politics. A result is that normative theorists spend too much time commenting on one another, as if they were themselves the appropriate objects of study. This separation has also fed the tendency for empirical political theory to become banal and method driven—detached from the great questions of the day and focused instead on what seems methodologically most tractable . Both types of theory have evolved close to the point where they are of scant interest to anyone other than their practitioners. This might bump up citation indexes and bamboozle tenure committees, but it scarcely does much for the advancement of knowledge about what is or ought to be the case in politics. My discomfort extends to commenting at length on this state of affairs , which replicates the disorder under discussion even more than Descartes’s cogito established his existence. Rather, my plan here is to illustrate what I take to be one of the central challenges for political theorists: serving as roving ombudsmen for the truth and the right by stepping back from political science as practiced, to see what is wrong with what is currently being done and say something about how it might be improved. Holding the discipline’s feet to the fire might be an appropriate slogan. Let me hasten to add that I have no interest in declaring this is the only important task for political theorists or indeed that it is the most important task; only that it is an indispensable task. If political theorists do not do it, then it seems to me to be unlikely that it will be done at all. Donald Green and I have previously criticized contemporary political science for being too method-driven, not sufficiently problemdriven .2 In various ways, many have responded that our critique fails to take full account of how inevitably theory-laden empirical research is. Here I agree...