95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method (review)

Norton's forcefully argued manifesto will appeal to the many students of politics and society who are alienated from the relentless foundationalism, essentialism and positivism of variable-oriented political science. Weaving together philosophical critique with empirically grounded argument, she fights on behalf of the many heterodox students and scholars who have broken with a bankrupt research paradigm. Her heroic mission is to bolster those research programs which respect social life's multivocality, complexity and contingency and do not treat social reality as a collection of preexisting factums awaiting discovery by the unbiased observer.

Yet Norton's polemics fall short because she refuses to engage her adversaries on their own territory and prefers to fire slings and arrows from the safe distance of philosophy and metatheory. Her preference for this kind of argumentation means that she often slips into the very kind of "abstract, universalistic" theorizing which she decries in the work of her essentialist and positivist opponents. By recruiting Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc. as allies in her struggle against the essentialist-positivist fallacies of the mainstream, Norton effectively limits her readership to those students and scholars already conversant with and sympathetic to the concerns of these thinkers.

She opens the book with a group of theses (1-23) dealing with culture and social inquiry. Here Norton enlists arguments from anthropologists and philosophers in order to dispose of essentialist and positivist straw men. First on the chopping block is the unsupportable proposition that "Culture" and "cultures" both exist independently of language, time, social practice and relations of domination. A number of equally essentialist generalizations about identity, power and institutions are then dispatched. But it remains unclear who would endorse such propositions besides the authors of the frequently mentioned book Designing Social Inquiry.

The next block of theses (24-50) concern institutions, identities, politics and power. Here she veers between uncontestable propositions such as "living within a culture entails a complex of relations to its practices and institutions" and overreaching propositions such as "there is no culture without resistance and critique." These latter propositions have no place in a book that aims to combat the universalist and absolutist formulations of mainstream social science. Norton's methodological commentary, by far the most promising section of the book, begins with thesis 51: Facts do not Speak for Themselves. Here she pursues her constructionist agenda in a more fruitful way by unmasking the methodological myths of mainstream political science. Facts, she contends, actually issue from interpretative operations and "truth regimes" even if they are presented by mainstream political science as unconstructed datums. In the heart of this section, Thesis 64: , she questions the alleged rigor of variable-oriented research built around measurable properties and units of analysis. Here she rehearses familiar arguments about the rhetorical, performative and ritualistic dimensions of social science research, Norton's goals would have been better served had she gone after the fundamental premise of variable oriented research, namely that decontextualized abstractions can stand in as proxies for social action and interaction.

Moreover, on closer inspection the propositions which appear the most subversive turn out to accord well with the prevailing methodological wisdom. The weaknesses of falsifiability, replicability and predictive success as criteria for theory testing are well-known within the community of variable-oriented social science practitioners. Her caveats about conflating causality and correlatedness, for example, would elicit no dissent from even the most blinkered partisan of "normal science." Moreover, for an empirically-minded reader, such weaknesses as those Norton diagnoses pale in comparison to the shortcomings of variable-oriented research analyzed by Ragin (1987) and Abbott (1997).

The real strength and contribution of 95 Theses is apparent when one takes a step back from the particular arguments and considers the purpose of the book as a whole. Norton's multifaceted arguments and examples show how mainstream political science appears to an observer standing at the margins of the discipline's positivist core. From her heterodox standpoint, she succeeds in baring the...