Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (review)

Flyvbjerg seeks to position his argument on behalf of a social science that is avowedly engaged in the critique of existing social arrangements by situating it between the “Science Wars” poles of positivistic science and its relativist deconstruction. He argues for a revival of social inquiry built around Aristotle’s phronesis, “variously translated as prudence or practical wisdom,” a style of knowledge-building that “involves decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social and political actor,” (2) which will thus resist the flattening of experience produced either by a social science built around techne, or around episteme. Theory here, in the Continental tradition, is explicitly philosophical, and to my American eyes fresh but somehow often not to the point, and certainly not highly relevant to social science’s peculiar role in the “Science Wars” argument. Gradually, the book’s argument shifts from theory to method, for a central goal of the author is to develop “a set of methodological guidelines for phronetic social science” (129), but these guidelines read to me as something of a laundry list of good if modest ideas (importantly to historical social scientists a reinstatement of the case study, emphasis on “little things” (133), and enhanced awareness of the role of power, tendencies visible also within American social science). These are exemplified by several lengthy expositions of work Flyvbjerg considers admirably phronetic, but which exemplars are perhaps better read in extenso.