The Disorder Of Political Inquiry

by Topper, Keith Lewis

• ISBN13: 9780674016781
• ISBN10: 0674016785
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

In the past several years two academic controversies have migrated from the classrooms and courtyards of college and university campuses to the front pages of national and international newspapers: Alan Sokal's hoax, published in the journal Social Text, and the self-named movement, "Perestroika," that recently emerged within the discipline of political science. Representing radically different analytical perspectives, these two incidents provoked wide controversy precisely because they brought into sharp relief a public crisis in the social sciences today, one that raises troubling questions about the relationship between science and political knowledge, and about the nature of objectivity, truth, and meaningful inquiry in the social sciences. In this provocative and timely book, Keith Topper investigates the key questions raised by these and other interventions in the "social science wars" and offers unique solutions to them. Engaging the work of thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Roy Bhaskar, and Hannah Arendt, as well as recent literature in political science and the history and philosophy of science, Topper proposes a pluralist, normative, and broadly pragmatist conception of political inquiry, one that is analytically rigorous yet alive to the notorious vagaries, idiosyncrasies, and messy uncertainties of political life.

Author Biography

Keith Topper is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Political Science at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: The Social Science Wars	p. 1
Social Science Wars I	p. 2
Social Science Wars II	p. 5
Debating the Foundations of Political Science	p. 8
Sciences of Uncertainty	p. 10
Science Turned Upside Down	p. 20
Philosophy, Foundationalism, and Linguistic Pragmatism	p. 23
Rorty's View of Natural Science	p. 36
Conclusion	p. 55
In Defense of Disunity	p. 57
Pragmatic Naturalism and the Social Sciences	p. 59
Hermeneutics Revisited	p. 67
Conclusion	p. 83
The Politics of Redescription	p. 84
Redescription Applied	p. 87
Contingency, Self-Creation, and Change	p. 94
Redescription and Politics	p. 102
Conclusion	p. 107
Reclaiming the Language of Emancipation	p. 108
Roy Bhaskar's Critical Realism	p. 108
Critical Realism as a Philosophy for the Sciences	p. 115
Critical Naturalism and the Stakes of Social Inquiry	p. 127
Ontology, Causation, and Social Criticism	p. 134
Conclusion	p. 154
Sciences That Disturb	p. 156
Pierre Bourdieu's "Fieldwork in Philosophy"	p. 156
From the Practice of Theory to the Theory of Practice	p. 158
Ordinary Violences	p. 171
Conclusion	p. 180
Conclusion: Pluralism, Power, Perestroika, and Political Inquiry	p. 181
Perestroika and Methodological Pluralism	p. 185
Hegemonic Political Science and Methodological Monism	p. 188
The Contest of Methodological Disunity	p. 191
Revitalizing Political Inquiry	p. 215
Notes	p. 219
Index	p. 315
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