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Post-Autistic Economics Network
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THE
PERESTROIKA MOVEMENT
Perestroika: For An Ecumenical Science of Politics Gregory Kaska
There is no reason that
deductive theorizing or quantitative research need generate this hegemonic
ambition. The postmodernist hegemony of the left that plagues some literature
and history departments may be just as suffocating as a hard-scientific
hegemony of the right. The problem is the hegemonic project itself, which
might serve any approach. To force conformity among us, some hard scientists
have corrupted decisionmaking on hiring, promotion, curriculum, and
publication. Many seek to indoctrinate graduate students instead of teaching
them to think for themselves. The Perestroika movement’s
first goal is to defeat this hegemonic project. To do this, we must highlight
the limitations of hard-scientific research. But the movement does not aim to
banish deductive theory or to put a new orthodoxy in its place. Even hard
scientists who embrace intellectual pluralism might join the Perestroika
movement. Why must we stop the
hegemonic project of hard science? First, because it threatens academic
freedom. Many hard scientists are oblivious to the harm they are doing to
young scholars. A recent job applicant to my university had superimposed an
ill-fitting rational-choice template on her dissertation. Her advisors had
warned her that without it she might not find work, get published, or even
organize a thesis committee of the right people. Other graduate students have
reported similar stories to the Perestroika forum. Ian Shapiro, Theda
Skocpol, and Margaret Keck, among many others, have recently warned graduate
students not to view their work instrumentally, urging them to shun what is
fashionable and to rely on their own judgment. But what has become of our
calling when we must admonish graduate students to write what they think? In
the past, no such advice was necessary, but today’s hard scientists have
convinced many young people that they must sacrifice their intellectual
integrity to enter this profession. The rest of us cannot ignore this
situation. It is our profession, too, and we are responsible. A second reason that we
must blunt this hegemonic project is that normal science makes for bad
science in the study of politics. Viewing its results, the irrationalities of
this endeavor overshadow the anticipated progress. No objective person could
read Donald Green and Ian Shapiro’s Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (Yale
1994) without seeing the dangers that arise when like-minded scholars avoid
external scrutiny and interact only with one another. While these scholars
supported the publication of each other’s research, there was no one among
them to point out that the emperor was, at best, scantily clad. The so-called
New Institutionalism exemplifies the isolation of the hard-science group.
Institutional variables, such as organizational and legal structures, have
always been paramount in research on bureaucracy, party systems, regimes, and
many other empirical subjects. The only way one could declare a New
Institutionalism in political science in the mid-1980s is if one had read
nothing outside the rational choice tradition for a very long time. This is
the blindness that results when, as at the University of Rochester, virtually
every job ad has sought a practitioner of rational choice. A third reason to stop the
hard-science project is that its scholarship is increasingly irrelevant to
the normative and practical problems of real politics. Moral questions get
little attention from today’s hard scientists. They have pushed classical
political philosophy to the margins of the curriculum. On the practical side,
although hard science ostensibly addresses empirical questions, it inevitably
degenerates into an unempirical exercise. Except in rare situations, the
political action of real, living human beings is not susceptible of rational
choice equilibria or any comparably rigorous theoretical formulations. The
only way to develop hard-scientific theories of politics, then, is to
extirpate the empirical. That is why the currency of hard science is formal
modeling, deductive theory, and macro-level quantitative research that
analyzes “facts” out of context. Instead of studying human beings as they
are, many hard scientists turn their subjects into robots or abstractions,
restricting their thoughts and actions for theoretical convenience. The
resulting theories teach us as much about real politics as a book of chess
openings might teach us about medieval society. When confronted with the lack
of empirical support for their theories, hard scientists denounce those who
don’t understand that the task of social science is to “generalize.” But
generalize about what? Is it our task to understand politics, or to grapple
with the logic of imaginary games? The disparagement of
empirical research has brought many evils. Hard scientists have sought to
create an artificial division of labor between their self-anointed
theoretical elite and area studies experts, who have long been the richest
source of empirical political theory. (Never mind that hard science
flourishes mainly in that most parochial of areas, American politics—it is
truer to say that these folks study a politics practiced only in their minds,
a nowhere politics, than it is to describe them as Americanists. The robots
don’t speak English; they speak Mathematics.) As hard scientists climb the
ladder of abstraction, practical policy studies get less space in the
curriculum and in top journals. And as empirical issues lose salience, a
narrow technicism becomes the main criterion for judging research. It no
longer matters whether scholarship enhances our comprehension of politics,
but only if it fits into the current methodological or theoretical
straitjacket. Every approach has its
uses and limitations. The point here is not that deductive theory or narrowly
quantitative work is always inferior to the alternatives. Many political
scientists use hard-scientific methods selectively to produce work free of
the ills described above—in fact, many such scholars have backed the
Perestroika movement. The point is that these approaches are not the panacea
that their more dogmatic adherents claim them to be, and thus the effort to
establish their hegemony is misguided. Some may question the
coupling of deductive theory and quantitative research under the one rubric
of “hard science.” Quantitative researchers do at least schematically
empirical work, whereas most deductive theorists use empirical data only for
anecdotal illustration. But it was radical quantifiers, those who analyze all
questions with statistics, who first deformed the discipline in the name of
hard science. It was they who popularized the study of politics outside of
its historical and cultural setting, who made methodology into the core of
graduate education while degrading political philosophy and foreign language
study, and who spawned the trend toward method-driven rather than
problem-driven research. Thanks to the tyranny of
hard science, graduate students today enter political science as if boarding
a spaceship in midflight. They are clueless as to its origins because their
training slights basic normative and epistemological questions. Their
destination lies somewhere in the clouds of “theory.” Following an education
that emphasizes methodology and research design, the students earn their
passports to the clouds in qualifying exams that grill them on multiple
regression, most-different-systems analysis, and the small-n problem. Many of
the exam-takers have yet to master the history, economics, social structure,
and politics of even one “n,” but why bother? They will exit the spaceship
either at quantitative research, where the computer will provide all the n’s
they need, or at deductive theory, where they may generalize without any n’s
at all. Numbers crunchers created
this approach to political education; rational choice theorists thrive on it.
Despite their differences, they share the daydream of a hard science of
politics. That is why they have formed a ruling coalition in economics
departments and aspire to do so in political science. The Perestroika
movement thus parallels the movement for a “Post-Autistic Economics”
(www.paecon.net), which similarly combats the extreme exponents of
quantitative research and rational choice theory. If the hegemony of hard
science is what the Perestroika movement opposes, what vision of political
research does it support? Against the flawed conception of normal science, we
espouse the ideal of an ecumenical science. It is based on three principles:
problem-driven research, methodological pluralism, and interdisciplinary
inquiry. While normal science identifies itself by its method, ecumenical
science will unite scholars of diverse methods and approaches around the
study of substantive political problems. The problems include both normative
and practical concerns, which we believe are inseparable. The two words
“political science” have come to grate against one another under the regime
of hard science. The compulsion to forge a grand, elegant scientific canon
has produced theories of little relevance to real politics. For us, it is
politics first, science second. Where science contributes to knowledge of
politics, we embrace it. Where it does not, we have no use for it. We reject
the hard-scientific fetish of theory for theory’s sake. Good political
scientists read history so as to know the limits of theory. Methodological pluralism
is our objective in all matters of hiring, curriculum, and publication. In an
ecumenical science, approaches and methods will not be religious commitments
but tools whose utility varies with the problem at hand. In our view,
scholars who use the same approach or method to examine every political
question are not thinking. Those who would impose one approach or method on
the discipline are not allowing others to think. While encouraging the
flexible use of scientific methods, we do not accept the hard-scientific view
that good method is the sine qua non of good research. Even a cursory glance
at the best political scholarship belies this notion. Depending on the
research problem, good scholarship might demand rational normative discourse,
a careful reading of history, knowledge of foreign languages, field work, a
judicious examination of primary source materials, and many other elements
besides appropriate methods. Even flexible methodology, then, does not
guarantee positive results—it is but one aspect of good research. The greatest task of an
ecumenical science of politics is to remove the artificial barriers between
disciplines that have long hindered the study of society. Specialization may
befit the natural sciences, but their objects of study are distinct. The
social sciences and humanities all claim the same object of study: the human
being. We have carved up this whole being and removed the parts to our
separate “disciplines,” each of which pretends to explain actions of the
whole person by drawing inferences from its part alone. But when people
engage in political action, they do not leave their psychology, history,
language, or religion behind. What scholars in other disciplines are learning
about human beings is directly relevant to their politics. Already in the
1920s, José Ortega y Gasset bemoaned the lack of “encyclopedic moments” when
scholars of society might integrate what they were learning in so many
isolated compartments. Political science once
stood at the crossroads of history and philosophy and it has been the most
eclectic social science. Restored to that pivotal position, it will be
uniquely well situated to become the ecumenical science whose task it will be
to reintegrate the study of human beings. The result will not be one or a few
grand theories, but we can achieve integration on a more modest scale by
assembling diverse groups of scholars to work on key political problems. To put our three
principles of problem-driven research, methodological pluralism, and
interdisciplinary inquiry into practice, we must reform graduate education
and forge a new relationship between political science and other fields of
scholarship. What is to be done? 1.
1. We must restore political
philosophy to a central place in political studies so that the ends of political
life once again become our common focus. Hard-scientific methodology has
displaced political philosophy as the core requirement in the graduate
curriculum. The result has been a narrow conception of “science” and the
proliferation of research whose purpose is to test-drive some method or
approach rather than to increase our knowledge of politics. (It is no wonder
that undergraduate enrollments have plummeted in step with the hegemony of
hard science.) The revitalization of political philosophy will unite us
around a common normative discourse, and methodology will once again become a
means, and not the end, of our work. 2.
2. We must expand methodological
training beyond the realms of deductive theory and quantitative research to
encompass qualitative research methods. 3.
3. We must pursue innovative
strategies to reorganize research around the study of substantive problems.
These might include the earmarking of faculty lines for subjects rather than
subfields (the Yale model) or the temporary organization of faculty clusters
around topics of novel interest or importance, such as gender and politics,
immigration and civil rights, or politics and genetics. We should treat the
standard subfields as administrative expedients, not as barriers to the
creative organization of research. 4.
4. As one more step towards
reinvigorating problem-driven research, we must reverse the decline of policy
studies. It will be disastrous for political science if policy research
continues to migrate to schools of public administration in the way that
practical economic studies have fled economics departments for the business
schools. If one compares the size of economics departments and business
schools in today’s academy, the cost of reducing a social science to sterile
theoretical endeavors is obvious. 5.
5. We must revamp our professional
associations and journals to emphasize political substance and catholicism
with respect to methods and approaches. As the most prestigious outlet for
political research, the American Political Science Review needs reform. On
professional bodies, we must facilitate the full participation of women,
ethnic minorities, foreign scholars, and the faculty of liberal arts
colleges, all of whom have special contributions to make to the ecumenism we
hope to foster. 6.
6. We must renew our commitment to
study the politics of different parts of the world. Cross-cultural
comparisons may be the ideal basis for empirical political theory, but
cross-cultural research is not acultural research. Comparative politics will
become impossible if we ape economics in its repudiation of foreign area
studies. We must stop the practice of allowing statistics courses to
substitute for foreign language requirements in our graduate programs. Above all,
we must increase our faculty with expertise on the non-Western world. We
cannot allow research on non-Western areas to ebb and flow with the level of
external funding, lest we revert to the dark ages when “politics” meant the
politics of a few, rich, western nations. 7.
7. We must promote interdisciplinary
research, not just by singing its praises, but by educating the next
generation of scholars to do it. As urged by the Gulbenkian Commission (Open
the Social Sciences, Stanford 1996), we must promote graduate training that
combines political science not only with the other social sciences and the
humanities, but also with the physical sciences. We advocate the spread of
joint degree programs and the practice of encouraging our Ph.D. students to
earn master’s degrees in other disciplines. The words department and
discipline will be the least sacred entries in the ecumenical glossary. We
advocate an “un-discipline-d” political science. William
Riker was fond of saying that political science was a sinking ship, and
rational choice theory was the only tugboat that might bring it to port. It
is truer to say that Riker’s disciples have acted as pirates out to hijack
political science to a rather barren island. Their piracy is doomed to
failure. The study of politics will never become a normal science except at
the point of a gun. The many interests involved in political life guarantee
that every concept and every approach will be contested. Let us celebrate
this diversity, not suppress it. It makes our academic community a more
interesting place to live. It produces better scholarship than could any
closed circle of true believers. And it may enable us to play a pivotal
historical role by integrating once more the study of human beings in an
ecumenical science of politics. Gregory Kaska |