The golden mean and the golden hammer: Phronesis and method in contemporary political science

Polity

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2014, Pages 274-295

  Gimbel, Edward W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN WHITEWATER   (United States)

Author keywords

Bent Flyvbjerg; Hans Gerog Gadamer; method; Perestroika; philosophy of social science; phronesis

Indexed keywords

EID: 84901004955     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/pol.2014.6     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. It should be noted and kept in mind throughout that these approaches-game theory and large-n statistical work-differ dramatically from one another both philosophically and methodologically.
2. Nonetheless, these approaches share a characteristic "mood" (to use Dahl's term) with roots in behavioralism: "a mood of sympathy toward 'scientific' modes of investigation and analysis, a mood of optimism about the possibilities of improving the study of politics."
3. In this sense, whether the mode of investigation and analysis is inductive/empirical or deductive/mathematical is less important than that it be scientific.
4. Robert A. Dahl, "The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest" in Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, ed. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), 249-65.
5. Originally published in American Political Science Review 55 (1961): 763-72.
6. The controversy continues. A recent symposium in PS: Political Science and Politics (October 2010) evaluates the "Past, Present, and Future" of the Perestroika movement 10 years after its inception, and New Political Science (August 2013, Volume 35, Issue 3) takes on a similar task with a special issue on "Studying Politics Today: Critical Approaches to Political Science."
7. For engaging retrospective discussions of Perestroika, its broader context, and its lasting impact, see especially Patrick J. McGovern, "Perestroika in Political Science: Past, Present, and Future," PS: Political Science & Politics 43 (2010): 725-27
8. Timothy W. Luke and Patrick J. McGovern, "The Rebels' Yell: Mr. Perestroika and the Causes of This Rebellion in Context," PS: Political Science & Politics 43 (2010): 729-31.
9. Stephen K. White, "Return to Politics: Perestroika and Postparadigmatic Political Science," Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (2003): 836.
10. The text of Mr. Perestroika's message is widely available, including in Kristen Renwick Monroe, Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
11. Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, "Perestroika and Its Other,"
12. Monroe, Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion, 15.
13. While this last point was not specifically enumerated in Mr. Perestroika's email, prominent scholars in the Perestroika movement put this formulation forward as a way to respond to one of Mr. Perestroika's apparent desires: to make political science better speak to contemporary political problems of interest to broader audience.
14. See especially Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, ed., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
15. David D. Laitin, "The Perestroikan Challenge to Social Science," in Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method, ed. Sanford F. Schram and Brian Caterino (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 33.
16. Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, trans. Steven Sampson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
17. Schram and Caterino, eds., Making Political Science Matter; Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram, eds., Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
18. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 46.
19. Throughout his study, Flyvbjerg hedges on this point.
20. He carefully notes that "one cannot prove that social science cannot become scientific in the sense of normal science.
21. Nonetheless, Flyvbjerg's analysis compels him to conclude that "it is difficult, and perhaps misguided, to believe that this will actually come to pass."
22. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 46-47.
23. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
24. Much of what follows paraphrases Aristotle's work in this chapter.
25. All quotes from the Ethics are taken from the W. D. Ross translation.
26. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 61.
27. See especially Nicomachean Ethics VI, 12-13.
28. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 58, 62.
29. What Flyvbjerg understands as epistemic science-the natural sciences-frequently has little or nothing to do with episteme in the Aristotelian sense of demonstrative (as opposed to applied) science.
30. See especially Bent Flyvbjerg, "A Perestroikan Straw Man Answers Back: David Laitin and Phronetic Political Science," in Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method, ed. Sanford F. Schram and Brian Caterino (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 75.
31. Flyvbjerg develops his particular focus on the concept of power and claims that "Aristotle never elaborated his conception of phronesis to include explicit considerations of power.
32. Hans-Georg Gadamer's (1974) authoritative and contemporary conception of phronesis also overlooks issues of power."
33. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 130-40.
34. Flyvbjerg, "A Perestroikan Straw Man Answers Back," 76.
35. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, 196.
36. See also Flyvbjerg, "A Perestroikan Straw Man Answers Back," 68, 77, 129.
37. Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram, ed., Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
38. The dominant approach to Gadamer's treatment of phronesis in the social sciences has been by way of elucidating the important and difficult Gadamerian concept of hermeneutic application.
39. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, trans. and ed. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
40. Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983);
41. Georgia Warnke, "Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Politics" in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. R. J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 79-101.
42. My approach is different: to read Gadamer's interpretation of phronesis not primarily as the exemplar for his own concept of hermeneutic application, but as a thoughtful and, in my view, accurate reconstruction of the Aristotelian intellectual virtues.
43. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, 2nd rev. edn. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 317.
44. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 28.
45. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 317.
46. Gadamer argues that in the special case of children, obedience to an elder replaces moral decision.
47. This argument parallels Aristotle's argument in the Nicomachean Ethics that the moral virtues (ruled in part by phronesis) are cultivated primarily through the development of habit, not teaching, and that said habits find their most basic expression in the imitation of a model.
48. Aristotle raises the theme of imitation again in the Poetics where, against Plato, he praises the human instinct for imitation as a gift that distinguishes men from animals and that provides a path for learning.
49. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 2-3.
50. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 29.
51. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 320.
52. Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 8, 1141b 33, 1142a 30; Eudemian Ethics, VIII, 2, 1246b 36 (cited in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 316).
53. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 322.
54. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 152-53.
55. Literally, "without virtue."
56. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 324.
57. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in his The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (San Francisco: Harper Perennial, 1982).
58. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983);
59. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
60. Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 6.
61. Flyvbjerg, "A Perestroikan Straw Man Answers Back," 84.
62. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 198
63. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 28-29;
64. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 317.
65. Brian Caterino, "Perestroika's Last Stand," PS: Political Science & Politics 43 (2010): 753-54.
66. Caterino discusses the issue in terms of a distinction between more progressive and more conservative strains of Perestroika.
67. He seems less sensitive to the extent to which even more progressive Perestroikans fall into similar traps.
68. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 320-24.
69. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 142.
70. For an admirable attempt to reconcile these and other accounts of phronesis in Aristotle's ethics, see John E. Sisko "Phronesis" in Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edn., ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (London: Routledge, 2001), 1314-16.
71. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, ed. Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-2.
72. variations on this idea are also found in Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, "Pathologies Revisited: Reflections on Our Critics," in The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered, ed. Jeffrey Friedman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 235-76;
73. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
74. This, incidentally, may also help to explain the tendency within these debates to group together distinct approaches to social science, like game theory and large-n statistical work, under a general heading of "quantitative social science.
75. In spite of their many and often obvious differences, both game theory and statistical work require extensive and focused quantitative training.
76. On this latter point, the Real Social Science volume is particularly valuable.
77. The essays collected by Flyvbjerg and colleagues illustrate this commitment to praxis far more clearly than to any coherent shared understanding of phronesis.
78. I have expanded on this point in "Making Political Science Matter? Phronetic Social Science in Theory and Practice" Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013): 1139-43.
79. Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
80. Greek methodos: a going after, from meta-after + hodos-way.
81. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276.
82. Work that engages one or both of these points spans the history of political thought and runs the gamut of methodological approaches.
83. Beside writings from the past that are cited in the text, political theory has been rich with work that articulates a vision of "the kind of world we are building."
84. See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
85. Paul Ricoeur, The Just (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000)
86. in which both ends and means are analyzed, and objectivity does not entail forgoing such considerations.
87. Empirical political science, too, occasionally embraces ends-oriented reflection and an awareness of the author's own standing in the empirical world.
88. The writings of Adam Przeworski, for example, reflect on these points, as do John R. Freeman's Democracy and Markets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).
89. Michael Barnett's Eyewitness to a Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).