Becoming a Social Science Researcher: Quest and Context 0472055984, 9780472055982

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BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

Becoming a Social Science Researcher QUEST AND CONTEXT

Bruce Parrott

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2023 by Bruce Parrott All rights reserved For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected] Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper First published March 2023 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978-­0-­472-­07598-­0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­472-­05598-­2 (paper : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­472-­22108-­0 (e-­book) Cover illustration courtesy Unsplash.com / Dana Ward.

In memory of Karen Dawisha—­ intrepid researcher, bold pioneer, brave heart

Contents

Preface ix List of Illustrations xi

Part I. Preview

Introduction: Why You Should Read This Book Chapter Summaries

3 8

Part II. Your Quest in Context

I II III IV V

Perception and Misperception in Life and Scholarship Social Science and History Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics Progress in the Social Sciences: Real and Imaginary Dimensions of the Social Sciences

17 24 34 45 59

Part III. Your Quest: Weighing Intellectual Choices VI VII VIII IX X XI

Building Professional Relationships and Preparing for Your Doctoral Exams Choosing Research Problems: Personal Values and Disciplinary Agendas Concepts and Concept Formation Theories, Hypotheses, and Research Designs Case Studies and Comparative Methods Logics of Explanation

71 83 94 109 119 130

Part IV. Your Quest: From Planning to Finishing

XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII

Planning Your Project and Writing a Prospectus Mapping Research Resources and Gathering Evidence Producing a Draft Through the Jungle: Guiding Your Reader (and Yourself) Getting to Go: Defending and Passing Your Choices and Your Futures

147 158 172 187 198 203

viii CONTENTS

Notes “On the Meaning of Education” Information on the Supplementary Website Acknowledgments Index

207 299 301 303 305

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12275879

Preface

“Becoming” is a capacious word that encompasses nearly all the journeys of life, and the word “quest” stretches almost as far. If you are an aspiring social scientist working on your PhD, this book is meant especially for you. The book is intended to provide insight and guidance as you move from your formal courses and preliminary examinations into the most challenging part of your growth as a scholar: planning, researching, and writing your doctoral dissertation. It aims to do this by illuminating the intellectual and social contexts within which you are pursuing your scholarly quest. Parts of the book will be useful to more senior researchers as well. Chapters 1 through 5 and 7 through 11 will provide ample food for thought to established scholars in political science, the field I know best, and in the other social sciences. The practical suggestions in chapter 6 and chapters 12 through 16 will help doctoral candidates master the challenges of carrying out research and analysis on an unfamiliar scale. But these chapters contain suggestions that also are likely be of value to seasoned scholars: ideas about mastering new subjects quickly, mining bibliographic databases to conduct research efficiently, and using word-­processing software to write effectively. In any case, whatever your academic background and level of training, you should decide which parts of the book to read on the basis of your own prior knowledge and needs. The book has developed more or less organically from my many years of teaching doctoral candidates at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. When I first taught an introductory course for incoming PhD students, I knew little more than that it was needed, because my own graduate experience had sorely lacked such a course and I had struggled painfully to complete my PhD. With time, I discovered that many of the persistent questions vexing SAIS doctoral students were tied to complex epistemological and philosophical issues, and I strove to understand those issues more clearly to help my students find their way. By teaching the course repeatedly, I gradually distilled the ideas presented in the book. That is why the book is relevant to the work of advanced social science researchers as well. For inquiring minds, intellectual growth continues

x

PREFACE

unabated after earning the PhD degree. A long time is required to plumb the complexities of social research, especially the aspects that are rarely addressed directly in professional publications. That was certainly the case for me. Ten years ago I would have been incapable of writing this book. The discoveries it presents dawned on me slowly, as a result of a protracted period of personal investigation and as a benefit of working with talented graduate students. I am indebted to several generations of SAIS doctoral candidates for the queries they have raised and the insights they have contributed to my understanding of the research process. My greatest debt is to my wife, Sara Foose Parrott. A brilliant teacher in her own right, she has constantly prodded me to write clearly and get to the point. These are not my natural qualities, and whatever utility the book has will be due in large part to her constructive criticism.

Illustrations

Figure 1 The 3-­D Heuristic

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Figure 2 Checkershadow Illusion

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Figure 3 Checkershadow Proof

21

Table 1 Four Hypothetical Books Sorted into Separate Groupings on the Basis of Two Shared Features

63

I

 | Preview

Introduction Why You Should Read This Book American society is not aware, excepting personal acquaintance of particular ABDs [all-­but-­dissertation doctoral students] of the almost larger-­than-­life trials, fortitude, despair, courage and even heroics experienced in writing a doctoral dissertation. One never sees a TV program or movie, for example, about a . . . person who, against all odds, completes a dissertation in political science or educational psychology. Skating championships, law and medical degrees, attainment of political office, yes; doctoral dissertations, no. —­David Sternberg

Becoming a successful social ­science researcher is easy for talented graduate students with strong academic records, right? Wrong. Creating your dissertation will be an unfamiliar experience and a personal trial, harder than anything you’ve ever done. But you will grow as never before.

T

his book is designed to help you as an aspiring social scientist understand the complexities of the research process. The book has little to say about research techniques; many existing works explain these techniques in detail. Instead it concentrates on the philosophical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of social research. These dimensions have received less coverage in guides written for social ­science researchers, but they are arguably even more important than specific research techniques.1 Truly sophisticated social ­science scholarship requires the researcher to understand the intellectual and social contexts in which he or she collects and interprets information. Over the past two decades, doctoral training in the social sciences at leading American universities has gradually become more systematic, and better guidance has been published, but both training and guidance still fall short in addressing this fundamental requirement.2 Memories of my own experience as a doctoral student during the early 1970s were one motive for writing the book. My years of PhD training were full of uncertainty and loneliness. Identifying the hazily demarcated body

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4 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

of knowledge I was expected to plow through to pass my doctoral examinations was stressful. What were the boundaries of the field, and what were the major theories and controversies? What did the existing literature show about these matters, and what perspectives did it neglect? These were hard questions that would have been easier to confront with better guidance from my professors. Preparing for the exams, however, was a cakewalk compared with trying to discover how to map out a dissertation project and produce the dissertation. That task was positively baffling. It felt like intellectual agoraphobia, like setting sail from Europe across the Atlantic with no navigational instruments and nothing but vague assurances that a continent may exist on the other side. My subsequent experience teaching doctoral candidates at Johns Hopkins suggests that problems of this kind continue to vex PhD students, and I am confident that the same holds true at other universities. Naturally, elements of uncertainty and confusion cannot be eliminated from doctoral training, which by definition requires questioning and skepticism for the creation of new knowledge. But the personal burden of these problems can be reduced through patterns of teaching and learning that enable PhD students to make wiser intellectual and professional decisions. This book is intended to help you make such decisions. Ten central themes run through the book. The first is that social ­science research is much more complicated, intellectually and emotionally, than it seems on the surface. This is true largely because every researcher must unavoidably make many assumptions and judgments before beginning any empirical investigation. Scholarly knowledge, even in the natural sciences, is invariably nested within a much broader framework of assumptions and value judgments.3 It took me decades after finishing my PhD to reach this conclusion, which emerged from the interplay between my persistent frustrations as a scholar and striking new insights revealed by cognitive psychologists and philosophers of science. My discoveries in this realm are what will make a substantial part of this book valuable to seasoned scholars as well as to doctoral candidates. The book’s second theme is that you, as a researcher in ­the ­making, must take the initiative to make your own decisions about what to study and what kind of scholar to become. Your professors can give you useful advice about what to study as you prepare for your doctoral examinations and then embark on a dissertation project. This is especially true of choosing a dissertation topic. Advisors can point you toward important scholarly questions and warn you about the pitfalls that some superficially attractive topics may conceal. You should consider this advice carefully, especially

Why You Should Read This Book

when it concerns potential pitfalls. But in a broader sense, your teachers cannot tell you what you should study. This is a personal decision that will have long-­term implications for your life, and only you can make it. You are already an adult, but unless you are quite extraordinary, you are still in the process of developing your own intellectual tastes and priorities. You are also still learning about the crucial role of imagination in top-­flight scholarship. Only by exploring and refining your own interests can you discover a path toward lasting professional engagement and creativity. A third theme of the book is that scholarship is choice. You may have heard the saying, “to govern is to choose.” To be a scholar is also to choose, but to choose in quite a different way.4 When you read an academic book, you make many decisions: What exactly the book is about, what assumptions the author takes as given, which parts of the book are most important, what the key ideas are, and how well the evidence supports the book’s conclusions. If you are like most students and many teachers, you make some of these choices thoughtfully and others unconsciously. But one way or another, you cannot avoid making them. Political leaders must make certain decisions in order to govern; you must make certain decisions in order to learn and to create new knowledge. The book’s fourth theme is that you should strive to make most of these decisions consciously, rather than by hunch or by default. When reading a book, it is easy to take the path of least resistance by accepting the author’s framing of the subject and moving through the text in a relaxed fashion. Although passive reading of this kind will limit what you discover and learn, it can still be stimulating and reasonably informative. But writing is a different story. When you write a dissertation or a book, relying on intuitive judgments and default assumptions becomes nearly impossible, and extremely painful. Writing a major study means making hundreds or perhaps thousands of decisions: how to define the subject, which concepts to use, how to operationalize the concepts, how many cases to include, what period to cover, which sources to consult, which demographic groups to survey, how to structure your chapters, and on and on. Your mentors and fellow researchers can help you work through some of these issues, but you must make many of the decisions on your own, and only thoughtful choices can give your finished study a solid intellectual foundation. If you succeed in making thoughtful choices, the experience will change not only your view of your subject, but your view of the books and articles you read, which, after all, are also the products of hundreds or thousands of decisions by their authors.5 The book’s fifth main theme is that understanding your personal pro-

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6 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

fessional context matters to your success. Social scientists, like other human beings, live in particular social and professional settings. But the character of the social sciences, which often seek general theories that are uniformly valid across time and space, can obscure this human reality, especially its connection with the content of scholarly research. Social scientists do not work in a timeless intellectual laboratory, but in the real world of fashionable ideas, hopes, ambitions, and fears. Recognizing this basic truth will help you comprehend the dynamics of your chosen social science discipline, as well as its intellectual limits. You are entering a cultural environment in which scholarly investigations are arguably more deeply intertwined with the fate of humankind than ever before. Contextual awareness will make you a more rigorous researcher, a better teacher, and a more independent thinker. This leads to a sixth theme of the book. Even at its best, the knowledge produced by social researchers is unavoidably specialized and incomplete. This idea may seem out of place in a book about the research process, but it is indispensable for an adequate understanding of the whole enterprise. It is not just that we can never completely abstract our knowledge of events from our own social and intellectual context. As a scholarly profession, we face the need to analyze a stream of novel political, economic, and social phenomena generated by unceasing historical change. We are therefore engaged in a scholarly race against time, and not just because we are mortal. Only by recognizing that some questions cannot be answered through rigorous research can we improve our chances of answering those that can. Only in this way can we clearly identify the normative issues and moral dilemmas that are inescapable parts of social life. Only in this way can we distinguish what we believe from what we actually know.6 A seventh theme of the book is that writing your study will change your psyche as well as your intellect. Working on the dissertation will unleash powerful emotional tides running below your conscious struggle to develop and refine scholarly ideas. Our emotions and our ideas interact in complex ways that are difficult to identify and that can never be fully fathomed. These interactions are fueled by the inescapable limits on human knowledge and by the necessity to commit ourselves individually to particular understandings of where those limits lie. The necessity of deciding what can be known persists throughout a scholar’s life, but it is most tangible and psychologically difficult at the dissertation stage. Writing your dissertation will connect the growth of your mind and your emotional life in new ways, some good and some bad. It will thereby shape your intellectual personality as no previous academic experience has done.

Why You Should Read This Book

The book’s eighth theme is that deep changes of this kind happen slowly and require sustained reflection over time. Ideas that seem opaque today may become clear to you in a few months, or maybe a few years. That being the case, it may be most efficient to read different parts of this book at different stages of your intellectual journey, and perhaps to reread some of them as you reflect back on the terrain you’ve traversed. I’ve tried to make the whole book clear and direct by providing a summary at the start of each chapter and by offloading supplementary material onto a companion website you can consult for further analysis and sources. Still, some of the central issues are exceedingly complex. So you must decide which parts of the book to read, and when. My only suggestion is that you make these judgments after carefully reading all the chapter summaries grouped in the next section. Further down the road, you may decide to look at the additional analysis and sources on the website.7 The ninth theme of the book is that tempered judgment is an indispensable element of good scholarship. Every scholarly discipline is built around an accepted range of analytical techniques. But practitioners in any field almost never agree entirely on the relative value of the individual techniques available, and you must exercise personal judgment about which analytical techniques to use. In making these decisions, assumptions about epistemology and ontology—­that is, assumptions about what we can know and about the nature of social reality—­play an important role (whether or not you recognize that role).8 Moreover, choosing a particular technique still does not relieve you of the responsibility to exercise additional judgment in weighing how much to credit the technique’s results. Seasoned judgment of this kind is one measure of scholarly maturity. The tenth theme of the book is that in today’s academic world, following some of these guidelines may complicate your professional life. Current academic practices and educational structures pose serious career risks to new scholars who follow unorthodox intellectual paths. Seeking a new path, of course, has always entailed some risks, but I suspect that they are greater today than they were a few decades ago, largely because of the steadily worsening economics of the academic job market. In other words, the operational definition of creativity in the social sciences has arguably narrowed in recent decades. This book may help you recognize the risks and avoid some of them. But it does not contain any neat formula for eliminating the trade-­offs between practical necessity and ideal scholarly conduct. How you manage these trade-­offs must be based on your own needs and your own calculus of professional costs and benefits.

7

Chapter Summaries

INTRODUCTION: WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK

Becoming a successful social ­science researcher is easy for talented graduate students with strong academic records, right? Wrong. Creating your dissertation will be an unfamiliar experience and a personal trial, harder than anything you’ve ever done. But you will grow as never before.

CHAPTER 1.  PERCEPTION AND MISPERCEPTION IN LIFE AND SCHOLARSHIP

They say seeing is believing, but can you trust your own eyes? Like the optical illusions triggered by certain visual habits, our perceptions of social realities are often distorted by subconscious processes. By becoming sensitive to the role of cultural and academic conventions in analyzing social phenomena, you can make your research more sophisticated and insightful. The most important conventions concern the relationship between history and social science.

CHAPTER 2.  SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HISTORY

At first glance, the words “social science” and “history” may seem clear. But each term has several different meanings that regularly cause confusion. You have freely chosen to become a social scientist, but like all other social scientists, you are also a product of history. To truly understand your chosen field of specialization, you must appreciate how the realms of social science and history have evolved and interacted over time. You must also understand how shifting concepts of nature have shaped your intuitions about what is given and what you must explain.

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Chapter Summaries 9

CHAPTER 3.  SCHOLARSHIP AS SOCIAL PROCESS AND AS POLITICS

Knowledge may be stored in libraries, but it is created through social and political processes that you should be aware of. At a certain point, your dissertation or book project will become so demanding that it will block out everything else. Even experienced researchers usually concentrate on their specialties and pay little attention to the broader social and political contexts in which they operate. But those contexts will have a major impact on your work and your success. Being aware of disciplinary and departmental dynamics will help you chart your course through the crosscurrents of academic life and make intelligent decisions about your professional future.

CHAPTER 4.  PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES: REAL AND IMAGINARY

As researchers, most of us like to think of ourselves as empiricists who favor building theory through steady scholarly progress and are opposed to utopianism. But your personal assumptions about the nature of social knowledge can make you a utopian, whatever you choose to call yourself. This apparent paradox shows up in every field of social science. It may seem irrelevant to your current studies, but it will influence your whole academic career, as well as any contribution you make beyond academia. What kind of personal progress will you strive for?

CHAPTER 5.  DIMENSIONS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Each of the social sciences can be delimited and partitioned in different ways. How the lines are drawn depends on the concerns of individual researchers or groups of researchers. Each of us carries a distinctive “map” of our chosen social ­science discipline in our head. This map, in turn, affects our choices about what to study and how to study it. Most likely your disciplinary map is still a rough sketch that you’ll spend years making into a reliable guide. Writing your dissertation is a vital step in charting the new intellectual terrain.

10 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

CHAPTER 6.  BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PREPARING FOR YOUR DOCTORAL EXAMS

If you are like many PhD candidates, the first major hurdle on your road to the doctorate will be the comprehensive examinations you must pass after completing your coursework. Thorough preparation will depend not just on understanding your department’s exact requirements but also on developing your relationships with key faculty members as well as other PhD students. Properly managed, preparation for the exams can aid your takeoff into full-­time dissertation research. Certain methods of studying will strengthen your grasp of the discipline and lay a foundation for the next stage of your training.

CHAPTER 7.  CHOOSING RESEARCH PROBLEMS: PERSONAL VALUES AND DISCIPLINARY AGENDAS

Although widely accepted, the notion of value-­free scholarship is a bad guide to practical decisions about research topics. Choosing a research question and assessing the relevant evidence are different things. Personal values play a central role in the selection of research topics by all scholars, whether they know it or not. Commitment to the rigorous assessment of relevant ideas and evidence is an equally important scholarly value of a different sort. This means that weighing your own values is a key part of framing your research project and selecting your analytical approach.

CHAPTER 8.  CONCEPTS AND CONCEPT FORMATION

Concepts and concept formation are the heart of analytical thought. Without them you can’t think intelligently about your research project or anything else. One obstacle to effective conceptualization is that many concepts have familiar names that make them seem straightforward, even though they are not. Another obstacle is that concepts are based on mental categories that are continuously modified to accommodate new experiences and new ideas. Both individual thinkers and whole societies regularly engage in this kind of conceptual adaptation. That’s why thinking hard about concept formation is essential before you launch your research project.

Chapter Summaries 11

CHAPTER 9.  THEORIES, HYPOTHESES, AND RESEARCH DESIGNS

Theory and hypothesis are ubiquitous words in social science, but each word can mean several different things. To make matters worse, they are sometimes used interchangeably. “Framework,” another term researchers often use to organize their investigations, also conceals potential pitfalls. Whenever you use one of these words or see it in print, ask yourself what it really means. Unless you do this, you may misunderstand the scholarly literature pertinent to your research, and assembling a coherent dissertation design will be a steep uphill climb.

CHAPTER 10.  CASE STUDIES AND COMPARATIVE METHODS

“Case” is a common term in the social sciences, but what does it really mean? One fundamental question you should always ask is: “A case of what?” Like substantive concepts such as democracy, the methodological concept of case poses the issue of degrees of membership. Whatever the category of phenomena you are studying, you must decide how fully your chosen instances belong in or outside the case category as you have defined it. Different analytical methods categorize cases in terms of different properties and can produce quite different comparative conclusions. Keep these issues in mind as you frame your research project.

CHAPTER 11.  LOGICS OF EXPLANATION

Analyzing human societies and behavior is exceptionally hard. That’s why each social science specializes in examining a limited range of human activities. This division of labor promotes disciplinary progress, but it also sidesteps a fundamental reality: Human beings frequently engage in more than one type of behavior at the same moment, and their behavior usually results from multiple causes. Because single-­factor explanations of human action are often incomplete, scholars pursuing causal accounts of human behavior face a formidable challenge. Understanding that challenge from the get-­go is far better than pretending it doesn’t exist.

12 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

CHAPTER 12.  PLANNING YOUR PROJECT AND WRITING A PROSPECTUS

If you’ve identified a research question that intrigues you, you’ve made important progress. Still, moving from that question to a workable research project is a big job; to complete the move you must produce a solid work plan. Here are four guidelines: (1) don’t confuse planning your dissertation with writing it; (2) seek advice from experienced scholars and advanced dissertation writers; (3) make sure your prospectus includes essential logistics and a work schedule; (4) recognize that your finished prospectus can’t really be final, because you’ll have to revise it repeatedly as the project evolves.

CHAPTER 13.  MAPPING RESEARCH RESOURCES AND GATHERING EVIDENCE

Researchers sometimes fail to think through the processes of “hunting and gathering” systematically. The key rule for mapping research resources is to develop a thorough grasp of the existing universe of pertinent materials and the rules of selection you will use in choosing among them. The key rule for collecting evidence is to ensure that the data you collect are actually relevant to the question you want to answer. Luckily, legions of scholars, librarians, and database managers have created many powerful tools to help you. Learning to use these tools will save you from intellectual mistakes and possible embarrassment.

CHAPTER 14.  PRODUCING A DRAFT

At first glance, creating a dissertation may seem like writing an especially long paper. But producing a finished dissertation is much harder. That’s why most dissertation writers feel waves of doubt about whether they’re making progress or will ever finish. A good way of looking at these issues is to view the creation of your thesis as an extended process of gradually reducing your intellectual uncertainty about your topic. Adopting a few specific practices will help you keep moving forward. Above all, learn to write in miniature, and stay in touch with your friends.

Chapter Summaries 13

CHAPTER 15.  THROUGH THE JUNGLE: GUIDING YOUR READER (AND YOURSELF)

Unless you’re very rare, you still have a lot to learn about writing well. Effective writing is a complex bundle of aptitudes that must be honed continuously through diligent practice. Learning to do it resembles becoming a master carpenter or a top-­flight soccer player. In reworking your dissertation draft, you should seek input from a few thoughtful readers to help you see its strengths and weaknesses accurately. The aim in revising is to imagine your audience clearly, anticipate their questions, and provide persuasive answers. To achieve these goals, you must become your own stern editor.

CHAPTER 16.  GETTING TO GO: DEFENDING AND PASSING

The idea of defending your dissertation may seem frightening, but the experience needn’t be. To get a feel for what to expect, sit in on the defenses of some fellow doctoral candidates. Approach your own defense as an opportunity to exchange scholarly opinions, not a trial. Prepare an opening statement that lists the dissertation’s main points, and practice delivering it several times beforehand. Expect to get broad questions about the significance of the thesis as well as narrower ones about its methods and evidence. In the discussion, don’t hesitate to disagree respectfully with an examiner who questions your analysis; by the same token, don’t be afraid to acknowledge that particularly cogent criticisms have merit.

CHAPTER 17. YOUR CHOICES AND YOUR FUTURES

The effort to complete your dissertation is a deeply personal pursuit that may sometimes seem like a struggle to the death. It vividly exemplifies the interplay between personal effort and contingent circumstance in the quest for excellence. Naturally, finishing the thesis and finding a job have to be your top concerns. But your quest also has a larger social meaning. You are part of humankind’s age-­old struggle to understand the complexities of the human condition and shape the future of human life. This is the ultimate importance of modern scholarship. Whatever personal hardships your quest imposes, it is a worthy undertaking for a noble end.

PART II

 | Your Quest in Context

I

 | Perception and Misperception in Life and Scholarship Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth. —­Archimedes One may be tempted to think of “thought control” as an extreme and rare phenomenon, but in fact it is the bread and butter of social life. —­Dietrich Rueschemeyer The modern state has made us a dismal science, and we have made it worse by removing ourselves two or three levels away from sensory experience. —­Theodore Lowi Graduate education should be a transformative experience, but it should not foreclose intellectual openness and curiosity. —­Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea

They say seeing is believing, but can you trust your own eyes? Like the optical illusions triggered by certain visual habits, our perceptions of social realities are often distorted by subconscious processes. By becoming sensitive to the role of cultural and academic conventions in analyzing social phenomena, you can make your research more sophisticated and insightful. The most important conventions concern the relationship between history and social science.

W

hy start a practical book like this by discussing perception? The answer is that many researchers discount the perceptual processes that affect their work and therefore risk making serious intellectual errors. Several decades ago Robert Jervis published a brilliant study titled Perception and Misperception in International Politics. Jervis showed that the calculations and behavior of international leaders depend on basic sociopolitical assumptions and perceptions which they think are accurate, but which frequently are wrong. Most leaders fail to understand how their own social context shapes their assumptions and perceptions, and this failure increases the political harm that can result from their actions. Such misperceptions,

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Jervis argued, occur in distinctive syndromes that can either validate or invalidate particular theories of international relations, such as theories about the causes of war.1 Misperception and unwarranted assumptions also pose a serious risk in the social sciences, although the academic warfare that occasionally results is less harmful. Compared with great powers, social ­science researchers usually are more inclined to collaborate with one another. Nevertheless, we do often misperceive the work our contemporaries, as well as the work we’ve inherited from past generations of researchers.2 The sources of these misperceptions lie deep in our human biological and cultural makeup and constitute a vast subject in their own right.3* But for purposes of this book, the key point is that many of these misunderstandings can be traced to our handling of the concepts and working assumptions on which we base our research. It should go without saying that the concepts we choose and apply in our investigations invariably affect the way we gather data and the way we interpret those data. Social scientists, however, frequently neglect this crucial aspect of intellectual inquiry.4 Why is this important? Most social ­science research depends heavily on information about entities that we cannot perceive directly. We cannot see the Chinese nation, French political parties, or American financial institutions. We can observe many representations of them, such as Chinese ceremonies on national holidays, the electoral platforms of French parties, or the congressional testimony of the chairman of JPMorgan Chase. But we cannot see the social entities themselves, and our understanding of those entities depends primarily on the information assembled and made available to us by other observers—­who cannot see them either.5 What’s more, these secondhand reports are usually based on words taken from daily life that can convey widely divergent meanings. The operational meanings of ordinary concepts such as “society,” “market,” or “power” are anything but clear, and a few words, such as “sanction,” can have two diametrically opposite meanings. These words resonate powerfully in our minds and affect the way we think. Often their main effect is to produce a form of confusion that is especially harmful because we are unaware of it. That is another reason the intellectual conventions that underlie such concepts must be scrutinized by any conscientious researcher. But is firsthand knowledge of social realities any better? Cultural anthropologists would undoubtedly say yes, but even they would attach important caveats, and rightly so.6 Cognitive science has shown that unconscious conventions have a powerful impact not only on our social perceptions, but even on our sensory perceptions of the physical world. And these

Perception and Misperception in Life and Scholarship 19

Fig. 1. The 3-­D Heuristic. (Reproduced from Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011]. Used by permission.)

sensory conventions—­call them perceptual habits—­can obscure central facets of material reality.7 Look carefully at the drawing (fig. 1) of three similar figures standing on what might be a long moving airport sidewalk, then answer the question that follows. Here is the question: As printed on the page, which of the figures is the largest? The answer seems obvious. The converging lines of the sidewalk suggest that the figure on the right is the largest, because he seems farthest away. In reality, however, the three figures are situated in the same plane and are exactly the same size on the page. Look at the figures from the side of the page or use a ruler if you still cannot believe that this is true. In this instance, an unconscious perceptual convention—­that converging lines denote distance—­powerfully shapes the way we understand the evidence of our senses.8 Another optical illusion makes the same point. Consider the checkerboard image in figure 2.9 Is square B to the left of the column lighter than square A on the edge of the checkerboard? The answer is that square B is

20 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

Fig. 2. Checkershadow Illusion. (Source: Website of Edward H. Adelson. Used by permission.)

the same shade of gray as square A. Our minds balk at accepting this fact, because our brains automatically compensate for the appearance that square B is located in the shadow of the column next to it. Superimposing a grid on the image (fig. 3) allows us to make an accurate comparison between the squares and see that they are the same shade of gray. Similarly, our perception of the relationship between two patches of color is strongly influenced by their visual contexts. Viewed against a uniform background, the patches appear to be the same color. But when seen against separate backgrounds consisting of different colors, the patches appear to be quite different. Even after we have seen that the patches are the same, our minds continue to tell us that they are different when seen against the varied backgrounds.10 Moreover, experimental evidence also shows that the members of a society share common definitions of the “normal” versions of various colors—­blue, red, and so forth—­and that when asked to remember and identify a nonstandard variant of a particular color, they choose the standard version, even when the two hues are noticeably different.11

Perception and Misperception in Life and Scholarship 21

Fig. 3. Checkershadow Proof, with Overlay. (Source: Website of Edward H. Adelson. Used by permission.)

In other words, culture plays a role in defining the colors we believe we see.12 Societies vary in the number of colors they single out as distinctive, but none of these taxonomies of color comes close to encompassing all the biological possibilities. The average human being is capable of differentiating ten million distinct colors.13 This physiological capability is quite remarkable. Still, comparisons with various other animals reveal that our physical perceptions of the world outside us are in many ways extraordinarily limited.14* In addition to cultural conventions about how to interpret the physical world, broader cultural understandings shape our sensory perceptions. For example, a recent psychological study instructed two groups of subjects to view pairs of Arabic letters and decide whether the letters of each pair were similar or different. The group of subjects who did not know Arabic arranged the letters based purely on physical similarities. By contrast, the subjects who knew Arabic grouped the same letters differently, according to the cultural meanings associated with some of the individual letters. The two groups looked at the same images but saw them in quite

22 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

different ways. In this instance, the subjects’ sensory perceptions were shaped not only by the basic conventions of visual perception but also by cultural-­semantic factors.15* If perceptual conventions exert these effects on what we see with our own eyes, think how much more powerfully they can affect our understanding of the social entities we cannot see at all. Here is one small example from my dissertation research many years ago. The subject was Kremlin debates over Soviet technological competition against the West during the 1950s and 1960s. When I started the project, I was strongly influenced by the totalitarian model that scholars generally accepted as an adequate depiction of Stalin’s rule during the 1930s and 1940s. During those decades, I reasoned, Stalinist censors would have blocked any public references to high-­level debates over the organization of Soviet research and development, especially the tradeoffs between military and nonmilitary uses of scientific research. Then my dissertation supervisor urged me to write a historical chapter on the Stalin era as the background for my chapters on the post-­Stalin years. Lo and behold, when I delved into the primary Soviet sources for these years, I found extensive published evidence that many of the technological malfunctions of the Soviet system in the 1960s were already visible under Stalin and were already being publicly debated, including, obliquely, the relative benefits of military and nonmilitary scientific research. This discovery immediately changed my assessment of whether recent Soviet efforts at reform could eliminate those long-­standing malfunctions. But without my advisor’s suggestion I would have overlooked this evidence entirely, because I assumed it did not exist. A much more consequential example of intellectual blinders comes from the history of political thought. For centuries, the reigning view was that the proper concern of Western political philosophy was the rights and obligations of human beings: “man,” for short. At first glance, using the ambiguous word “man” for “human” may seem like a minor case of linguistic imprecision. But in practice, this ambiguity masked a set of profoundly important political issues. For more than two millennia most Western philosophers assumed that the only worthy subject of political philosophy was “man,” in practice, the human male. As a result, the political circumstances of most women were excluded from discussion by an act of definition. Women did not count as political actors.16 The family was their proper sphere of activity, and the realm of the family was “nonpolitical.” Hence the rights and obligations of women as individual human beings, and the exercise of power inside families, were not suitable subjects for philosophical examination. As Susan M. Okin has demonstrated, this

Perception and Misperception in Life and Scholarship 23

philosophical outlook prevailed in the West beginning with classical Greece.17 And only gradually, during the past half-­century, have we understood how consequential this assumption has been—­above all, because it usually has been accepted unthinkingly as a self-­evident truth. Preconceptions of this kind have had profound consequences not only in social thought but in the natural sciences as well.18 In short, intuitive concepts play a decisive role in our perception of both society and nature. Neither human society nor nonhuman nature exists as a detached reality “out there,” separate from our own internal mental processes of perception and analysis.19 Our acquired models of reality can obscure extremely significant elements of the world in which we live, and the intellectual effects of this situation can never be escaped entirely. But that is no excuse for intellectual defeatism. These masking effects can be substantially reduced through reflective practices of self-­observation, which help us view the workings of our own minds in context and adjust our understanding of the outside world accordingly.20 The first step toward adjusting for these masking effects is to understand the development of our apparatus of scholarly perception. What are its historical and sociological origins, and how is it changing today? The next two chapters address these questions.

II

 | Social Science and History To see the limitations of a discipline—­any discipline—­requires a perspective developed at least partly outside that discipline. —­Barry Schwartz If, at the beginning of any discipline’s self-­definition, it undertakes to distinguish itself from another, “false” version of itself, that difference is always going to come back to haunt it. —­Marjorie Garber If science aspires to escape the limits of surface observation and prejudice, historical understanding of the conditions and trajectories of scientific work can be as valuable as theoretical frameworks and research methods. —­Craig Calhoun [W]hen you dig deep down, economists are scared to death of being sociologists. —­Charles Schultze

At first glance, the words “social science” and “history” may seem clear. But each term has several different meanings that regularly cause confusion. You have freely chosen to become a social scientist, but like all other social scientists, you are also a product of history. To truly understand your chosen field of specialization, you must appreciate how the realms of social science and history have evolved and interacted over time. You must also understand how shifting concepts of nature have shaped your intuitions about what is given and what you must explain.

T

he term “social science” is deceptively exact. The idea of studying society scientifically originated in Europe around the start of the nineteenth century. Later in the century, thinkers concerned with this pursuit began to speak of the “social sciences” in the plural, which suggested that there were multiple methods of studying society and implicitly posed the question of how these different methods of study were related to one another.1* Around 1900, the modern social ­science disciplines, such as political science, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and geography, began to be

24

Social Science and History

institutionalized in separate university departments and professional associations.2 This pattern of organization resulted from the ongoing professionalization of scholarship in all fields of learning, ranging from physics and chemistry to linguistics and art history. This process of specialization differentiated the natural sciences from the social sciences, but it did not resolve the thorny question of how nonhuman nature and human society are linked.3 Of all the relationships among the various types of specialized knowledge, the connections between history and the social sciences are the most important for you to understand. When I asked members of my PhD seminar to comment on a draft of this book, one student suggested that I highlight the relationship between history and social science. The theme stood out in her mind; she remembered the session at which we discussed it as being both stimulating and confusing. And no wonder: the relationship is confusing. It is fundamentally important to doing sophisticated social research, and it is mind-­bendingly complex. One helpful way to think about it is to reflect on the historical emergence and differentiation of social science into separate disciplines. That’s because each discipline has its own distinctive history. In recent decades, intellectual historians have shed new light on the emergence and evolution of specialized academic fields.4 One of their most important conclusions is that the social ­science disciplines are best thought of as human projects rather than “natural” categories that automatically assumed a certain form.5

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

As you pursue your career as a social researcher, three points about the processes of scholarly specialization and disciplinary development are vital. First, scholarly disciplines grow through social processes that depend not only on the intellectual efforts of individual researchers but on the particular historical context in which the researchers work. Put differently, researchers’ social and cultural environment affects their choice of research topics and how they frame and prioritize those topics.6 For example, before World War II the study of the USSR received relatively little attention from American scholars, but after the war the onset of the US-­Soviet geopolitical competition gave research on the Soviet Bloc a much higher priority among American social scientists.7 Similarly, for two decades after the war, US political scientists paid remarkably little attention to developments in what we later learned to call the Third World or developing world. Only when

25

26 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

indigenous national-­liberation struggles undercut Western imperial control and made the Third World a locus of Soviet-­American geopolitical competition did scholarly horizons gradually expand to encompass these neglected regions.8 A more recent example of contextual influence on the work of social scientists comes from US domestic affairs. During the decade of buoyant American economic optimism following the collapse of European communism, US scholars paid little attention to the political aspects of domestic economic inequality. By the end of the next decade, however, the politics of inequality had become a major focus of research, due partly to the bitter public debate over the destructive consequences of the 2008–­ 2009 financial crisis.9 The second key point about scholarly specialization and disciplinary growth is that the various disciplines are not neatly divided from one another. They overlap, and the relations among them ebb and flow. They are “not what philosophers call natural kinds. The academic disciplines do not carve knowledge at the joints, and they did not drop down out of God’s blue sky. . . . [They] were constructed at a particular historical moment, and teachers and students in the twenty-­first-­century university are the heirs of that moment.”10 In fact, topical specialists within separate disciplines often have more in common with their specialized counterparts in other disciplines than with fellow members of their own discipline.11* It follows that the patterns of interaction among disciplines vary across historical periods and from one national context to another.12 You can see such effects by comparing the distinctive developmental patterns of political studies in the United States and in Europe. It’s no accident that the idea of political science—­meaning the investigation of political phenomena modeled on the style of the natural sciences—­has become more deeply entrenched in the United States than in most of Europe. There, many scholars still prefer the concept of political studies, because they regard the study of history and the study of politics as more closely aligned intellectually than do many American scholars.13 To a significant extent, European and American social scientists also differ over the intellectual boundaries and overlap between political science and economics.14 The third key point about specialization and disciplinary growth is that researchers in the various social sciences must decide whether to focus their analyses on sociopolitical change or sociopolitical constancy.15 Of course, no investigation of societal dynamics can be conducted if researchers assume that everything remains constant. Nor can meaningful research of this type be conducted if we assume that everything in our field of view is changing simultaneously at the same rate. Within these limits, however,

Social Science and History

we must decide how much attention to devote to change and how much to constancy.16 This, in turn, depends on our views about social reality and intellectual progress in the social sciences. We will examine this matter more closely in chapter 4. But before we do, we must consider the general interaction between the social sciences and history.

WHAT IS HISTORY?

What is “history”? The word can mean many different things. It can refer to past events such as the American Civil War or the Protestant Reformation. Alternatively, it can refer to surviving records and other evidence connected with those events, such as published accounts of US congressional debates on the eve of the Civil War or the writings of Martin Luther and his contemporaries at the time of his break with the Roman Catholic Church.17 A third meaning of history is written accounts that claim to be truthful and aim to explain the significance of such events in retrospect. This third meaning encompasses the writings of professional historians, but it also shades into literary and artistic depictions of the human past by many other kinds of observers.18* The remainder of this chapter focuses on analyses of the past written by professional historians.19 Many political scientists, economists, and sociologists tend to regard the work of professional historians as a storehouse of factual data useful for generating and testing social ­science theories.20* But do the writings of historians really amount to a unified compilation of knowledge about the past, as social scientists and natural scientists typically assume?21 Not at all. Rather, scholarly history is a vast constellation of variegated historical accounts that overlap and jostle each other.22* Modern histories have been written about humanity on every scale, ranging from the entire globe to the church parish, and there is no reliable way to integrate these accounts into a single unifying framework.23 To grasp this point, consider one type of history: biography. In the past, most biographies were written about prominent men and (less often) prominent women, not just because biographers gravitated to prominent personalities but because only these individuals seemed to leave behind enough documentary evidence to permit careful accounts of their lives.24 In recent decades, however, the explosion of electronic media has virtually annihilated the informational limits on biographical research.25 In advanced societies, powerful electronic devices and data systems like Google and Facebook continuously generate and preserve a massive volume of infor-

27

28 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

mation about each living individual that could in principle be turned into a separate biography of that person. What are the implications of this situation for the way you might use historical evidence in your research? Try to imagine how you as a would-­be historian might go about synthesizing the vast quantity of biographical information about millions of individuals into a single, overarching study of the country or social group to which those individuals belong. This herculean task would be completely beyond your ability—­and beyond the ability of any human being—­unless you selected a tiny sliver of information and ignored the oceans of data that remained.26 This thought experiment suggests that existing professional histories do not add up to a single meta-­account of the past; instead they are an enormous assemblage of overlapping accounts, each shaped by the criteria for selecting evidence that analysts like you choose.27 What kind of selection criteria might you pick? Broadly speaking, historical accounts can be classified according to three general features.28* One is their spatial coverage. For example, you might decide to analyze the dynamics of the Cold War in Europe, or in East Asia, or in the Middle East, or all across the globe.29 Another general feature is chronological coverage. Decisions about this matter have important implications for any causal analysis.30 For instance, you could decide to start your study of the Cold War with the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, or with Soviet tensions with the United States and Britain in 1942–­43 over the delayed opening of a western front against Nazi Germany, or with the Soviet military occupation of Poland in 1944, or with US-­Soviet political conflicts over the Marshall Plan in 1947. A third general feature of classification is thematic scope. For example, you might decide to focus your research on US diplomacy during the Cold War, or on Soviet diplomacy, or on each superpower’s military policies, or its economic policies, or its international propaganda. Even if you aren’t interested in the Cold War, these three broad ways of categorizing historical studies are still relevant to most research topics in the social sciences. You can choose the substantive focus of your research from among literally thousands of historical entities or social processes. As a political researcher, you can explore everything from state formation and dissolution, the behavior of major political leaders, the political roles of aristocracies and armies, the causes and consequences of wars, government taxation and budgeting, the operation of electoral systems and political parties, the emergence of national and ethnic identities, and much more. In the field of economics you could study government economic policies, the sources of national economic growth, the operations of financial markets,

Social Science and History

national rates and causes of inflation, international trade and financial flows, the causes of financial crises, patterns of industrial labor and employment, trends in consumer behavior, and many other topics. Whatever substantive focus you choose, you must decide on the geographical, chronological, and thematic frameworks within which to examine the topic. These decisions about delimiting the context of your study will have a major impact on the conclusions you reach, so you should not make them by default.31 Relevant facts cannot be ignored without moving from the realm of historical reasoning into the realm of fiction (or fraud). But the relevant facts can be chosen and grouped in multiple ways. Why should this matter to you? Ian Lustick has argued convincingly that social scientists who turn to historical scholarship to test their theories run a serious risk of selection bias—specifically, singling out the particular historical accounts that favor their theory and overlooking accounts that undercut it.32 Depending on the intellectual predisposition of the observer, any historical event may be situated in several different historical contexts, rather like a Venn diagram in which the event is located in the area where several circles overlap but each circle contains a unique combination of prior events and influences. These multiple contexts, in turn, can validate quite divergent perspectives on the event. Empirical research can disprove many far-­fetched interpretations of an event, but sometimes the few explanations that remain account for it with equal plausibility.33 Selection bias is a danger whenever we turn to historical evidence to generate or test social ­science theories. Although there is no definitive means of eliminating this danger, we can minimize it by familiarizing ourselves with the corpus of historical writings surrounding our chosen subject. This will enable us to discern the various perspectives that serious analysts have adopted toward that subject in the past. Naturally, we cannot become full-­fledged historians, but we can arm ourselves by consulting the plentiful stock of relevant specialized encyclopedias and review articles about our chosen subject. These research aids, which many social scientists ignore or neglect, can provide intellectual overviews of the relevant current scholarship and monographic research on our chosen subject. This broader perspective, in turn, can help us make more judicious use of historical evidence.34

WHAT IS SOCIAL SCIENCE?

If the study of history is so slippery, surely the study of political science and other social ­science disciplines must be more straightforward, mustn’t

29

30 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

it? The short answer is: no. The field of social science you have chosen as the focus of your professional career contains just as many intellectual complexities and potential pitfalls as history does. Many books and articles explore the character of the various social sciences and standards of research within them; we will circle back to this question in later chapters. The emergence of the social sciences is a distinctive feature of modernity, because they contributed to the opening of “a new horizon of expectations” about novel possibilities of societal development.35 But the social sciences themselves are hard to conceptualize accurately due to ongoing changes in their content. For now, the quickest way to grasp the problem of conceptualizing them is to consider the metaphors sometimes used to describe the various lines of social s­ tudies investigation. Working scholars use many metaphors to describe the social sciences. In English, dozens of metaphors can be used for this purpose, but here I will concentrate on three of the most common ones: building blocks, fields, and disciplines.36* Each of these three terms captures certain features of scholarly studies of the societal realm, but none of them is entirely satisfactory. Let’s take a moment to consider why this is the case for political science and some of the other social sciences. The study of history, if we count it as a semi–­social science, draws on the same metaphors, but also on a few distinctive ones.37 The notion of a discipline highlights an important aspect of scholarly endeavors: the quest for logical rigor and empirical verification. The idea of political science, economics, or sociology as a discipline suggests that researchers are bound by these scholarly standards. At the same time, the notion does not spell out the sources of intellectual discipline among researchers. Although that discipline stems partly from researchers’ own internalized commitments, some of it usually comes from outside. Who are the external authorities who are responsible for ensuring observance of disciplinary standards? How do the established authorities exercise this responsibility, and what happens when they disagree with one another, for example, in deciding which scholars to hire or promote?38 Leading researchers often have major disputes about the boundaries and methods of their discipline and its parts. For instance, some international-­relations researchers regard their studies as part of political science, but others see IR as lying outside the boundaries of political science.39 Should we therefore, perhaps, resort to the plural term, “political science disciplines”? “Field,” another commonly used term, conveys the sense that all topics within a given discipline are intellectually connected with one another, but it also has serious drawbacks. Most people who use the term do not recog-

Social Science and History

nize that it is a territorial metaphor with important unspoken implications. For example, as commonly used, the term implies the existence of clean demarcations among individual disciplinary fields and subfields. But these demarcations are actually a matter of perpetual argument among practitioners in various disciplines. Conceived in broader territorial terms, the metaphor of a field does capture one important aspect of scholarly life: struggles over the ownership of academic turf.40 But competition for control of intellectual territory is far from being the whole story about scholarly fields and how they operate. The notion of “building blocks” is another metaphor for social ­science research. Although now less common than “discipline” or “field,” this image has long been used by social scientists and historians to underscore their belief that the scholarly knowledge of society is cumulative and that each researcher makes at least a small contribution to the construction of the edifice of knowledge.41 As we will see in the following chapter, this outlook assumes the existence of a unified intellectual domain that researchers can chart in increasing detail in order to generate a progressively more sophisticated model of social reality. A unified intellectual order of this kind, however, cannot simply be assumed. On the contrary, the history of philosophy and the social sciences to date strongly suggests that there is no single intellectual scaffolding into which the building blocks of various fields and subfields can be neatly slotted.42 For these reasons, I favor discussing political science and the other social sciences in terms of their various “dimensions.” The utility of this metaphor lies in its abstract and relatively nonmaterial quality. The overall dimensions of objects can vary endlessly, because the shapes of objects can vary endlessly. Moreover, there can be many more than three dimensions, not just in the world of mathematics but also in the social sciences. Viewed in this way, the “shape” of any discipline or subdiscipline depends on the particular definition that an observer uses to decide what belongs in that disciplinary space and what does not.43 The metaphor of dimensions accommodates the fluidity and changing boundaries of various social ­science specialties that were discussed above.44 We will return to this matter in chapters 5 and 6.

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND NATURE

Finally, we should take a moment to think about the analytical significance of ideas concerning “nature.” History and the social sciences are frequently

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32 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

counterposed to the natural sciences on the assumption that the line between social and natural realities can be clearly drawn. But the matter is not so simple; the word “nature” has been described as “perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language,” and this complexity affects the way we social scientists think about our research.45 As a thoughtful researcher, you may already understand that appeals to the idea of nature play a key role in stabilizing political systems, framing political decisions, or validating economic systems. To “naturalize” means, among other things, to attribute existing circumstances or ideas to a natural realm regarded as fundamental and unchanging.46 Put differently, “naturalization imparts universality, firmness, even necessity—­in short, authority—­to the social.”47 The ideology of social Darwinism is a familiar example; the notion of an unalterable division of labor between human males and females is another; the very different notion that every human being is endowed with the same natural rights is yet another. The widespread practice of reasoning from the assumed properties of nature plays an important part in how we as scholars frame our research questions and formulate the answers. This pattern of reasoning often affects our outlooks in subconscious ways. It can subtly cause us to accept as part of the natural order social phenomena that in fact require investigation and explanation. The mental habit of assuming that the order of nature is self-­evident obscures the truth that the boundaries separating nonhuman nature, human customs, and calculated human choices are seldom clear.48 That habit exerts a decisive effect on what we accept as given and where we believe we can stop our investigations. Plentiful evidence of this effect can be found in political and economic studies, among others.49 As we shall see in later chapters, failure to recognize this reality is the root of many quarrels among social researchers. Divergent definitions of the natural underlie many social-­scientific disagreements about what constitutes a sufficient analysis or explanation.

CONCLUSION

This sketch of the character of social ­science scholarship probably strikes you as vague and unhelpful. How can you be expected to master constellations of knowledge that have such different shapes when viewed from different scholarly angles, especially if those shapes will also change with the passage of time? The short answer is that you can’t master them—­not, at least, in the sense you may have absorbed from your earlier academic train-

Social Science and History

ing. I entered graduate school under the illusion that I would steadily master one subject after another—­comparative politics, international relations, American politics, and so forth—­as I had mastered the material in my high school and college courses. And this misplaced expectation troubled me for many years afterward. As a graduate student, I experienced recurring doubt and uncertainty about whether I was learning the right things. The body of essential information was hopelessly vast, and everything in “the field” seemed amorphous and changeable. Nor did this discouraging prospect suddenly lift when I received my doctoral degree. Teaching my first courses, I was nearly paralyzed by worry about what I didn’t know. What I still didn’t understand was that the pursuit and accumulation of scholarly knowledge are an unceasing, open-­ended process. You can always learn more about your chosen subject—­and for that reason, you can never learn everything about it. Although initially unsettling, this insight is also liberating; it lifts the burden of feeling that you must know everything, a burden that is especially heavy for young scholars and new teachers. By the same token, this insight frees you to participate actively in the growth of scholarship and to enjoy the shared excitement of discovery. You can, in other words, become a full participant in the scholarly enterprise and can make those around you participants as well. Scholarly understanding begins as personal questions and knowledge in the minds of individuals; it is broadened and refined through interactions among researchers, teachers, and students.50

33

III

 | Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics It is important not to think of the embeddedness of scientific cultures in broader cultural practices as a problem of contamination. The broader cultures of modern science provide a source of metaphors and institutional practices that both inspire new research and limit its possibilities. —­D. Hess Disciplines are artificial holding patterns of inquiry whose metaphysical significance should not be overestimated. —­Steve Fuller The scaffolding supporting the work of a discipline often remains in the shadows. The infrastructure of a discipline (its institutions, organizations, funding, techniques, etc.) is a necessary, yet seldom foregrounded, aspect of knowledge production. The ways in which these structures support or hinder research effort is important, but seldom assessed. —­Charles Crothers The Chicago school [of sociology] . . . was not a thing, a fixed arrangement of social relationships or intellectual ideas that obtained at a given time. It was rather a tradition of such relationships and ideas combined with a conception of how that tradition should be reproduced over time. —­Andrew Abbott

Knowledge may be stored in libraries, but it is created through social and political processes that you should be aware of. At a certain point, your dissertation or book project will become so demanding that it will block out everything else. Even experienced researchers usually concentrate on their specialties and pay little attention to the broader social and political contexts in which they operate. But those contexts will have a major impact on your work and your success. Being aware of disciplinary and departmental dynamics will help you chart your course through the crosscurrents of academic life and make intelligent decisions about your professional future.

S

cholarship is commonly thought of as a set of proven and proposed ideas about a particular subject. Scholarship can also be viewed, however, as a social process of interaction among researchers and as a political process of

34

Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics 35

decision making inside intellectual institutions.1* Researchers and teachers rarely spend much time analyzing the broad social and political contexts in which they wrestle with scholarly ideas. We have our hands full just trying to read the latest publications, make our own modest contributions to the growth of knowledge, and teach students. But the social and institutional aspects of scholarship strongly influence the development of the ideas in any field of specialization. For a dissertation writer seeking employment, the market for academic jobs is an especially tangible manifestation of this reality, but to understand your academic situation and career options you must pay close attention to other contextual factors as well.2

SCHOLARSHIP AS SOCIAL PROCESS

Specialization is a central feature—­arguably the central feature—­of the growth of modern scholarship in the humanities, natural, and social sciences.3 Thanks to this process, distinct academic disciplines and subdisciplines began to crystallize in the late nineteenth century, and they have continued to proliferate up to the present day.4 In the United States the social sciences developed and ramified through the creation of university departments, each devoted to a separate discipline such as economics, political science, or sociology.5 The disciplines that resulted are different from one another partly because they privilege different scholarly objectives, different means of analyzing social reality, and different kinds of evidence.6 This process of differentiation into a widening spectrum of disciplines and subdisciplines facilitates the accumulation of specialized scholarly knowledge. But it is also a device for circumventing disagreements about what should be studied and how it should be analyzed.7 The intellectual complexity of scholarly disciplines makes them especially difficult to characterize accurately. As mentioned in the previous chapter, scholars frequently assume that their chosen disciplines are clearly defined intellectual containers, sometimes even that they are building blocks in the edifice of knowledge. In truth, however, the pursuit of scholarship is much closer to being what Andrew Abbott has called a “chaos of disciplines.”8 Despite their distinct labels, there are no clear-­cut lines of demarcation among the social ­science disciplines (or, for that matter, among the natural sciences).9 To put it differently, adjacent disciplines are separated by “borderlands” rather than borders. Like nations and other large-­scale social phenomena, disciplines cannot be seen. They are, rather, conceptual approxi-

36 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

mations of extremely complex intellectual realities that are continuously shifting and evolving on the basis of new events and new research. Like nations, they are the ongoing “projects” of leading individuals and elite actors. That is why it is especially hard to avoid stereotypes and inaccuracies when discussing them. It is also why fellow scholars seeking to chart the trajectory of their shared discipline sometimes talk past each other.10 A personal example will illustrate this point. A few years ago the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where I taught for many years, was seeking to fill a new professorship in international political economy. During the faculty meeting that reviewed the short-­listed candidates, one professor described a particular candidate as a leading researcher in international political economy; a few minutes later, another professor remarked that the same candidate was “not really” an international political economist. Such disagreements are far from rare, and they show the fuzziness of disciplinary definitions commonly assumed to be clear-­cut.11* Just as new disciplines and subdisciplines are a means of deepening specialized knowledge, hybrid fields that span standard disciplinary boundaries also produce distinctive insights. Think of political economy, political sociology, economic sociology, political psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, political geography, political anthropology, and so on. Problem-­oriented interdisciplinary research that straddles the conventional disciplines is often especially innovative, and at major universities it has been institutionalized in a large number of cross-­ disciplinary research centers.12 One common type of interdisciplinary center investigates a particular geographical region or country from several disciplinary angles. In the United States between the 1950s and 1980s, area-­ studies centers of this kind bourgeoned.13 Interdisciplinary research, however, does not usually produce higher-­ level syntheses that transcend the disciplines in question.14 Quite the contrary: Although hybrid fields frequently contribute to the enlargement of human knowledge, they also contribute to its continuing fragmentation through the proliferation of specialized intellectual domains.15* To be sure, the compelling idea of the essential unity of all scientific and scholarly knowledge still plays an important rhetorical role in debates over the proper relationships among disciplines and especially in debates over the social legitimation of the scientific enterprise as a whole.16 This idea is reinforced by the common notion that all of science is united around a single “scientific method.” But this idea is false.17 The supposition that the social sciences will become intellectually unified in the future is no more than an

Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics 37

article of faith tacitly perpetuated despite more than a century of accumulating evidence to the contrary.18 Deepening fragmentation is a distinguishing feature of modern knowledge.19* In consequence, the relationships among the disciplines are fluid and broadly nonhierarchical. This is true even though some disciplines usually enjoy greater social prestige than others—for example, economics compared with the other social sciences. Disciplinary relationships are impossible to sum up in any single model. Interactions among disciplines and subdisciplines can be characterized in terms ranging from isolation, rivalry, and warfare to coexistence, cooperation, and alliance, plus many other patterns. Each of these images captures some of the truth in certain times and places.20 Taken alone, however, none of them adequately describes relations among researchers in the social ­science disciplines and subdisciplines. Depending on the specific circumstances, the ongoing process of disciplinary development and proliferation takes many different forms. One pattern of disciplinary development occurs in isolation, without connection to other fields. Critics of academic isolation often lament the “stovepipes” that allegedly seal off adjacent disciplines or subdisciplines, thereby preventing fruitful interaction among them.21 Similarly, advocates of interdisciplinary projects often describe those projects as cooperative efforts to remedy harmful intellectual isolation.22 Scholarly isolation certainly exists in many instances, due partly to the sheer burden of charting the torrent of new research within just one discipline. It can also result if an insular ethos dominates a particular part of the academic world.23 But isolation most commonly affects relations between disciplines focused on topics that have no direct bearing on one another, for example chemistry and comparative politics.24 The level of interchange among neighboring social ­science fields is ordinarily much larger. The problem of isolation is frequently overstated by working scholars due to the conventions of academic rhetoric and an understandable desire to play up the novelty of their own research.25 Although entrepreneurial scholars frequently champion the idea of making new connections among disciplines, this process has an unavoidable epistemological limit. Calls to increase interdisciplinary links are more than a century old; they have been around since the start of the disciplines themselves.26 Another form of scholarly interaction is conflict. Observers of efforts to delineate the boundaries of disciplines and subdisciplines frequently refer to turf battles, secession, or outright war among scholars. Turf battles, probably the most common form of conflict, occur when individual scholars or scholarly groups compete for a piece of intellectual terrain both sides can

38 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

plausibly claim they should control. After the collapse of European communism, for example, intense turf battles broke out between longtime specialists on communist affairs and newly arrived scholars skilled in particular techniques, such as survey research, that could now be usefully applied to postcommunist countries.27 Scholarly secession occurs when the advocates of an emerging field of study battle successfully to separate it from a long-­ established discipline or subdiscipline. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for example, the standard-­bearers of political science had to struggle to separate their new field from the scholarly study of history, whose champions had earlier had to fight free from the overlordship of philosophy.28 Conversely, academic imperialism occurs when ambitious scholars champion an emerging discipline or subdiscipline and strive to bring established fields or subfields under its control. For example, a few recent proponents of the “new institutionalism” in political analysis have forthrightly stated their intention to take over other subfields of political science.29 Likewise, some economic thinkers have been criticized for a similar lack of intellectual restraint toward other disciplines.30 There are, on the other hand, many forms of cooperation among individual scholars and groups of scholars whose intellectual interests coincide. This is, after all, one of the chief advantages of organizing the pursuit of knowledge along disciplinary lines. Networking is a key feature of the growth of individual disciplines and subdisciplines, as scholars exchange ideas and build on each other’s work. This is likely the most common form of scholarly interaction, or at least it should be, since converging research interests sometimes spark intense professional rivalries as well. Such cross-­ disciplinary attractions contribute to the centrifugal tendency to form new specialties within individual disciplines and subdisciplines.31* Emulation, a looser form of cooperation, occurs when the practitioners of one discipline try to apply ideas and techniques imported selectively from other disciplines, especially disciplines with high intellectual prestige. After the Second World War, for instance, many political scientists hoped to advance their discipline by emulating physics, whose prestige had skyrocketed due to its extraordinary contributions to the US victory in the war.32 Economists, having taken this path earlier, continued to follow it.33 More recently, political scientists who favor the rational-­choice approach to political research have taken as their model the view held by mainstream economists that individuals make decisions by systematically calculating relative gains and losses in monetary terms.34 Is one of these patterns of conflict and cooperation prevalent in scholarly life? It’s hard to be sure. A moment’s reflection suggests that most

Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics 39

scholars and scholarly disciplines are usually engaged in several of these forms of interaction at the same time.35* So long as the various types of interaction do not go beyond “civilized” norms of academic politics, all can have constructive intellectual effects. Conflicts, including turf wars and rivalries, can contribute just as much as collaborative relations to the advancement of scholarship. Although they may provoke bad feelings, they may also provide powerful incentives for researchers to accelerate and enrich their personal research programs.36 The key issue concerning turf wars and rivalries is whether they are conducted primarily on the basis of intellectual argumentation or on the basis of personal favoritism and ad hominem attacks.37* What are the implications of this discussion for you as a researcher in the making? First, you should begin creating a personal network well before you plunge into your dissertation. Discussing your tentative ideas and hypotheses with other researchers is a valuable means of sharpening them; the only cost is that you must be prepared to acknowledge your own uncertainties. Second, you should be willing to serve as a sounding board for other dissertation researchers. Although doing this will sometimes seem like a diversion from your own project, it will hone your critical skills and make your colleagues more willing to do the same for you. Third, networking may serendipitously help you find a job.38 Fourth, in the longer term it will provide you with valuable intellectual allies. Some historians of science have argued that connections of this kind are an important means of successfully promoting new ideas to a broader scholarly audience.39 At a minimum, they are an important source of intellectual esprit for you and other scholars with similar interests.

SCHOLARSHIP, POLITICS, AND ACADEMIC AUTHORITY

The fluid “chaos of disciplines” makes the formal structures that institutionalize the disciplines exceptionally important.40 Precisely because it is so difficult to establish an agreed demarcation of boundaries among disciplines, the formal institutional boundaries among departments usually remain fixed. The durability of this system of autonomous university departments is also illustrated by my experience as a member of the Johns Hopkins Doctor of Philosophy Board.41* There are occasional exceptions to this pattern, but not many.42 At major universities the disciplinary departments generally have similar names, and they remain the single most important academic unit in making decisions about faculty appoint-

40 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

ments and budget allocations.43 Although efforts to subordinate one discipline to another do occur, these efforts almost always fail. The vision of a hierarchy of scholarly disciplines may be alluring, but it seems impossible to achieve in practice. Attempts to establish such a hierarchy have repeatedly come to naught.44* In consequence, university departments, disciplinary associations, and disciplinary journals play a critical role in determining exactly which scholarly activities are judged valuable and which are not.45 The leaders of these disciplinary institutions acquire real power over an intellectual domain and its practitioners. Departmental chairs and faculty committees have the authority to determine what kind of scholarly work warrants the hiring of new faculty members, as well as which faculty members will be promoted and obtain tenure.46* As editors and referees for scholarly journals and university presses, senior faculty members also wield considerable influence over which books and articles are published. This power to set standards of professional accomplishment is roughly analogous to the authority of individual professors to decide which students will pass or fail. In addition, as advisors to foundations and other funding agencies, senior academics influence which types of research receive material support and which do not. Compared with the governmental authority of presidents and legislatures, this academic form of authority may seem modest at first glance, but it is not. Its exercise can launch the career of an aspiring researcher or end it, meaning that this power is pivotally important to your professional success. Viewed from a different angle, this form of authority is also important for the welfare of society as a whole. In effect, decisions about hiring, tenure, and research funding are also decisions about the nature of the truths that universities should seek to discover and disseminate. Does this mean that the main determinant of your professional future will be politics, even if by another name? The answer, in most cases, is probably no. There are two contrasting views of the relationship between decision making in government and decision making in academic life. At one extreme, many academics view decision making in social science as the opposite of decision making in politics. At the other extreme, some academic observers have asserted that there is no difference between the two: the cultural deconstruction of scholarly knowledge shows that everything in the academic world is “politics.”47 Academic reality is far more complex than either view allows. The vital issue is not whether politics is present in academic life, but what kind of politics is present and how much of it there is.48 As one observer explains,

Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics 41

conscientious scholars cooperate with one another in a metaphorical sense even when they argue, so long as the argument remains focused on substance.49 Ordinary politics intrudes into academic life when standards of academic merit are overridden by personal connections or other nonprofessional criteria in making decisions about faculty hiring, promotion, or research. In the USSR during the 1930s, for example, it was possible for researchers in many debates over matters of academic substance to defeat their intellectual competitors by charging that these rivals harbored “Trotskyite” views at odds with Stalinist ideology. During the 1950s some American scholars came under similar pressures based on the charge that they were communists or communist sympathizers, although the impact of such witch hunts on academic life was considerably less severe in the United States than in the USSR.50 In the period since the 1950s, American academic life has exhibited fluctuating levels of politics of this variety. Conflicts over “political correctness” have roiled college and university campuses, reaching the boiling point in the 1960s and sharply intensifying again since the 1990s, most recently in conflicts over the teaching of so-­called critical race theory. These conflicts have substantially weakened the standing of higher educational institutions in the eyes of the public, but despite the worsening political environment surrounding universities, thus far few professors have lost their jobs as a result.51 A century ago things were quite different, not least because the threats to faculty autonomy came as much from inside colleges and universities as from outside. In those days, university and college presidents frequently made academic appointments and fired faculty members on their own. It was relatively easy for them to appoint their preferred candidates and punish faculty members who expressed unorthodox social or political views, especially views that offended wealthy university trustees.52 Over the span of the next half-­century, however, faculty bodies acquired a larger say in university governance, and academic departments obtained control over the hiring of entry-­level faculty members.53 This did not eliminate favoritism and bias from these hiring decisions, but the favoritism that existed was practiced by departmental chairpersons and faculty members rather than university and college administrators.54 Recent sociological studies indicate that the incidence of favoritism and insider deals in the appointment of college faculty diminished substantially between the 1950s and the 1980s.55* Formal procedures for advertising positions and evaluating applicants for tenure-­track positions have become more rigorous now than they were several decades ago.56 This sug-

42 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

gests that the exercise of academic authority may have become more legitimate, in the sense of adhering to procedures designed to review such candidates systematically and without personal favoritism. On the other hand, the dramatic long-­term rise in the overall share of “contingent” faculty members—­that is, PhD holders teaching on short-­term contracts without any prospect of winning tenure—­has greatly increased the vulnerability of these individuals to favoritism and other forms of arbitrary treatment by the hiring authorities.57 For that large population of higher-­educational faculty members, personal politics has become an abiding worry. It goes without saying that even in the best of circumstances, professors often disagree about academic choices, including decisions about hiring and promoting other professors. And those differences can produce what might be called a higher form of academic politics in tenure-­track hiring and other academic decisions. The key issue is how such disagreements are handled. To yield a result consistent with the scholarly ethos, these disagreements must be resolved through intellectual debate rather than by ad hominem arguments. Sometimes the disagreements may have to be resolved through the exercise of administrative authority by departmental chairpersons or deans, but such decisions can be regarded as legitimate only if they follow thorough discussion and debate among qualified faculty members and reflect the prevailing view among those faculty members rather than a purely administrative victory of one faction over another.58 The problem, of course, is that the line separating professional judgments from political attitudes is hazy. That is one reason why public controversies about the political views of American scholars have simmered and sometimes exploded. These eruptions occur most commonly at times of intense public controversy over government policies that have a connection to the academic field in question.59 Such flare-­ups are probably most common in the social sciences and humanities, which have an obvious bearing on issues of public policy, but they occur in the natural sciences and engineering as well.60 In the United States, some critics have charged that university and college professors intentionally instill their own left-­wing political bias in their graduate students. Research does show there are important differences in political values among established scholars from various disciplines, and that American social scientists tend to be more left-­leaning than other kinds of scholars and American citizens in general.61 A strong case can be made, however, that the political attitudes of doctoral candidates in the social sciences are a result of self-­selection before they enter graduate

Scholarship as Social Process and as Politics 43

school rather than a consequence of disciplinary socialization after they arrive.62 Moreover, there are good epistemological reasons to argue that a liberal outlook is inherently more compatible with social-­scientific styles of thought than is a conservative outlook.63 Seen from this angle, social ­science education is largely free of intentional professorial attempts to instill political ideologies in graduate students, especially because research shows that liberal faculty members as a group put more stress on creative thought than do conservative faculty members.64 Of course, even if this benign view is accurate, it is still desirable to have a wide range of attitudes represented within the faculty, so as to minimize the unthinking dissemination of political biases. I am not offering a blanket endorsement of current university pedagogical standards; far from it.65 But the way to pursue the minimization of biases is to recruit new applicants from a broader range of cultural and economic backgrounds, not to select them according to their personal political views.66* Historically, many obstacles impeded successful job applications from qualified women and members of racial and ethnic minorities.67 These obstacles have been dramatically reduced during the past two decades—­ especially where women are concerned—­but not eliminated.68 In any case, the steps taken to deal with this problem are fundamentally different from efforts to instill left-­leaning values into incoming doctoral students.69 Today the recruitment of graduate students is not usually distorted by conscious political biases among professors and academic administrators. Whether the same is true for the recruitment of faculty members is harder to say, but there is some reason to believe that candidates’ personal outlooks play a bigger role in choosing new senior faculty members than in hiring younger ones on the tenure track.70 It is worth adding that during the past two decades some philanthropists have funded autonomous research centers in which faculty appointments are subject to improper influence from beyond the university.71 But these efforts seem to be focused on influencing senior appointments rather than entry-­level hiring decisions.

SOME PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Once you recognize that scholarship is not only about ideas but also has important social and political dimensions, how will this insight help you? In the short run, it will broaden your perspective on your own research interests and objectives, and it will underscore the vital importance of interacting frequently with other doctoral students and scholars to refine

44 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

your ideas. As noted above, a scholar’s success in establishing the superiority of a particular view over rival views may depend partly on the presence of intellectual allies willing to promote it. In the longer run, this awareness may help you negotiate the shoals of your first job search and later land a promotion and possibly tenure. A sharper sense of academic context may also alert you to the negative side effects of American universities’ growing reliance on nominally objective criteria and procedures for selecting new faculty members. Although systematic hiring procedures may have reduced the impact of personal favoritism and prejudice on tenure-­track hiring decisions, impersonal selection criteria can bias hiring decisions toward applicants whose methodological preferences mirror those of the hiring department.72 This, in turn, can work against healthy intellectual diversity in individual social science departments and within the professoriate as a whole. We will return to this matter in later chapters.

IV

 | Progress in the Social Sciences Real and Imaginary [T]he defining characteristic of modern life is social change—­not onward or upward, but forward, and toward a future always in the making. —­Louis Menand Just because two experts disagree doesn’t mean that one of them is right. —­Mark White Although it is widely believed and taught that good science proceeds according to the steps enumerated in common descriptions of “the scientific method,” there are all manner of sciences, including several in both natural and physical science (not to mention social science), that proceed otherwise. Requiring political science to be scientific in one way is, then, a narrow understanding of what it means to be scientific and to do science. —­Dvora Yanow One might regard it as strange that a science could still remain “immature” some century and a half after its foundation, or that it could be under the thrall of a long-­surpassed Newtonian form of physics. . . . We are faced here with an extremely powerful historical structure indeed, a stubborn intellectual founding myth whose abandonment seems equivalent, in the eyes of most American social scientists, to giving up the project of seeking exact social knowledge altogether. —­William H. Sewell Jr.

As researchers, most of us like to think of ourselves as empiricists who favor building theory through steady scholarly progress and are opposed to utopianism. But your personal assumptions about the nature of social knowledge can make you a utopian, whatever you choose to call yourself. This apparent paradox may seem irrelevant to your current studies, but it will influence your whole academic career, as well as any contribution you make beyond academia. What kind of personal progress will you strive for?

45

46 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

S

urely progress must occur in the social sciences. Otherwise, why have we chosen to commit so much of our time and energy—­our lives, even—­to this scholarly enterprise? Ever since the eighteenth century, human progress has been a subject of passionate argument among social thinkers, including arguments about whether it exists at all.1* When you think about scholarly progress in your chosen discipline, it’s worth remembering the intensity and persistence of these disputes about progress in the larger sense.2 Progress in the study of society is extremely important, not just for scholars but for everyone. Without at least some progress in the social sciences, citizens in the United States and elsewhere would lack the ability to measure current conditions against philosophical ideals and would be deprived of the opportunity to act in pursuit of those ideals. Moreover, societal leaders would lack essential information for assessing problems and devising policy responses. This claim holds for political science, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. In economics, for example, all the crucial data series that guide national and corporate policymaking were created during the past one hundred years, including GNP-­GDP figures, which began to be compiled around the time of World War II.3 Even though decision makers sometimes ignore or misinterpret available scholarly insights, a thought experiment in which they had no access to such perspectives suggests that the quality of government and economic management in modern societies could be much worse than it is.4 In the United States we recently had a full-­scale political experiment that put this proposition to a test. The egregious policy errors of the Trump administration show what deep harm can be done by leaders who rule without regard for available scientific and social knowledge.5 On the other hand, progress in the study of society has certain limits that any working scholar should recognize in order to set research goals that are feasible. There are epistemological as well as practical limits on what we can learn about societal reality, and ignoring these limits is a recipe for self-­delusion and perhaps pain.6 Although this philosophical issue may seem esoteric, it isn’t. In veiled form, it is the underlying source of your personal struggle to decide what can be said to be true and what cannot. In other words, it is directly relevant to your future. The type of disciplinary progress you choose to pursue will have an enduring impact on your life, personal as well as professional.

PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES—REAL AND IMAGINARY 47

PERSPECTIVES ON DISCIPLINARY PROGRESS

Since the mid-­twentieth century, scholars have offered very different assessments of progress in the social sciences.7 Professional optimism in the United States peaked during the two postwar decades, a period when the United States enjoyed unprecedented international dominance and the US higher educational system underwent an equally dramatic expansion that gave American social scientists unparalleled career opportunities.8* Starting in the late 1960s, however, domestic upheavals associated with racial injustice and the Vietnam War reverberated in all branches of the social sciences.9 Since then, at least two movements in political science have argued that the discipline has failed to address vital intellectual issues due to an uncritical acceptance of the political status quo.10 These were the Movement for a New Political Science, launched during the crisis of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the “Mr. Perestroika” controversy that broke out in 2000–­2001, inspired partly by the collapse of European communism.11 Today, debates about these matters continue in political science, although less passionately.12 Trends that are roughly similar have occurred in other disciplines. In the field of economics, the Western “stagflation” of the 1970s and the financial crisis of 2008–­9 have fueled the reappraisal of established orthodoxies, with varying intellectual effects. Recent critics have charged that the discipline has become preoccupied with manipulating abstract economic models and has underestimated the harmful societal effects of unregulated markets.13* Sociology and anthropology likewise have experienced outbreaks of internal controversy.14 Overall, the strength of these professional doubts has led some historians to conclude that political and cultural trends have called the whole social ­science “project” into question, even though some later historians have concluded that the long-­term disciplinary impact of these controversies has been modest.15 At a minimum, these debates show that scholars disagree about what the primary purpose of their chosen discipline should be. Some scholars have favored the instrumental view that social research should make government or other organizations more effective, whereas others have argued that it should take a critical stance highlighting the discrepancies between societal realities and philosophical ideals.16 Members of a third group, possibly the smallest, have maintained that knowledge of the societal realm is inherently valuable and should be pursued for its own sake. Similar disagreements about purpose have manifested themselves in virtually all the social ­science disciplines.17 Naturally, these disagreements over the proper relationship

48 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

between knowledge and practical affairs have produced divergent appraisals of each discipline’s successes and failures. An additional complication is that scholars have disagreed in principle about the kind of knowledge that social ­science researchers can hope to produce, no matter what the motive. That is, they have disagreed about matters of epistemology. This state of affairs is hardly surprising. US social scientists, perhaps more than their counterparts in other countries, have always had far-­ reaching intellectual ambitions. To justify those ambitions, many leading scholars have counterposed evidence-­based social science against utopian ideologies of various sorts. Viewed from this angle, social ­science research appears to be an embodiment of American pragmatism.18 But this view is too simple. Ideologies come in different shapes and sizes. Some “macro” ideologies, such as Marxism-­Leninism, have declined markedly in Europe and North America during the past quarter-­century, but others persist in ethnocentric forms of nationalism, and “micro” ideologies covering narrower intellectual domains have proved equally resilient.19 One example is the “market fundamentalism” that has encouraged several Western governments to respond to severe economic slowdowns with austerity budgets that go against the views of many economists and actually make the crises worse.20 Regarded from this angle, political science and the other social sciences have sometimes contained a persistent strain of utopianism, not so much about what kind of progress is possible in the real world of practical politics and economics, but about what kind of progress is possible in the world of ideas.21 To put the matter differently, intellectual utopianism sometimes masquerades as empiricism. This empiricist utopianism rests on an uncritical faith that intellectual progress occurs simply through the accumulation and manipulation of empirical data. Of course, progress does occur in the social sciences—­despite what a few naysayers claim—­and new data play an important part in the process.22 Today we know far more about societal realities and trends across the globe than we did a half-­century ago, and this expanded body of knowledge is highly significant.23 In addition to this geographical broadening, our knowledge has been deepened by close investigations of the components of modern social life, including survey research conducted on a vast scale, which gives texture and substance to previous abstractions like “society” and “public opinion.”24 But some scholars are too inclined to assume that progress occurs almost automatically through rapid growth of the volume of published research. This view may be especially pronounced among young scholars, who usually are less jaded and less familiar with the persistence of recurring disciplinary

PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES—REAL AND IMAGINARY 49

debates than older scholars are. In any case, there are serious reasons to doubt that it is true. Consider, for instance, the question of the intellectual value of new books and articles relative to old ones. Like most scholars, social scientists tend to focus on the newest publications. This tendency is reflected in a major handbook of political science published in the mid-­1990s. An analysis by the editors showed that more than half the works cited by the contributing authors had been published in the previous decade, and two-­ thirds had been published in the previous two decades.25 This preference can plausibly be justified on the grounds that social scientists who wrote in earlier decades were unable to take account of pivotal events and discoveries that occurred subsequently. In extreme forms, however, it leads to damaging “professional amnesia” about previous scholarship.26 The work of professional historians illustrates the problem of unfamiliarity with earlier scholarship. Although the relationship between history and the social sciences is a matter of perennial debate, the work of historians can be assumed to be indicative of social scientists’ practices in this respect; of all the disciplines that study society, historians should be the group least likely to misperceive the relationship between recent and earlier scholarship in their discipline. But even historians tend to exaggerate the novelty of new scholarly publications. In research on American history, for example, scholars who championed the “new history” in the United States from the 1970s onward were generally unaware of “outlier” historians who had previously advocated approaches similar to theirs. They did not recognize, for example, that the “new social history” had been practiced by some pioneering scholars nearly a half-­century before.27 In other words, advocates of the new history unwittingly injected an exaggerated notion of progress into accounts of the development of their own discipline. It is hard to believe that this kind of misunderstanding is not equally or more widespread among political scientists, economists, and other social researchers. As a profession, political scientists in America have shown a strong tendency to view the development of the discipline within a progressive narrative that stresses “revolutionary” breakthroughs to new forms of knowledge and heavily discounts past achievements.28* And political science, along with most adjacent disciplines, has made no serious effort to assess its achievements systematically from a historical angle.29 In 2003, for example, a careful survey of graduate-­level syllabi and reading lists in comparative politics at major American universities found almost no coverage of the history of the subdiscipline.30 Similar deficiencies appear to be even more pronounced in economics. Economists—­especially in

50 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

America, but also elsewhere—­jettisoned the study of economic history several decades ago, and most of them appear to have neglected the intellectual history of their present-­day discipline just as completely.31* A subtler variety of misunderstanding can occur when social scientists discuss disciplinary “classics.”32 In political science, for example, some evidence suggests that contemporary scholars are not simply unacquainted with many of these works, but also misinterpret the ones they think they know. A case in point is Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, one of the foundational texts in the development of American scholarship on international relations.33 A careful analysis of recent discussions of this work shows that a sizeable number of IR scholars have reduced it to a set of simplistic formulas supposedly embodying the “realist school” of IR theory.34 In fact, however, Politics among Nations is a sophisticated work rich in intellectual nuance. The discrepancy suggests that many of the people who have cited the work read it long ago and have not taken the trouble to refamiliarize themselves with its arguments.35 Instead, they have made the “realist paradigm” into a straw man that helps validate their own research.36* Something similar seems to have occurred in modern economists’ formulaic misrepresentation of one of their illustrious forerunners, Adam Smith.37 This kind of simplification is understandable but not pardonable. The rapid proliferation of publications and postings leaves any scholar hard-­ pressed to stay abreast of the new work in his or her own specialty, not to mention earlier work and work in related fields. A complementary but less flattering explanation is the desire to underscore the originality of our own scholarship. Reducing prior scholarship to a few formulas helps make our own scholarly output seem more sophisticated and novel than it is. In any case, whatever motivates this practice, you should resist it, because it is harmful to genuine scholarly progress.38 An excessive emphasis on the weaknesses of earlier scholarship means that we lose the benefit of innovative research and insights produced by our intellectual forebears, and it understates the genuine accomplishments of the social ­science disciplines to date.39 Reinventing the wheel is no more constructive in scholarship than in any other endeavor.40 At this point, it’s necessary to address the issue of progress in history writing. Although many social scientists believe they have “left history behind” intellectually, historians themselves have pursued disciplinary progress of a certain kind, and massive evidence shows that they have succeeded in ways that are often underestimated. During the past two centuries, the methods of researching and writing professional history have undergone enormous improvements, and it would be a mistake to over-

PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES—REAL AND IMAGINARY 51

look this cardinal fact.41* These extensive refinements have not produced a single, definitive narrative of humankind, or of nations, or of any other social entities. But they have excluded (or at least undermined) a vast range of national and religious mythologies that previously reigned unchallenged as self-­evident truths. This is a major achievement, and it should not be ignored by social scientists inclined to exalt the standing of their own disciplines vis-­à-­vis historical studies. A final reason for tempering optimistic expectations of sweeping progress in the social sciences is the disciplines’ long track record. Although many contemporary scholars may not know it, social scientists have been striving to build systematic knowledge of social reality for nearly a century and a half.42 The efforts of many generations of scholars, however, have still not produced a highly synthesized body of empirically tested theory.43 Instead, what has been created is an enormous store of specialized knowledge about political, economic, and social phenomena in varying conditions, times, and places. As already noted, the scope of our knowledge about non-­Western countries and peoples has grown tremendously in the past seven decades, as has the depth of our knowledge about the socioeconomic components of technically advanced Western countries, and both things are praiseworthy scholarly accomplishments.44 The pace at which this new information has been synthesized into durable theories, however, has been much more modest, and I see no reason to expect major progress in the creation of unifying syntheses in the foreseeable future. Numerous past attempts to create such overarching syntheses have not withstood the test of time, because rapid social change is a distinguishing feature of modernity and because human behavior is frequently altered by the nominal lessons derived from recent experience.45 That is why, in my view, broad generalizations about societal reality—­such as the variants of “modernization theory” proposed in the 1950s and 1960s—­should always remain provisional and probably cannot ever be confirmed definitively. Because societies change in ways that nonhuman nature does not, scholars will always confront a world of “impermanent modernization” that requires continuous revision of general theories. Wider scholarly recognition of this fundamental reality would facilitate timely and intelligent revision of our theoretical outlooks and would itself be a form of intellectual progress.46 The idea of creating synthetic general theories assumes a high level of coherence within each social ­science discipline. But well-­informed observers have argued, against the hopeful view of fellow scholars, that disintegrative trends now predominate in political science, and the same sort of

52 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

heterogeneity apparently exists in most of the other social sciences, with the possible exception of economics.47 Personally, I doubt the feasibility of durable syntheses. Some recent philosophers of science have argued that all knowledge is unavoidably contextual and that this epistemological barrier makes broad-­gauged theoretical generalizations impossible even in principle.48 These arguments strike me as quite convincing, and they have fundamental ramifications for every scholar’s decisions about what kind of research to pursue.49 In view of these circumstances, how realistic is it to base your own intellectual aspirations on the assumption that high-­level syntheses of social knowledge can be achieved during your lifetime? The answer to this seemingly abstract epistemological question has major personal implications for the professional path you choose. As you ponder this question, it’s also important to recognize that the history of the social sciences suggests that many of our disciplinary predecessors have unthinkingly accepted assumptions about race and gender very much at odds with contemporary democratic principles. This is unquestionably true of political science, and similar shortcomings, although perhaps not such serious ones, seem to have occurred in adjacent disciplines.50 The tangled ethical legacy of the social sciences in this realm means that your personal value-­choices have an important part to play as you wrestle with the question of which intellectual path to follow.51

STATIC, CLOSED DYNAMIC, AND OPEN DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO RESEARCH

You will answer that question in practice—­even if not in principle—­by the kind of dissertation project you decide to undertake. Social ­science projects can be roughly sorted into three categories according to the different amounts of attention they give to the passage of time and to the novelty of social phenomena.52 Static research pays no attention to the significance of time or to the adaptive learning that can change the behavior of societal actors as a result of their recent experience. Closed dynamic research focuses on the importance of chronological processes but restricts the range of possible outcomes to those that have occurred or been prefigured in the past. Open dynamic research pays close attention to chronological processes and also recognizes that some potential outcomes may have no parallels in previous history.53 All three types of scholarship can be useful, depending on the issues being investigated, and the three types are sometimes combined in a single study.

PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES—REAL AND IMAGINARY 53

Research based on a purely static approach leaves aside—­or at least should leave aside—­questions of causality. Projects designed to assemble and analyze descriptive statistics often fall into this category. For example, many government censuses and other data-­gathering efforts represent such research.54 Over the long run, this kind of research has had enormous importance. As noted above, it has transformed vague philosophical notions such as “society,” “work,” and “the market” into substantive empirical concepts that allow us to think about societal realities in a much more sophisticated fashion than previously. Before the twentieth century, for example, social philosophers often discussed the relationship between society and government, but they had far less concrete knowledge with which to flesh out each category and analyze ideas about the relationship between the two. Much more than today, these thinkers were forced to rely on personal beliefs and anecdotal evidence. Contemporary researchers now possess a superabundance of factual data, but continued compilation of such information is as necessary as ever to track new circumstances and problems. If you decide to pursue this kind of research, you should pay special attention to the process through which your cases are classified (either by you or by other data gatherers). Because classification generally involves a process of abstraction that can mask important contextual details, statistics sometimes obscure rather than clarify social realities.55* As the title of one study proclaims, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron.56 The history of GDP accounting, for example, suggests that GDP figures may omit some productive activities that should be included, while including some activities that should be omitted. Some leading economists have pointed out that data summarizing GDP per capita do not capture individual welfare as accurately as several other indices do.57 Most contemporary social scientists, of course, aspire to move beyond the compilation of descriptive statistics to search for causal explanations. Any project that seeks this sort of explanation presupposes that time matters, since causality is by definition a sequence of steps. These investigations usually fall into the category of closed dynamic research. Studies of shifts in voter attitudes between classifications such as “liberal” and “conservative” are a good example. Analysts of these shifts are interested in changes among standard groupings that they have specified in advance.58 In the realm of comparative politics, studies that track movements from authoritarianism to democracy (or vice versa) are examples of the closed dynamic approach. One important subtlety in this sort of analysis is to avoid unconsciously incorporating an implicit causal theory into analytical categories that seem on their face to be straightforward.59

54 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

By contrast, open dynamic research focuses on changes that are based on “learning” by social actors from their previous experience and that may be historically novel for that reason (or for other reasons). I put “learning” in quotation marks because actors often derive the wrong lessons from experience; to assume otherwise is to embrace a naïve faith in undeviating social progress. Today, in an era of breakneck social change, this open approach is probably wisest from an epistemological standpoint, especially if we are attempting to analyze the dynamics of macrosocietal development. This is, for example, a major attraction of the intellectual current sometimes described as “evolutionary economics.”60 But the approach also entails methodological risks. Perhaps most important is the risk of creating a narrative that exaggerates the agency of specific actors—­especially leaders—­and that understates the causal influence of pre-­existing structural constraints on their decisions. All three types of knowledge are essential to the functioning of a modern society. That said, research based on the open dynamic strategy yields a kind of social knowledge that is, in my opinion, especially important. It helps us place ourselves historically and assess rates of recent societal progress (or deterioration). It also helps us detect genuinely novel phenomena that require further investigation.61 In addition, it helps citizens and leaders make reasonably intelligent decisions about an uncertain future, even though in most instances we cannot accurately predict what the future holds.62 By contrast, a closed approach cannot allow for novel patterns of change, even if they prove to be of decisive importance. Consider, as examples, two books that were highly influential at the time they were published: Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1967), and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Moore’s book is a pioneering effort to understand the emergence of various types of twentieth-­century political systems through comparative historical analysis. Using an analytical approach adapted from Marxism, he argues that the nature of class relations in the agricultural sector of early modern societies had a decisive impact on whether democracy, communism, or fascism developed in those countries. The book is a tour de force in comparative history. But it also illustrates the intellectual conundrums created by a closed approach to historical change. The book provides a plausible explanation for the class origins of Nazism in Germany, but its analytical framework cannot explain why after the Second World War German fascism was

PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES—REAL AND IMAGINARY 55

replaced with liberal democracy. The same problem holds for its treatment of fascist Japan.63 This limitation has two sources.64 First, Moore’s analysis implicitly assumes that roughly the same historical turning points can be found in the history of all twentieth-­century countries.65 A strong argument can be made that this assumption is not valid. Second, Moore’s analysis does not leave room for equifinality, that is, for situations in which the same outcome is produced by two different sets of causes. The principal causes of West German liberal democracy after World War II were that the disasters of the war discredited Nazism among most Germans, and that after the war the US, British, and French occupation forces had a powerful strategic interest in building a stable new West German political system along liberal-­ democratic lines.66 Something similar holds for the postwar establishment of liberal democracy in Japan.67 There, too, fascism was succeeded by democracy. But these causes, which were primarily international, do not fit into Moore’s class-­centered analytical framework.68 Even though Moore does not claim his analysis exhausts all logical possibilities, his analytical approach obscures some historical patterns that proved to be pivotally important in the twentieth century.69 Similar problems can be found in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. The book, published in 1992, addresses important philosophical issues. But it also suggests that the liberal democratic state may be the final, stable form of human political organization. When Fukuyama looks back into history, he sees epochal changes. But when he peers into the future, although he recognizes possible moral complications for democratic practice, he does not anticipate systemic changes of the same magnitude. In this respect, the book reflects the same neglect of continuous social change that led previous modernization theorists to treat advanced societies as having already reached the ultimate stage of modern societal development.70 One cause of this striking intellectual asymmetry is Fukuyama’s failure to consider the long-­term implications of steadily accelerating scientific and technological change. Quickening innovation, especially in the realms of bioengineering, information technology, and electronic surveillance, has posed fundamental new challenges to the survival of liberal democracy. But the book’s analytical framework provides no intellectual space to allow for these novel challenges.71 Its optimistic view of human progress minimizes the possibility of future political transformations that may be both unprecedented and undesirable.72

56 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIETAL PROGRESS

This brings us back to the issue of societal progress. How do social scientists contribute to societal progress? Some disciplinary progress may have little evident bearing on current societal life. “Pure” research of this kind can be justified by its impact on the way analysts perceive reality and by its indirect effect on subsequent research and political practice. Research on esoteric subjects can also be justified as contributing to a reservoir of scholarly knowledge that may be called into use when an unexpected turn of events creates an urgent need for intellectual “firemen” to help cope with a novel sociopolitical challenge.73 Research with more immediate applications can help clarify how current societal arrangements came into existence, how they function, and how they affect human groups. It may also clarify how current arrangements might be improved. Each of these activities helps—­or has the potential to help—­individual citizens and whole societies achieve greater self-­understanding and engage in purposeful social or political action. Which type of scholarship you choose to pursue will be influenced both by your own values and by the present-­day research agendas of your chosen social s­ cience specialty.74 By illuminating present societal realities and exploring future possibilities, the social sciences, at their best, help counteract both utopianism and fatalism. Instead they nourish realistic aspirations for reform. The modern era is distinguished by widespread “possibilism,” an understanding that inherited societal arrangements can and ought to be improved.75 This is the central plank of any doctrine of progress. The social sciences can help achieve such possibilities by working to counteract the persistent human tendency to generate political oversimplifications and untenable myths. In this respect, the nineteenth century was a historic turning point: For the first time, the world’s most advanced societies began to study themselves empirically on a massive scale, and the nascent social sciences were part of that effort. It is easy to forget how sweeping the effort was, how closely allied it was with the desire to improve government, and how many realms of society it encompassed.76 It launched investigations of a wide range of new social problems linked with industrialization, and it generated new socioeconomic information, statistical and otherwise, in great quantities.77 The contemporary explosion of “big data,” albeit extraordinary, has its early roots in the nineteenth century.78 Despite the noteworthy growth of social research since then, social scientists’ efforts to analyze collective life have plainly not prevented grave public misunderstandings of contentious social issues. By common agree-

PROGRESS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES—REAL AND IMAGINARY 57

ment, the twentieth century—­or more accurately, the first half of the century—­was a disaster for humankind.79 The development of political science, economics, and sociology did little to obstruct the rise of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes or to avert two catastrophic world wars, although academic social research did help the United States win World War II.80 The clashes centering on the two totalitarian regimes marked a high-­water mark of ideological conflict in international affairs, and Western social scientists struggled in retrospect to explain their origins.81 Even had social scientists unanimously foreseen these dramatic changes and the disastrous outcomes, that would not have solved another fundamental problem: how to affect events by communicating their knowledge to leaders and citizens. The nexus between power and knowledge at the apex of political systems is fraught with difficulty, and the same is true at the popular level. Although certain kinds of education can mitigate public misunderstanding of important policy questions, popular misunderstanding will probably become a more difficult challenge in the future. As advanced societies become ever more technically complex, their internal workings and the choices they pose will become increasingly hard to fathom.82 But even if we social scientists could magically agree on all the important questions that we study—­which, of course, we cannot—­it would be utopian to expect that our scholarship could ever entirely dissolve widespread popular misinterpretations of political and economic realities. Behind this utopian intellectual ambition lies a technocratic fantasy with ominous implications of its own.83 Instead, we can hope only to curb especially harmful public misunderstandings and oversimplifications of societal matters. That is, we can hope, in a pragmatic spirit, to contribute to the incremental improvement of our society’s public life.84 Another way of viewing this problem is as an aspect of historical “memory.” I use the quotation marks because psychological research has shown that the memory of individuals—­even their recollection of vivid firsthand experiences—­can be notoriously inaccurate and commonly shifts over time.85 The same is true of the way that societies “recall” past events and experiences. A significant proportion of any country’s prevailing historical memories are, by the standards of professional historians, factually mistaken or fundamentally incomplete.86 Nevertheless, societies, like individuals, cannot exist without memories of some sort.87 For societies, as for individuals, lessons derived from past experience are necessary in order to survive, although such lessons may be misconceived and in any case cannot guarantee societal survival.88 What does this have to do with the social sciences, and with you? One

58 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

important function of the social sciences—­including not only history but political science and related disciplines—­is to restrict the scope of the ongoing process of historical myth making. Despite what J. H. Plum suggested decades ago, arms-­length professional scholarship will never supplant resonant social “memories.” We have a human need for a value-­infused understanding of our social and psychological origins, and compelling historical narratives help satisfy this need.89 Because of human mortality and the obligation to educate the young, the nominal lessons embedded in those memories are passed on through generational change. The lessons are often modified, and sometimes repudiated, due to the addition of the younger generation’s vivid new experiences and the dimming mixture of experiences inherited from the old. Thus, in an important sense, the past cannot die. The “death of the past” in the form of cultural myths may occur among some intellectuals, but not among most laypeople, and there is probably a limit to this process even among intellectuals. Historical change will steadily yield new readings of the past, which will repeatedly be resurrected or born anew. Most of us think of social scientists as quite different from historians, and in some respects that view is correct. Considered as a group, social scientists are much more concerned about present-­day developments, which historians tend to sidestep because of the shortage of available archives and chronological perspective. Nonetheless, we share an important role with historians: to help nonacademics understand the past. Whether the interval in question extends backward by centuries or by days, our most important calling is to help our fellow citizens and leaders understand the sources of the present and the possibilities of the future.

V

 | Dimensions of the Social Sciences The inevitable consequence of interdisciplinarity may not be the end of the scholarly world as we know it but the acknowledgment that our knowledge is always partial, rather than total. —­Marjorie Garber The stupendous loss in the depth and richness of human nature is a noticeable part of the price we have paid in transforming economics from a moral science of man creating wealth to a cold logic of choice in resource allocation. —­Ronald Coase [S]ocial science complements moral philosophy by ordering the comparison of what actually exists with what could be and by asking which moral principles could be realized, and how, in the sort of world we know. —­Charles Tilly

Each of the social sciences can be delimited and partitioned in different ways. How the lines are drawn depends on the concerns of individual researchers or groups of researchers. Each of us carries a distinctive “map” of our chosen social ­science discipline in our head. This map, in turn, affects our choices about what to study and how to study it. Most likely your disciplinary map is still a rough sketch that you’ll spend years making into a reliable guide. Writing your dissertation is a vital step in charting the new intellectual terrain.

C

hapter 2 explained why it is better to think about the social sciences in terms of intellectual dimensions than in terms of fields, territories, building blocks, disciplines, or subdisciplines.1 A discipline or field can be characterized by as many different dimensions as are needed to describe it accurately. Some of these dimensions are suggested by the contextual delimiters mentioned in chapter 2: time, space, and thematic range. Chronologically, all the social sciences tend to focus on recent time periods, but each can still include noticeably different time spans, as with historical sociology, for example.2 Spatially, each social science can deal with phenomena on different scales, extending from primary social groups to global

59

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interactions. Thematically, research in each discipline can be highly inclusive or narrowly focused. Think for a moment of the differences among international relations, international politics, and international economics. These three thematic terms overlap spatially and do not represent sharp-­ edged categories. Nevertheless, they focus researchers’ attention on distinctive assortments of societal phenomena.3 When I did my graduate work, one common thematic classification differentiated political science into international relations, comparative politics, American politics, and political philosophy.4 As a student, I thought of these categories as discrete bodies of knowledge, as did many other students and scholars; but that was an enormous oversimplification. This schematic view of political science was ethnocentric because it treated the study of American politics as an intellectual pursuit separate from the comparative study of politics in other countries.5 But even if we leave aside this ethnocentric incongruity, how to define the other salient features of the discipline was far from self-­evident. If we examine several handbooks of political science produced during the past four decades, we discover substantial variation in the ways the handbook editors have chosen to partition the academic study of politics.6* One early handbook includes no subdivisions except for the headings of individual chapters. A later handbook makes “democracy” one of four major subdivisions, a subdivision that is missing from all the other handbooks. A more recent handbook includes “Law” and “Contextual Factors” among the subheads, but omits “Administration.” This kind of organizational variation is not primarily a result of editorial whims. Instead it is a manifestation of genuine intellectual complexities for which there is no single definitive solution. Underlying these different labels are questions: how should the discipline conceive of itself, and on which research questions should it concentrate its attention?7 Perhaps that is why I can never leave the scholarly books in my office in the same place on the shelves for long. Over the years I have spent many hours reordering my books according to some new scheme, but after a few months I grow dissatisfied with one or another section of my library and start rearranging it. Although these rounds of shelving and reshelving may show a trace of obsessive-­compulsive disorder on my part—­as my wife has pointed out—­they do illustrate an important reality. Most of the books in my office are multifaceted and cannot be definitively grouped according to a single criterion of classification. My problem resembles what library cataloguers experience when they ponder where a new book should be filed in the library catalog. The difference is that my bookshelves lack the cross-­

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references that allow a catalog to capture these multiple connections for prospective readers.8 Hence I have more trouble picking a fixed shelf position for each book.9

SORTING BY DIMENSIONS

Another way of thinking about this matter is that each book or article has a number of disciplinary or subdisciplinary dimensions. In political science, for instance, it is not unusual to encounter books that straddle the boundary between comparative politics and international relations. Most of the social sciences conventionally divide the topics of scholarly investigations between processes that transpire inside the nation-­state and those that transpire outside it, but the complex relationships between these two domains are anything but clear.10 Moreover, in an age of globalization, the distinction is increasingly tenuous. The literature on the “democratic peace” provides plentiful examples.11 So does the literature on the transnational role of civil society and other nonstate actors.12 Transnational processes have acquired great importance for understanding both domestic politics and international relations.13 To take another example, political philosophy and empirical political science are sometimes treated as if there were a sharp dividing line between them, but in practice they shade into each other.14 After all, political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke made certain empirical assumptions about human nature, assumptions that may have been plausible in early-­ modern England but which can each be challenged on the basis of a huge array of anthropological and psychological data later gathered from other times and places. The range of potential human behavior varies dramatically from one individual to another, and the behavior of any given individual may vary dramatically depending on social context.15 Neglecting the issues raised in political philosophy can harm empirical investigations by excluding important questions from researchers’ consideration and even their awareness.16 This disciplinary gap between political philosophy and empirical research seems to be even deeper in economics. One of the strongest accusations leveled by critics of that discipline is that it has lost the broad awareness of ethical issues that it exhibited in the nineteenth century, before “political economy” became modern-­day “economics” based on marginal analysis. Some of the discipline’s progenitors and founders paid close attention to broadly ethical questions. Adam Smith, the revered author of

62 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

The Wealth of Nations, wrote another major book entitled The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but that book falls even farther outside the ken of most contemporary economists than The Wealth of Nations does. Richard Ely, one of the founders of the American Economic Association in the late nineteenth century, showed ethical concerns parallel to Smith’s, but those concerns became increasingly circumscribed within the profession as it strove to make itself more scientific. Were present-­day economists familiar with The Theory of Moral Sentiments, they would almost certainly construe Adam Smith’s ideas in a different light, more fully attuned to the social ramifications of their discipline.17 In other words, the scholarly research fields often construed as essentially empirical have an inescapable normative aspect.18 A great deal depends on where we decide to “look,” that is, where we believe we should direct our scholarly attention.19 We use normative criteria to select and frame the intellectual problems we choose to study, and the conclusions of our empirical research support some normative prescriptions rather than others.20 Consider, for example, the underlying judgment that International Relations should focus on the relations among states. States are not the only entities that operate across boundaries, and they never have been. The judgment that they should be the central focus of International Relations is certainly defensible, but for decades it implicitly discounted the fate of other actors affected by international relations, above all, the overseas subjects of colonial empires.21 Here is a specific illustration of how underlying assumptions about the dimensions of a social ­science discipline can affect our views of the scholarship connected with it. One careful study of the “traditions tradition” in International Relations shows that leading IR scholars have grouped major studies from earlier eras in widely different ways.22 In other words, any given classification of those scholarly works depends on the criteria of selection that are applied by the particular reader, and also on the criteria that are not applied. Imagine four idiosyncratic books (1, 2, 3, and 4, shown in table 1) that were published in that sequence at different times. Do they all belong to the same scholarly subfield, or not? This depends on the criteria we use to identify intellectual parallels and contrasts among the books and to assess the intellectual continuities and discontinuities among them across time. Our four hypothetical books might be grouped in several different ways, depending on the features we choose to highlight. As you can see in the table, six distinct intellectual groupings are possible, and the six groupings encompass different time intervals (1+4, 1+2, 2+3, and so forth). As a working scholar, you can say that one grouping is ger-

Dimensions of the Social Sciences 63

Table 1. Four Hypothetical Books Sorted into Separate Groupings on the Basis of Two Shared Features Book and Order of Publication

Book’s Features

#1 #2 #3 #4

A, B, C B, C, D C, D, A D, A, B

Features Used for Group Selection

Resultant Grouping Includes

A, B B, C C, D D, A A, C B, D

Book 1 + Book 4 Book 1 + Book 2 Book 2 + Book 3 Book 3 + Book 4 Book 1 + Book 3 Book 2 + Book 4

mane and the others are not only after specifying the criteria according to which you are assessing the books. Viewed from this angle, the partitions among the various social sciences and their subfields look much more fluid than is usually acknowledged. This model of the formation of bodies of scholarly work is more than an impersonal abstraction. It shows the unavoidable role of intellectual judgment—­whether discriminating or careless—­in assembling and assessing the patterns of past scholarship.23 The need for thoughtful judgment is something to bear in mind when you reach the stage of mapping out your research plan and putting together a review of the relevant literature.24

THINKING ABOUT EXISTING SCHOLARSHIP

Judgments of this kind will be an indispensable part of framing your research project. One of the principal arguments justifying a dissertation or book situates the project within an ongoing research tradition. This is a valid means of demonstrating the significance of your subject and your familiarity with other scholarly research that touches on it. The notion of a scholarly “tradition,” however, also conceals hidden complexities. Table 1 above illustrates these complexities. Another name for the various groupings in the table could be “traditions.”25 Virtually any grouping of scholarly works into a tradition presupposes a set of selection criteria that may omit features of each work which could become the basis for defining an alternative tradition.26 This intellectual process of creating a genealogy of scholarly works bears some resemblance to the “invention of tradition” familiar to students of nationalism.27 The invention of national tradition consists of singling out and highlighting certain past events as markers of a distinctive ethnona-

64 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

tional group that exists in the present. Similarly, alternative scholarly traditions can be derived from the same set of scholarly works by emphasizing particular intellectual features of the scholarly past while ignoring others.28 This is not to say that your dissertation or book should disregard scholarly traditions, only that you should be aware of their constructed character.29 Recognizing that there are alternative perspectives on certain intellectual problems may actually ease the burden of belonging to a “new generation” that might otherwise feel compelled to reject the work of previous scholars as parts of a single outdated “tradition.” It may also help you frame your project in a more fruitful way by seeing it as one element of an ongoing dialogue among you and other scholars, both those who are alive and those who are dead. Scholars from the same discipline frequently agree about the features of such traditions, but just as often they disagree about them. This, as we saw in an earlier chapter, produces different interpretations of any discipline’s history—­the history of psychology, for example.30 It also produces different views about what qualifies as part of the disciplinary field and what qualifies as interdisciplinary work bridging the divides among fields. The fundamental question underlying such disagreements about a discipline’s past is where the given field or subfield is coming from and—­more important—­where it is headed. What is the best path toward scholarly progress? In scholarship as in politics, the prevailing interpretation of the past privileges certain “projects” for developing the common enterprise, and it excludes others.31 Closely related to debates over a field’s or subfield’s overall trajectory is the issue of which scholarly works are most significant and therefore worth remembering and building on. Chapter 4 touched on this matter, and chapter 7 will discuss it at greater length. For now the main point is that every mature social scientist has a personalized disciplinary schema of the subjects he or she studies and teaches.32 That is why individual professors frequently teach a given subject differently and emphasize different ideas about it. These variations of point of view and emphasis are partly matters of personal intellectual sensibility, and no amount of reasoned argument can resolve them entirely. Much of the general discussion of the social sciences is framed in terms of so-­called paradigms. I say “so-­called” because the word paradigm, though useful, has at least three distinct meanings.33 First, it signifies an intellectual framework containing the assumptions and research objectives endorsed by a scholar or a group of scholars. Second, it refers to an exemplary piece of scholarly research that other scholars admire and seek to

Dimensions of the Social Sciences 65

emulate. Finally, the word can refer to the essential values that undergird modern scholarship: reliance on empirical investigation, internally consistent reasoning, willingness to acknowledge that your favorite ideas may be invalidated by the evidence, and so forth.34 The three meanings are quite distinct, but they are often mixed together in scholarly discussions of disciplinary development. A strong case can be made that political science—­like most other social sciences—­has no widely accepted general paradigm. Arguably economics does have a shared paradigm, although not all professional economists subscribe to it, and some leaders of the field have challenged it head-­on.35 In any case, political science includes a multitude of paradigms (using the term in the first and second senses mentioned above). Political scientists do share the conviction that the acquisition and exercise of political power are important topics for investigation, but beyond this general principle lie many disagreements about precisely which aspects of these processes are most important and how they should be studied. For example, when political science first emerged as a discipline, it centered on the study of government, whereas in subsequent decades it focused on the exercise of power in a wider context that included not just government but other institutions such as political parties, corporations, and interest groups.36 Over the past half-­century, virtually all the social ­science disciplines have widened their substantive horizons and tried to investigate a broader range of societal entities and processes. Economics has probably been the most ambitious in enlarging its field of view.37 As noted above, multiple views of a shared discipline are often manifested in the way members of the discipline imagine its intellectual past. Most researchers are concerned with their discipline’s present rather than its history, and their particular concerns tend to produce incomplete or slanted depictions of the discipline’s previous development.38 To a limited degree, this is a natural consequence of the fact that all of us see past events through a personal lens formed by our own experiences and ideas. Here, however, differences of degree are important, and they can have a powerful impact on the way contemporary researchers think about their chosen discipline, whether it is political science, economics, sociology, or some other field. Oversimplified accounts of the discipline’s past impose a definition that centers on the observer’s favored paradigm for the field and marginalizes other researchers whose work does not fit into it. Thumbnail sketches of a discipline’s past can be a legitimate part of the rhetoric scholars employ to justify their own work, but formulaic descriptions can also sow serious intellectual misunderstanding.

66 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

Note, too, that the history of political science or any other discipline can also be understood not just as a sequence of general ideas, but as the personal intellectual evolution of leading scholars.39 This biographical approach to the academic study of society offers several advantages. It takes fuller account of the intellectual distinctiveness of those scholars, differences that may easily escape the traditions approach discussed above. And it doesn’t require us to read long biographies of major thinkers, because capsule biographies are readily available for a wide range of significant scholars.40 A biographical approach sharpens our understanding of the central intellectual concerns of major thinkers in the past, and it clarifies the interactions between them and their historical circumstances. It thereby reduces the danger of intellectual amnesia about our profession’s history and cuts through the rhetoric of impersonality that usually veils the struggles of individual scholars to answer important research questions they care passionately about.41 Perhaps equally important, a biographical approach enables us to identify the societal questions that major thinkers did not take on, and therefore to fathom their views of the world in a way that helps us discover new research questions. This approach to our discipline allows us to view major thinkers as paradigmatic individuals whose intellectual concerns and life trajectories help us understand the choices that we face in our own scholarly journeys.42

“BRINGING THINGS BACK IN”

Political scientists sometimes talk about bringing neglected subjects back into the mainstream of scholarly research activity. This transportation metaphor resembles the “turns” and “moves” sometimes invoked in other disciplines to flag new intellectual trends, such as the “cultural turn” in the writing of history.43 A common American political ­science slogan during the 1980s and 1990s was “bringing the state back in.” In this instance, the discipline’s preoccupation with the behavior of individuals as the key to understanding politics was challenged by scholars who thought that the significance of supraindividual factors such as the state had been neglected.44 Their terminology suggested that the discipline’s overall priorities were out of balance and should be altered. This catchphrase is one example of the rhetorical devices that scholars use to attract readers and persuade them of the importance of their ideas.45 It also illustrates the way pivotal public events like the Vietnam War or the stagflation of the 1970s can precipitate a reassessment of disciplinary priorities.46* In such cases, an important empirical question is whether champions of

Dimensions of the Social Sciences 67

the neglected concept or approach actually manage to persuade other scholars to pay more attention to it. Citation evidence suggests that “bringing the state back in” had a substantial impact on the political ­science discipline, although direct textual evidence of this impact has diminished in the past decade or so. Between the periods 1981–­85 and 1986–­90 the number of political ­science journal articles in the JSTOR database that contained this phrase in their title rose from 5 to 94. In 1991–­95 the number increased to 154. During the next fifteen years the number declined slightly; in 2011–­ 15 it dropped to 64. Most likely this diminution does not mean that the heightened disciplinary emphasis on the state has gone out of fashion. The new emphasis has probably been accepted by many scholars and also has probably morphed into other forms, especially the discipline’s increased attention to the study of institutions. The state, of course, is only one among many kinds of institutions; but it can fairly be called the “master institution” of modern politics, and the word carries special interpretive weight when used to frame research problems. In any event, a major survey of political science published some twenty years ago was organized around the concept of the state, marking a serious effort to return the concept to the center of the profession’s attention.47 A similar slogan, less familiar but equally important, is “bringing nature back in.”48 For two millennia observers of politics and society have struggled to understand how variations in the natural environment affect the structure of political order and the social behavior of human groups.49 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, most social scientists became noticeably less interested in these issues. One index of this shift of attention was the marginalization of geography among the social sciences.50 The shift probably occurred partly because growing human technical capabilities appeared to reduce the impact of natural conditions on political life. No doubt it was also strengthened by the desire of many social scientists to create broad theories that transcended the details of specific regions or countries. Today, of course, bringing nature back into social science has become an urgent matter. Climate change poses huge problems and dangers for contemporary societies. Understanding societal responses (and failures to respond) to this unprecedented challenge should be high on the research agenda of political science, economics, and other social sciences. For a long time, however, many social scientists’ responses to this constellation of issues were anemic.51 Climate change may be the greatest threat to humankind since the advent of nuclear weapons, perhaps even a greater threat. Until recently, however, it has attracted the professional attention of only a limited number of the political scientists who study national political systems and

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international relations.52 This is the kind of pivotal professional judgment about values and priorities that will be discussed in the next chapter. If climate change challenges our understanding of the macrosocietal impact of nature, another challenge concerns nature’s microsocietal impact. On the micro level, for example, scholars following new trends in genetics and neuroscience have attempted to assess the influence of DNA and biological factors on the political behavior of individuals. This is a defensible effort to deepen our understanding of how “human nature” and variations in human biology influence the political conduct of individuals. But this kind of biological microanalysis conceals intellectual pitfalls that most of its practitioners do not recognize. In my opinion, they are reintroducing a tautological version of the prepolitical “state of nature” sometimes posited by early political philosophers, in a mistaken belief that this approach will advance rigorous political analysis.53 As I see it, macrosocietal issues such as those raised by climate change and cyber conflict deserve far more attention and are far more susceptible to reliable methods of scholarly study.54

BRINGING EVERYTHING BACK IN?

The slogan of bringing things back in raises two important epistemological questions. Can every important topic be “brought back in” at the same time, or is the intellectual attention span of the scholarly disciplines necessarily limited at any given moment to certain salient themes? Relatedly, are things brought back in once and for all, as a progressive view of each discipline’s development might suggest, or is disciplinary development cyclical and shaped by the ebb and flow of intellectual fashion? In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, many US political scientists dismissed previous studies of law and institutions as outmoded; instead they preferred to concentrate on what they regarded as the determinants of politics located in the socioeconomic “base.” In the 1990s, however, there was a resurgence of disciplinary interest in institutions as key elements of political life, and the emphasis placed on socioeconomic determinants of politics was toned down. Is this pattern of alternation typical of the discipline’s evolution, or atypical?55 In my opinion, such cyclical alterations are probably typical, and they are worth bearing in mind as you ponder your own research priorities.56 Following current disciplinary fashions can be attractive and exciting, but asking what the fashions may be missing can also lead to important discoveries.

PART III



 | Your Quest Weighing Intellectual Choices

VI

 | Building Professional Relationships and Preparing for Your Doctoral Exams The social science disciplines tend to view the self of the social scientific observer as a contaminant. The self—­the unique inner life of the observer—­is treated as something to be separated out, neutralized, minimized, standardized, and controlled. —­Susan Krieger Like the history of philosophy, the history of scholarship more often has been a story of great individuals than a study of a common project sustained by shared ideals, practices, and institutions. —­Anthony Grafton Advising is a lifelong commitment and a mutual learning experience. —­Alfred Stepan

If you are like most PhD candidates, the first major hurdle on your road to the doctorate will be the comprehensive examinations you must pass after completing your coursework. Thorough preparation will depend not just on understanding your department’s exact requirements but also on developing your relationships with key faculty members as well as other PhD students. Properly managed, preparation for the exams can aid your take-­off into full-­time dissertation research. Certain methods of studying will strengthen your grasp of the discipline and lay a foundation for the next stage of your training.

W

orking from this broad intellectual foundation, we can now zero in on practical issues and suggestions, beginning with doctoral examinations.1 Your preparation for these exams is—­or should be—­an intellectual prologue to launching your dissertation. Although these two phases of graduate training are formally distinct, they do have important features in common. Properly managed, your exam preparation and contacts with faculty examiners will strengthen skills that you can apply to researching and writing the dissertation. The key to success in the whole enterprise is this: Take control of your own training. Beyond working hard and knowing the program require-

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ments, this means meeting regularly with faculty members and conferring frequently with fellow students to discuss readings and ideas. Do not hesitate to meet with professors because you fear revealing your ignorance or “wasting their time.” Meet with them regularly to solicit their advice and show them what you have learned since you last spoke with them. You have every right to do this so long as you are flexible about scheduling particular appointments. Acting in the same spirit, treat your doctoral exams as more than just an administrative hurdle to be surmounted. Your preparation for them is an opportunity to refine your interests, mull over possible dissertation topics, and identify faculty members who might become advisors and committee members when you move into the dissertation stage. Discovering a thesis topic that you want to commit yourself to may take a long time, so thinking about this question—­without having to decide right away—­can be a useful benefit of preparing for your exams.2

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS WITH PROFESSORS

Doctoral candidates sometimes complain justifiably of faculty indifference to their chances of succeeding or failing. If you feel this way, you may not be able to change the situation entirely, but you can help yourself by building ties with those faculty members who are open to regular contacts with students. Although doctoral candidates’ relationships with professors always involve power asymmetries, those asymmetries can be managed in various ways.3* Good working relationships with your professors are important both emotionally and intellectually. Such relationships help you develop a reliable sense of the academic standards you’ll have to meet, including the operational meaning of standards for the significance and originality of your completed dissertation.4 If you already have a designated advisor who’s agreed to supervise the writing of your dissertation, solidifying relations with that person is especially important. In my experience, one avenue to healthy relationships with professors is to show respect for the demands on their time. This isn’t equivalent to avoiding frequent meetings; you’re entitled to see your professors and supervisor as frequently as you need to. What it does mean is figuring out in advance what you want to discuss, and sending them an e-­mail stating briefly why you’re coming. Putting something in writing will help crystallize your ideas, and it will give the professor a chance to think about your questions before meeting with you. It will also show in a tangible way that

BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PREPARING FOR YOUR EXAMS 73

you know professors have many matters to attend to. The most efficient dissertation writer I ever worked with would periodically inform me by e-­mail that he was going to send me a draft chapter in another two or three weeks. This heads-­up let me factor reading the chapter into my work schedule and, equally important, made it harder for me to postpone reading the chapter after it arrived; therefore it helped my student as well. Another way of showing consideration for your professors’ time is to date every draft chapter you send them and to include a brief outline of the whole dissertation as a cover sheet for every draft. This will enable your readers to tell various drafts apart and see where you think the latest one fits into the dissertation’s overall structure. Cooperative relations with professors can also be fostered by showing an interest in them as professionals and as people. Take a little time to find out about them. Naturally you should ask other students—­especially those who are further along than you are in the doctoral program—­about their own experiences with the person. But do more than this, especially if the professor in question is or might become your dissertation supervisor. Scan the professor’s CV and skim a few of the publications that catch your eye. If your professor has a website, take a quick look at it. Then you’ll be ready to engage in an exchange the professor will appreciate as more than simple chit-­chat and that will extend the conversation beyond your own immediate problems as a doctoral candidate. This stratagem rests on a basic truth: Scholars are naturally attracted to people who show interest in their ideas and research. After all, intellectual interchange and mutual recognition are one of the most satisfying parts of academic life. So express interest in a professor’s current research—­especially if it’s your advisor—­and if you really aren’t interested, ask yourself whether you should find a different advisor. In initial meetings with faculty members it’s natural to feel some reticence, but you should strive get beyond this stage. If your feel shy about exposing your ignorance—­and don’t we all?—­ask questions rather than plunging straight into expressing your own opinions. Asking thoughtful questions about a professor’s ideas and writings can open the door for broader discussions, for example, about the career path the professor chose and the obstacles that had to be overcome along the way. Playing this kind of “believing game” is a wonderful means of learning things while also helping your interlocutor clarify and refine his or her ideas.5 In this setting, of course, you’ll usually be the person who gains new insights, but it can work both ways. Within the limits set by individual professors, try to make your faculty relationships relaxed and collegial. Doing this is less a matter of striking

74 BECOMING A SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCHER

a note of personal familiarity than expressing an open-­minded intellectual attitude. Striking an overly familiar tone with a professor can boomerang by seeming presumptuous. I, for instance, don’t like for students to address me by my first name, unless the person who wants to do this asks first and gives me a chance to think it over. All things in due time, starting with respect. I am, on the other hand, drawn to students who prepare carefully before meeting with me and who occasionally show interest in my work. If you follow this approach with your professors, it will foster productive relationships with most of them, though perhaps not with all. Your most important relationship will be with the person who becomes your dissertation supervisor. Doctoral programs usually allow students some latitude to choose a supervisor, just as prospective supervisors have some latitude about taking on individual students for supervision. It’s wise to start thinking about prospective supervisors as soon as you start the doctoral program, even though you won’t have to make a final decision until you formulate your dissertation project. Making a wise choice depends on developing contacts with various faculty members early in your training. Start by identifying professors whose teaching and scholarship you admire (or who are admired by other doctoral candidates whose judgment you trust). Being responsive to students in class and giving detailed feedback on papers are two marks of a professor who might be a good supervisor. A reputation for providing sustained intellectual and emotional support to current dissertation writers is a definite plus. Other things being equal, it makes sense to try to work with a supervisor who has a strong professional reputation outside the department, which may give you an extra boost when it’s time to find a job. From this angle, working with younger faculty members may have some drawbacks, especially if they don’t yet have a track record as dissertation supervisors. On the positive side, relatively young professors may be especially innovative and enthusiastic, and memories of their own dissertation struggles may give them extra empathy. On the other hand, they may have inflexible expectations about the standards the dissertation must meet, and they may not have a seasoned understanding of how to help a dissertation writer work through the obstacles that will inevitably arise.6 Looking back on my early years as a supervisor, I remember encouraging one doctoral candidate to do a dissertation that was too ambitious; he finished, but only by dint of exceptional tenacity.7

BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PREPARING FOR YOUR EXAMS 75

COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS: MAPPING THE INTELLECTUAL TERRAIN

A major problem for students preparing to take comprehensive exams is deciding how to delineate the boundaries and structure of each examination field. Experienced faculty members have gained this sort of knowledge through many years of study and research, but doctoral students lack such craft knowledge. A key responsibility of your faculty mentors and examiners is to help you define the scope and content of each examination field. They, in turn, are entitled to ask you to play an active role in establishing the exam’s topical and bibliographic coverage. Today almost all doctoral political ­science programs that require PhD examinations provide written syllabi for the various examination fields. Those syllabi may give you most of the essential information about the topics and readings covered in the exam. In any case, after studying the syllabi you should meet with the relevant faculty members to clarify any unanswered questions you may have. To organize your preparation for an examination, plan to rely heavily on the exam syllabus, meetings with your professors, and study groups with other students who will take the exam at the same time. Study groups are essential for maintaining your morale, and probing discussions about other people’s ideas are a great way to clarify your own. Honing your skills by dissecting your colleagues’ ideas will improve your capacity to refine yours as well.8 But meeting with fellow scholars isn’t all you should do. You should also undertake independent reconnaissance missions to locate the intellectual boundaries of the field on which you’ll be tested. For this purpose, four techniques are especially useful. First, identify and consult specialized encyclopedias that cover the examination field. If you have the same attitude as I did in graduate school, you may think that encyclopedias are only for dilettantes who aren’t serious. This view is misguided, and it’s a recipe for wasted effort and unnecessary confusion. As explained further in chapter 13 on research resources, specialized encyclopedias are an indispensable means of mapping unfamiliar intellectual terrain and quickly discovering the broad outlines of accepted knowledge on a subject that’s new to you.9 A second useful technique is to locate recent literature reviews that discuss the latest publications in your examination field. The advantage of literature reviews is that they are ordinarily more comprehensive and up-­ to-­date than articles in specialized encyclopedias. The trade-­off is that they will always list more sources than you have time to read, so you may not

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find them as helpful at this stage as the encyclopedia entries are. When you reach the dissertation stage, however, literature reviews will be invaluable, so investing some effort in learning how to use them now won’t be a waste of time.10 A third useful technique is to start building a personal bibliography of sources relevant to your special intellectual interests. As a tech-­savvy doctoral student, you already use bibliographic software like EndNote or Refworks to download citations for the books and articles you discover through your university library or the online catalog of the Library of Congress. These programs are an efficient way to keep track of the writings you’ll use for your preliminary exams, not least because you can attach electronic copies of the articles, their abstracts, and your own reading notes to individual bibliographic entries. Used along with Current Contents Connect or another similar service, they will also help you keep tabs on the most recent articles in the main journals in your examination field.11 Up-­to-­date bibliographic knowledge of this kind will impress your professors and field examiners, who are always on the lookout for interesting new publications. What’s more, these bibliographic programs will later become an important technical foundation for your dissertation. Coupled with various databases, they will dramatically boost your effectiveness as a researcher. A fourth useful technique for exam preparation is to compile a chronology of important dates or turning points relevant to the subject that the exam covers. You can build up a chronology from scratch as you do your reading; you can double-­check and augment it by skimming the relevant published chronologies. (They’re not hard to find; my university’s library contains more than four thousand records with “chronology” in the title.) You may wonder why having an accurate chronology tailored to your intellectual interests is so important. The answer is that causal analysis is inherently chronological. Factor A cannot possibly explain factor B unless A occurred before B; by the same token, it’s pretty embarrassing to argue that B caused A when A actually happened first. A similar caveat holds for tracing intellectual influences and scholarly schools of thought. Like other forms of causality, intellectual influences can be understood only in a chronological context. Especially if you’ve adopted a biographical approach to understanding the development of your chosen field of social science, as suggested in an earlier chapter, this kind of information is essential. It makes a difference whether Max Weber came before or after Karl Marx, Robert Putnam before or after Robert Dahl, Robert Gilpin before or after Hans Morgenthau, John Maynard Keynes before or after

BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PREPARING FOR YOUR EXAMS 77

Milton Friedman, and so on.12 If you fail to keep the chronological basics straight, your doctoral examiners will notice. A fifth useful technique of exam preparation is to keep an “intellectual diary” in which you talk to yourself and ruminate about what you’re thinking and reading. Jot down the questions or ideas that come to you, and talk them over later with your friends. When I’m on the go, I use my smart phone to record reminders and fugitive sources in topical lists that I can review later. Keeping a diary is a useful way to start mulling over subjects you might want to explore more deeply when it comes time to choose a dissertation topic and write your prospectus. It can also help you see how your ideas have developed and grown in the course of your studies.

PUTTING THE TOOLS TO WORK

Preparing for a doctoral exam requires a conscious intellectual strategy for using these tools and resources. One key to success is to establish an early connection with the examiners in all your chosen fields. You should probably contact them during your first semester in the program, regardless of when you plan to do the exams. This will give you the necessary lead time to take or audit any courses an examiner recommends and will ensure that you know each exam’s parameters in time to act on this information. Before meeting with the examiners for each of your chosen fields, use specialized encyclopedias to get a rough sense of the field’s terrain. If, say, you’re concentrating in political science and you’re preparing for a comp in comparative politics, you might read an article under that title or subject heading in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd ed., 2008), the International Encyclopedia of Political Science (2011), or the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed., 2015). Better yet, you might peruse all three sources to compensate for any idiosyncrasies in their coverage. You should also scrutinize the bibliographies attached to these encyclopedia articles to form an impression of the main authors and writings in the field. Similarly, if you’re preparing for a comp in economics, you might consult The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2018) or the IESBS articles on the history and philosophy of economics, together with the topical articles about recent trends in the discipline. If you’re concentrating in sociology, you might consult the IESBS overviews of sociology and its history, as well as more specific sociological articles, plus The Sage Encyclopedia of Economics and Society (2015). These are just a few examples of the many social ­science reference works that have multiplied in recent

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years.13 These works can give you quick information and overviews about many topics, thereby enabling you to organize your preparation for the exam more intelligently. This preliminary exploration will put you in a good position to meet with the field examiners. You can come to your first meeting armed with some initial ideas and questions about the structure of the field and a few important titles you believe you should read. Try these out on the examiners and ask for the titles of additional works you should study. If an examiner says compiling the relevant bibliography is your job, consult other doctoral candidates who’ve already taken the exam to get their opinions on the most important readings. Once you’ve compiled a working bibliography, be sure to discuss it with the examiners well in advance of the exam. Whether or not an examiner actually reads through your bibliography, presenting it counts as “due diligence” in your preparations. In the months before the test, meet several times with the examiners to update them on your preparation, and adjust your study plans accordingly. Assuming that you’re studying hard, one useful side benefit of the meetings will be to show the examiners that you’re preparing carefully. During your meetings it’s also prudent to ask professors about the criteria that will be used to grade the exam. This will help you avoid mistakes due to simple misunderstanding. For purposes of illustration, here is one possible set of criteria. You should be prepared to (a) demonstrate your familiarity with the relevant scholarly literature, including the range of scholarly perspectives on the major issues in the field, (b) compare and critically evaluate the main scholarly writings on those issues, (c) formulate your own intellectual position on these issues, either by drawing on prior scholarly work or devising an original line of argument, and (d) muster convincing empirical evidence in support of your position. Success in any exam depends on making your knowledge active beforehand, rather than waiting to “retrieve” and sort out the relevant information after you arrive in the examination room. Early in your preparations, compile a list of the questions you think might appear on the exam. Apart from the issues highlighted by the field syllabus and examiners, you should list other questions you regard as interesting and important. This exercise will give you your own cognitive map of the examination field and help you decide how to allocate your preparation time among various topics. And—­who knows?—­one of your questions could become the seed of your dissertation. As you read, keep an eye out for especially noteworthy books and articles that might become inspirations for your own research. Remember that the word “paradigm” denotes not only a certain disciplinary outlook, but also a model piece of scholarship worthy of emulation.

BUILDING PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND PREPARING FOR YOUR EXAMS 79

READING AND PREPARING IN VARIOUS WAYS

With your list of potential exam questions in hand, decide which materials you will read, and how. It’s vital to understand that you should read differently for different purposes. (This is a principle that will remain vital during your entire academic career.) Not all the books and articles on your bibliography will be equally important, so you should adopt a reading strategy geared to each item. An especially useful short guide to reading strategies is Paul N. Edwards, How to Read a Book, v5.0 (2015, 10 pp., at http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf). Do not skip this guide on the mistaken assumption that you already know everything about sophisticated reading. Study Edwards carefully before you do any of the substantive readings on your list. Intelligent reading depends on choosing a reading strategy that matches your purpose. You should meticulously read the most authoritative monographs and articles in their entirety. Other works you should read selectively, with particular exam questions in mind. Still other sources you should simply skim for the general view or interpretation they embody. How you approach each work will depend in part on how much you already know about the topic at hand. To size up a new book, a useful shortcut is to read three or four scholarly reviews easily culled from JStor or Wilson Web. That way you can quickly determine what other scholars regard as the convincing and the controversial elements of the book, as well as its main contributions. As for articles, you can gain quick insights by reading the abstracts usually included in electronic bibliographies and then skimming the full text.14 When I was a graduate student, my stolid academic outlook prevented me from grasping the importance of choosing among reading strategies. Looking back on my experience during those years, two memories stand out. The first comes from the reading group I joined when it was time to prepare for the doctoral exam in comparative politics. When a certain title comes up for discussion, one of my friends says, “I haven’t read the whole book, but I’ve read the introduction and conclusion.” Hearing this casual admission, I think condescendingly that his lack of intellectual seriousness is obvious. In retrospect, I understand that what should have been obvious was my own intellectual naïveté, along with my friend’s intelligence. He wasn’t being lazy; he was making decisions about how to allocate his time. In my second memory, it’s a Friday night in New York City and my dorm mates have gone out to party and enjoy themselves. I, on the other hand, sit in my room reading a thick volume by David Easton extolling the virtues of a “systems approach” to the study of politics.15 The book seems

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painfully boring and I struggle not to fall asleep, but I dutifully plow on, taking copious notes, which themselves become an opaque text with no almost educational value. I finish the evening with twenty pages of notes, but with almost no new knowledge. What’s the moral of this story? Just as there are different strategies for reading, there are different strategies for note taking. The note-­taking strategy you choose for a book or article should be determined by your purpose in reading it and by what you already know about the subject. The key in all cases is to read actively. If you do this, deciding how many notes to take will be much easier, and you won’t end up with an additional pile of paper instead of knowledge, as I did with Easton. Even if you decide to make exhaustive notes, do a quick initial reading to identify the most important elements of the text. Then, if you own the book or article, mark it up. If a book belongs to the library, make light marginal pencil marks that you can use when you review the text and later erase.16 Why does marking up books and articles matter? For most people, physical movement and mental acuity are linked. This is certainly true for me, and it’s probably true for you. Marking and annotating a text helps me isolate its key arguments and decide whether I believe them.17 Put differently, in all your reading you should concentrate on finding, marking, and recording the text’s key judgments. Usually these essential ideas can be found in the title, headings, introduction, and conclusion, but sometimes they’re located in less obvious spots.18 Once you’ve done this, you can decide how much attention and space to devote to absorbing the supporting evidence located in the rest of the text. To activate your knowledge in the run-­up to the exam, tailored outlines are also a valuable tool. Working from the readings and your notes on them, outline an answer to each of the examination questions you’ve compiled. An efficient technique for doing this is to make each question into a separate computer file and enter especially relevant points as you encounter them in your readings and notes. About ten days before the exam, shift your attention from new reading to reviewing the notes you’ve already made. Turn your notes for each question into a separate outline, streamline it, and spend the last few days before the exam studying your outlines. Doing this will create intellectual “modules” that you can use in answering most of the questions on the exam, even if the questions turn out to be different from the ones you expected. It will also allow you to think unhurriedly about what the fundamental issues really are, something that is hard to do under the pressures of a timed test.

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IN THE EXAMINATION ROOM

Doctoral exams come in various forms that include timed, closed-­book versions and untimed, take-­home versions. The timed versions are probably more common, and answering them usually requires more advance planning, or at least planning of a different kind. Here are a few tips for managing the pressures of a timed exam and improving your chances of passing. When the exam is handed out, look over all of it before making any decisions. Then decide which of the questions you can best answer (assuming you have a choice). Before starting to compose your essays, outline your answers to all the questions you’ve chosen. This will give your mind a chance to generate additional ideas and refinements while you’re outlining your answers to other questions. Never underestimate the intellectual benefits from elapsed time—­even a little elapsed time—­which allows your subconscious mind to webcrawl for additional ideas while you concentrate on something else. Examiners usually expect to find certain elements in an examination essay. At the start of the essay, you should define the key terms. Most essay questions don’t define their terminology. In any case, following the standard procedure of spelling out your definitions of key terms will clarify your own thinking. It will help ensure that you and the examiners are on the same wavelength and, once in a while, may demonstrate that you’re aware of an angle they haven’t thought of. As noted in an earlier chapter, many common terms in the social sciences lack a single, generally accepted definition; think of “power,” “democracy,” “market,” “culture,” and so forth. If you’ve prepared for the exam using specialized encyclopedias, you should be able to complete the definitional portion of your essay with dispatch. Examiners always want to verify that you know the relevant scholarly literature, so show them that you do. In a timed examination, this part of the essay may have to be fairly brief, but it still must be convincing. Make sure you mention the capital works in the field, and focus on them. If the literature contains different schools of thought that present contrasting views or conclusions, give at least one example of each school and mention that there are other writings in the same vein. If you have a considered opinion on any of the controversies in the literature, don’t hesitate to voice it, but keep these asides brief unless the question specifically asks you to expand on your own ideas. In a comp, your first goal should be to demonstrate that you understand the shape of the subject and are familiar with the seminal works in the field.

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Another thing examiners look for is the ability to muster evidence in support of an argument. Your essays should lay out the empirical evidence that backs up your arguments. Do this either by citing specific data or by citing articles and books that present such data. Be sure to address explicitly the issue of whether some scholars in the field have adopted a point of view at odds with your own. If they have adduced evidence that runs counter to your analysis, explain the limitations or deficiencies of that counterevidence. Finally, leave time to reread your finished answers for adequacy and internal consistency. In the days when students wrote doctoral examinations by hand, this process could be vexing because it often required cross-­ outs, minuscule inserts, and extra paragraphs scribbled in the margins. In the word processing era, this kind of self-­editing is much easier, and it allows for a modest amount of clarification and stylistic improvement. Other things being equal, a smoothly written essay will elicit a more positive response from examiners than an awkwardly written one. Each of these best practices for taking doctoral examinations is a scale-­ model miniature of skills you’ll need to create your dissertation. After reading the rest of this book, the connections between preparing for a comprehensive exam and producing a solid dissertation should become clear. We can now turn directly to how to approach your dissertation project.

VII

 | Choosing Research Problems Personal Values and Disciplinary Agendas Where to fix one’s loyalties is the supreme question of human life. —­William H. McNeill Definite views on what is and isn’t important, and on the kind of life-­position from which thought should start, are a precondition of all thinking. —­Mary Midgley Passion has its own purpose. Passion can be a bit disdainful of reasonableness and productivity. And passion is among the most sacred and fragile of the gifts the gods bestow on us. —­Robert Kegan Insistence on the value-­freedom of scientific investigation is common among scientists, journalists, and the general public. . . . [However,] recent investigations of the practices of scientists . . . have revealed the dominant roles different types of values have often played in their judgments and inquiries. . . . As the instances mount, the ideal itself becomes suspect: it is not just that many individual scientists do not live up to the standard of value-­freedom, but that they cannot do so—­and therefore it is not the case that they should do so. —­Philip Kitcher

Although widely accepted, the notion of value-­free scholarship is a bad guide to practical decisions about research topics. Choosing a research question and assessing the relevant evidence are different things. Personal values play a central role in the selection of research topics by all scholars, whether they know it or not. Commitment to the rigorous assessment of relevant ideas and evidence is an equally important scholarly value of a different sort. This means that weighing your own values is a key part of framing your research project and selecting your analytical approach.

E

ver since the social sciences began, intellectuals have ruminated about the relationship between social research and human values. The idea of value-­free research has its roots in the late nineteenth century, when European thinkers extolled positivism as a way of liberating empirical research

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from outside interference and also from researchers’ own personal biases. In the early twentieth century, this approach became deeply entrenched in American universities, as researchers sought justifications for their scholarly activity independent of religion and personal morality.1 The trend caused “an emerging and growing chasm between moral discourse and other forms of reasoning about society. . . . [A]n earlier encompassing conception of the moral and political sciences was gradually replaced by social sciences that marginalized moral reasoning or consigned it to the specialized discipline of philosophy.”2 This change was part of a broader shift in the United States toward science and expertise as sources of political and social authority in a modern era of rapid innovation. In the face of growing religious and ethical uncertainty, scientism—­an exaggerated belief in the capacities of science to dispel doubt—­was one widespread response.3 In the social sciences, scientism represented the effort of some ambitious scholars to bolster the status of their profession by suggesting that their disciplines could furnish definitive solutions to modern social problems.4* It embodied the ardent belief in “one best way” that spread through the American economy and culture early in the twentieth century and peaked in the aftermath of World War II.5 The belief prompted many prominent US social scientists to attempt to recast the study of society along rigorously dispassionate and empirical lines. It also exerted a deleterious effect on the academic structure of several social ­science disciplines that persists in the United States to this day. Here I am referring especially to the widespread American practice of hiving off political philosophy from other dimensions of political studies and treating it like an intellectual orphan.6* Similar impulses to avoid political and moral judgments have been evident in economics and sociology.7* Despite this practice, the notion of value-­free social science does not reflect the actual process through which the social sciences developed in Europe and the United States. From the start, they were closely tied to efforts to address the new problems generated by industrialization, migration, urbanization, the expansion of the national state, and the travails of democracy.8 As it became evident that modern societies change continuously and that informed human action sometimes can affect the direction of change, the perceived need for relevant social research grew rapidly, and governmental support for certain kinds of social research increased steadily. Applied social research grew in the government sector—­for example, through the expanded collection of census data and the introduction of national economic statistics—­as well as in universities.9 The motives and attitudes of social investigators at universities varied

Choosing Research Problems 85

substantially, and still do. Some researchers focus on so-­called pure research; they aim to describe and analyze how existing forms of political and societal organization function without considering how they might be improved.10 Other researchers focus on efficiency; they want their research to make the policies of government and societal organizations more effective at home and abroad.11 Scholars in still another category are motivated primarily by moral concerns; they wish to spotlight current socioeconomic failings in order to strengthen the case for fundamental reforms through political or social action.12 In nearly all instances, however, normative values have played a major role in scholars’ decisions to become social scientists and pursue a research career.13 Even allowing for individual variations in the motives of our disciplinary forebears, their life choices were at odds with the ideology of value-­free expertise that they sometimes espoused.

VALUES AND SCHOLARSHIP

This discrepancy between professional practice and professional ideology stemmed largely from a misleading assumption buried in the idea of value-­ free scholarship. The belief that a scholarly discipline can be completely value-­free rests on a misunderstanding of human values.14 Not all values belong to the same epistemological category. What we might call “existential values” are the choices we make about what we personally deem inherently important and worthwhile. Identifying our existential values is a central part of our difficult passage through adolescence and young adulthood to become mature adults; it is also central to your quest to become a recognized scholar. As an aspiring social ­science researcher, you have already made one important existential decision: namely, that human action deserves rigorous analysis and that the study of societal processes is something to which you want to devote your professional career. If you’re lucky, you’re already confident that you’ve made the right decision, although many times during my years in graduate school at Columbia University during the tumultuous 1960s I doubted that I had.15 (Fortunately, my impulse to transfer into Columbia’s doctoral program in English Literature was checked by a friend studying in that program who punctured my naïve fantasies about it.)16 In any case, you’re probably still wrestling with less dramatic existential decisions, such as the subfields you think are worth preparing for your doctoral exams and especially the topic you want to investigate in your dissertation. Personal struggles over such intellectual alternatives are

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unavoidable for all scholars, but they are usually hardest for young researchers, who typically are experiencing them for the first time. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors kept telling our comparative politics research seminar, “Don’t be afraid of your own interests!” At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant, precisely because I was afraid to make personal research choices that might depart from the conventional wisdom about what was worth studying. Looking back, I see that my professor was trying to help my classmates and me grasp the vital importance of caring passionately about our chosen subjects, whatever they might be. Without passion, few scholars can do first-­rate research.17* Figuring out what you really care about can be difficult, and the temptation to resolve your uncertainty by prematurely latching onto a topic just because it’s available is a risk you should recognize.18 You can counter this risk in a couple of ways. Reading works of political philosophy and literary fiction can help widen your horizons and sensitize you to questions that other scholars may have overlooked.19 The social sciences’ general tendency to discount the importance of political and moral philosophy during most of the past century helps explain certain disciplinary failures to address serious moral issues, especially those having to do with racist practices at home and abroad.20 Another way to prime your thinking is to consider carefully how your personal experiences might be parlayed into a researchable dissertation topic. Those experiences can be a valuable source of inspiration, and they shouldn’t be discounted.21 In my generation, for example, some returning Peace Corps volunteers drew on their service abroad to find an especially interesting region or issue for their dissertation research. In my own case, there was some carryover from my undergraduate major in religious studies to my graduate study of Marxism-­Leninism in the USSR.22 But do such academic choices really deserve to be called existential? They do. Your personal growth as a scholar depends on your discovery of topics that you care about deeply. The list of possibilities is almost endless, ranging in political science from voter behavior to the causes of interstate war, with a vast assortment of alternatives in between.23 The same abundance of potential topics is available in each of the other social sciences. The huge array of potential research topics underscores the necessity for you to choose carefully. Reading and discussing important books and articles may help you clarify your intellectual options, but no one else can tell you which subjects are most worthy of your sustained attention. Only you can do that, through repeated reconnaissance missions and careful reflection on what you’ve found. Choices of this kind are often stressful, especially

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near the start of your professional career.24 As your career unfolds, you may change the focus of your scholarship substantially, but each change will be shaped by a value choice based on your personal life project as you understand it at that moment, combined with conditions in the academic marketplace. Identifying the subjects that you find most engaging and satisfying is partly an intellectual process, but it’s also a deeply emotional one. All humans seek self-­respect and a sense of purpose. We seek these things because our existence, in a fundamental sense, begins and ends in mystery. The quest to tame this existential uncertainty acquires a sense of urgency from our awareness of our mortality, whether or not we acknowledge this link. The years are passing, and we have only a limited amount of time to discover a personal answer that justifies our existence.25 That is one reason we strive to match the accomplishments of other members of our generation—­or to surpass them—­as we move through the seasons of life. It is also why no other person’s sense of purpose can simply be substituted for your own. The central intellectual importance of value choices doesn’t mean that we should swing to the opposite extreme by characterizing the social sciences as purely subjective, as some proponents of an extreme “postmodern” outlook have done.26 The absolute contrast between “objectivity” and “subjectivity” is a false dichotomy (one of many discussed in this book).27 Existential values are quite different from probative values, but both are required to produce first-­rate scholarship.28 Existential values give the scholar a passionate commitment to study a chosen subject exhaustively. Probative values give the scholar an equally passionate commitment to follow wherever the empirical evidence leads.29 Probative values may also include commitments to rely on specific analytical methods of investigation and explanation, and the two kinds of values sometimes shade into one another. Mastering certain analytical techniques takes large personal commitments of time and energy, and these commitments tend to grow stronger over the years. This is true, for instance, of the techniques of survey research and analysis applied in sociology and the econometric methods used in advanced economic research.30 Still, the two categories of values are distinct in principle and should be carefully differentiated. Keeping this distinction in mind can help you make thoughtful decisions about the analytical techniques and skills you most want to master. It also can defuse misunderstandings with other scholars and facilitate scholarly progress. A third kind of value is aesthetic. Scholars have divergent attitudes toward the formal qualities that contribute to first-­rate scholarship. These qualities include simplicity, precision, elegance, rigor, topical inclusive-

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ness, compatibility with other specialized research fields, and degree of correspondence to lived experience. These values cannot all be optimized at the same time, and there is no settled method for deciding which deserves pride of place. To a significant extent, some values are baked into particular scholarly disciplines and subdisciplines. But they are also a matter of personal intellectual preferences, which helps explain why members of the same discipline may admire quite different exemplars of scholarly excellence. One illustration of varying aesthetic tastes is the well-­known contrast between “lumpers” and “splitters,” that is, between scholars who pursue inclusive generalizations and scholars who prize fine-­grained analytical distinctions.31 Motivated by these contrasting dispositions, scholars tend to pursue either “big picture” studies or “grassroots” investigations. Neither analytical approach is inherently superior to the other, and both arguably contribute to the growth of knowledge.32 The choice between them depends on the user’s aesthetic tastes and personal scholarly aims.33 Within limits, you are free to decide which of these values matter most to you.34

SHIFTING DISCIPLINARY PRIORITIES

As you set your scholarly course, the opinions of established scholars merit careful consideration, but not unthinking emulation. Like national political agendas, academic agendas are a matter of persisting debate. The level of disagreement ebbs and flows, but some contention always remains. In political science, for example, there is no overarching disciplinary agenda other than an interest in the generation and exercise of political power—­ and even this intellectual boundary is elastic.35 Although some especially entrepreneurial political scientists may talk as if a unified agenda exists or should be established, the testimony of knowledgeable senior scholars shows that these claims are wide of the mark.36 Rather, the discipline encompasses multiple agendas embodied in the priorities of particular researchers or groups of researchers. The same pattern exists in anthropology and sociology, and even in economics, although to a lesser extent.37 Of course, some of the disciplinary agendas on offer are more widely accepted than others. There may be a dominant view of what the discipline is and how it should develop, but many competing views exist, and the dominant view changes over time and from place to place.38 Established scholars expend a good deal of energy thinking and argu-

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ing about how their chosen discipline ought to develop in the future. This question is at the heart of the disciplinary debates discussed in earlier chapters, and it is closely bound up with the personal answers that the most outspoken researchers have arrived at in their own professional lives. If conducted in a constructive and tolerant spirit, such debates can shed valuable light on the intellectual choices and alternative scholarly paths that lie ahead. Professional associations make an important contribution to these discussions by highlighting emerging issues at their annual meetings and other gatherings.39 Disciplinary journals also contribute, as do review articles and annual volumes surveying recent trends in publications on particular topics within the discipline. Paying close attention to these debates and discussing them with people you know will help clarify your own scholarly priorities.40 Bear in mind that discussions and debates of this kind can also reveal implicit professional biases. Take, for example, the collection The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives, published a little more than a decade ago.41 It contains one hundred brief prescriptive essays by leading political scientists about the discipline’s prospects. Many of the essays are thoughtful and illuminating. Taken as a whole, however, the collection exhibits three striking omissions. First, it makes virtually no references to the far-­reaching “Mr. Perestroika” controversy that had erupted just a few years earlier and that had been encapsulated in a major edited volume debating current developments in US political science. The collection also overlooks another serious edited volume on the nature of political science that appeared about the same time.42 It therefore fails to engage with alternative views about the discipline’s future and falls well short of the standard of scrupulous scholarly interchange.43 Second, the collection contains only one essay that deals explicitly with a foreign country or countries; hence the comparative dimension of political studies is severely neglected. Third, the book focuses entirely on the domestic politics within states. The question of future research on international relations—­first and foremost the interactions among sovereign states—­is passed over completely. In a work that appeared a half-­dozen years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, these omissions are striking, especially because of the editors’ stated intention to clarify the discipline’s future and their recruitment of many distinguished American scholars to participate in the exercise.44 Despite the theme of globalization that was still a salient part of American cultural discourse at the time the collection went to press, the project bypassed many significant professional issues.

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US SOCIAL SCIENCE SCHOLARSHIP IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

With this point in mind, it’s worth thinking about the relationship between the social sciences in the United States and in other countries. America’s role in the world of international scholarship grew markedly in the early twentieth century, and after World War II the United States became intellectually dominant on the world scene, just as it did politically. Since then, foreign social studies have been strongly shaped by American practices. The American Political Science Association (APSA) was created decades before its European counterparts, and the number of political scientists in the United States far exceeds the number in other advanced industrial countries. Similar lags and numerical disparities have characterized the other social sciences, with the arguable exception of economics, and even in economics America’s relative position is extremely strong. In my view, US dominance of international scholarship has probably made humankind’s intellectual progress in social studies less valuable than a more balanced distribution of national efforts would have done. That is so partly because creative social science researchers in other countries have adopted certain distinctive approaches based on their own national political and academic traditions. Why is this variation in national scholarly practices significant? Juxtaposing distinctive national scholarly perspectives can help identify unconscious national biases and help compensate for lacunae and distortions in future research programs.45 In dictatorial regimes, of course, the scholarly study of current affairs is severely restricted, if it exists at all, and the access of foreign researchers to the country is likewise treated with suspicion. In the USSR, for example, the very notion of studying society empirically was profoundly distrusted by communist ideologists, and efforts to establish autonomous fields of social science were largely thwarted.46 This extreme case shows how the character of a country’s political regime can affect disciplinary progress, but even democratic countries with a relatively high level of scholarly output show important variations in research priorities and analytical approaches. Take, for example, the study of politics in Great Britain. Although the US constitutional system was strongly influenced from the start by British political ideals, contemporary British political science scholarship, considered in the aggregate, differs substantially from American scholarship.47 These differences are due in part to government restrictions and in part to the influence of British academic culture. British scholars have studied many important issues having to do with elections, the operation of Parlia-

Choosing Research Problems 91

ment, and other subjects. But they have been unable to shed much light on the workings of the British government’s executive departments, due to the prohibitions on obtaining information about those departments under the Official Secrets Act, whose intent is the opposite of the American Freedom of Information Act.48 In addition, compared with the US pattern, British scholarship has been less influenced by the aspiration to make the study of politics rigorously scientific. British political studies have therefore been more closely aligned with the work of political historians than has the output of most American political scientists.49 This generalization holds for “typical” or median definitions of US political science and British political studies, even though each body of scholarship shows substantial internal diversity. This brief foray into cross-­national differences in the study of politics brings us to the question of diversity within American political science itself (as well as in related social science disciplines). Although the range of scholarly values and priorities inside US political science is larger than sometimes recognized, a strong case can be made that the discipline would benefit from still more internal variation. That’s why expanding social, ethnic, and gender diversity within the American academic profession is an important objective.50 Although political debates over the proper role of American universities often oversimplify and caricature this issue, the need for greater diversity is genuine. Expanded diversity is necessary not only on grounds of fairness to individuals from underrepresented groups. Equally important, it is necessary on the strictly epistemological grounds of promoting disciplinary excellence. Scholars with different personal backgrounds tend to focus on different research topics and tend to work from different intuitive assumptions about their subjects. A culturally diverse profession is therefore more likely to identify and plumb a wider range of important scholarly problems. One dramatic historical example is the academic and cultural impact of the European intellectuals who fled the Nazis and immigrated to the United States in years before World War II (as well as afterward.) Some of these figures were pioneers in the US study of Europe’s catastrophic wartime fate, as well as in the study of the Soviet totalitarian system that survived the war.51* By contrast, native-­born American scholars rarely grappled as directly with the shattering experiences of the military upheaval.52 They had not experienced the consequences of the European catastrophe as deeply and personally.53 Nor did the political ­science profession, which included few members of America’s nonwhite minorities, pay nearly enough attention to ongoing

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practices of racism and ethnic discrimination inside the United States. Had it done so, the explosive domestic crisis of the 1960s might not have come as such a shock.54* Ever since American political science began, the proper relationship between political science and the promotion of continued democratization has generated controversy inside the profession.55* Although leading figures in the development of political science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nominally supported democratic principles, they were steeped in the racist and imperialist attitudes then prevailing among white Americans, and they openly endorsed these attitudes in public.56* They also neglected issues of gender and gender inequality, as explained in chapter 1. The fact that today this disciplinary history is unknown to most American political scientists is highly significant. It suggests that dominant social attitudes can strongly influence or limit a discipline’s research priorities, and it underscores the importance of recognizing such shortcomings in order to avoid repeating such errors of judgment in the present. It also highlights the importance of thinking hard about your personal context as a method of refining your research priorities in a self-­critical spirit.57 Of course, the linkage between distinctive personal experience and innovative scholarship is not rigid; it entails intellectual risks as well as benefits, and there are many exceptions. In the study of Soviet totalitarianism, for example, native-­born US analysts sometimes harbored a suspicion that émigré scholars were less objective due to their previous personal hardships, and the charge sometimes contained a grain of truth.58* The same holds, of course, for minority scholars working in fields such as African American Studies and Gender Studies. The champions of these new fields have sometimes pushed their new hypotheses and interpretations further than the evidence warranted. That tendency, however, does not disprove the existence of biases held by historically dominant majorities that are equally untenable (if not more so). On balance, greater racial, ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity among scholars will contribute to fuller coverage of important societal issues that otherwise might be neglected, as well as to wider exploration of serious hypotheses about those issues. In the words of a penetrating observer, “We are all full of unwarranted background assumptions and inclinations of which we are more or less unaware. This is not a question of intellectual honesty. We do not know precisely what our biases are, so they cannot be systematically eliminated.” The proper response to this situation, he explains, is to “organize the pursuit of knowledge so that a great variety of different prejudices are at work in the production of theories. The way to

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ensure the optimal diversity of rival theories is to make sure we have a wide variety of theorists.”59* The result, overall, will be better scholarship that draws in a disciplined fashion on the emotional dispositions of particular scholars. In the words of one shrewd thinker, “detachment functions . . . not by draining us of passion, but by helping to channel our intellectual passions in such a way as to ensure collision with rival perspectives.”60 Whatever your personal demographic profile, drawing on your own distinctive values and experiences to inform your scholarship can contribute to this outcome.

VIII

 | Concepts and Concept Formation Every serious experience cries out for one or more concepts. And when you have hit upon a concept that seems to encapsulate that experience, play mind games with it. Don’t come to the event—­make the event come to you by categorizing [it]. —­Theodore Lowi Our intense human desire to avoid ambiguity, to pinpoint the true and to discard the false, to separate the wheat from the chaff, tends to make us seek and believe in very sharp answers to questions that have none. —­Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander The most puzzling phenomena in this world are precisely the ones we take for granted. That is certainly the case within the scholarly disciplines, where the foundational concepts that are the tools for unearthing new knowledge—­ power in political science, culture in anthropology, truth in philosophy, fact in history—­themselves prove to be quite problematic as new subatomic levels continue to be discovered . . . —­Frank Ninkovich In their effort to communicate complex thoughts, social scientists have borrowed lay terms with impunity. At times, the practice helps to clarify a difficult theory. Perhaps as often, it muddies the conceptual waters. —­Mario L. Small

Concepts and concept formation are the heart of the analytical process. One obstacle to using concepts effectively is that most of them are represented by familiar words that make them seem straightforward, even though they are not. Another obstacle is that concepts are based on mental categories that are continuously modified to accommodate new experiences and new ideas. Both individual thinkers and whole societies regularly engage in this kind of conceptual adaptation. That’s why thinking hard about concept formation is essential before you launch your research project.

W

hy are concepts important in social science? Researchers sometimes take concepts for granted. They think of taxonomy, or the study of classifications, “as a kind of glorified bookkeeping dedicated to pasting

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objects into preassigned spaces in nature’s stamp album.” But this is a profound mistake, because systems of classification are actually “theories of order” chosen from numerous defensible alternatives.1* Think back to the optical illusions you saw in chapter 1. Concepts shape your thinking just as strongly as the cues in those images affected your visual perceptions. They are intellectual lenses that structure all our perceptions of the social world. They affect everything we do as researchers, no matter which analytical methods we employ. That is why the careful formulation of concepts is so critical to any research project. The concepts you select to frame your research project will affect how you organize your investigation from the get-­go, long before you start collecting data. They are “data containers.”2 Concepts have histories that give them distinctive intellectual features and evaluative overtones, and you should consider these particular characteristics in picking the concepts that will underpin your project.3 Unless you work through the process of concept formation systematically, your conceptual framework is likely to incorporate silent assumptions that skew your findings and diminish your work’s impact. Giovanni Sartori has called the key concepts used by a researcher “generalizations in disguise.” To put it differently, when you select analytical terms you may be endorsing certain generalizations without knowing you are doing it.4 Unless handled carefully, the concepts you choose can prevent you from recognizing such intellectual elisions and missteps. Perhaps just as important, your chosen concepts will influence how your finished project is received by other scholars, because they will tend to view your work through the prism of prior scholarship that has employed similar concepts. That is, choosing concepts will situate your work in certain intellectual “traditions” constructed by other scholars, whether or not you intend to put it there.5 For example, if you build a study of American politics around the concept of “elites”—­and even more, the twin concepts of “elites” and “masses”—­it will affect how most readers approach your work. If you frame the study in terms of “democratic participation,” readers will approach your work with quite different expectations. The audience effects of the sociological choice between “social stratification” and “social inequality” will be similar. Often people interpret the same empirical evidence differently, depending on whether it’s associated with certain hot-­button themes.6 To some extent, that’s true of scholars as well, even though in principle it shouldn’t be.7

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CONCEPTS AND CLASSIFICATIONS

At first glance, concepts and concept formation may seem straightforward, but in reality they are extraordinarily complex. To see why, consider the distinction between concepts and cut-­and-­dried classifications.8 Such classifications really are straightforward. A black-­and-­white classification scheme sorts items on the basis of objective, unchanging criteria of membership. It allows us to put social entities or phenomena into predefined pigeonholes or classes. Dividing accounts of historical events chronologically into centuries or decades is an example.9 Although the act of classification frequently runs up against borderline cases, in principle the process is clear.10 The classes are precisely and unambiguously defined.11 Conceptual categories are entirely different. In a brilliant study, cognitive scientists Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander have argued convincingly that concept formation and concept modification are the central processes of human thought. Virtually all human thinking is based on the making of analogies. Analogies link our past experiences with the present by assigning them to an evolving set of categories based partly on the language in which we’ve been educated and partly on our personal experiences.12 They allow us to say, for example, that phenomenon ABC resembles phenomenon BCD, that it has less in common with phenomenon CDE, and that it is completely distinct from DEF. Hofstadter and Sander point out that if humans lacked the capacity to make analogies, we would be unable to learn anything, because every fresh event would strike us as completely novel, even if we had experienced an identical or similar event only a day or an hour before. In other words, memory is a continuous process of analogy making that allows us to place our experiences in categories. Without categories and the analogies that produce them, we would be unable to reason and to communicate with each other.13 Moreover, analogy making is retroactive. It reshapes our thinking about the past as well as the present. Once we intuit that a new phenomenon or event should be fitted into an existing category, the addition often subtly modifies the category itself. Psychologists have shown that human memories are not fixed once and for all but are constantly “re-­remembered.” This holds true even for our “flashbulb memories” of the especially dramatic events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that we are sure we recall accurately and will never forget.14 What holds for individuals holds for groups as well, including nations, religious confessions, professions, scholars, and virtually all other social collectivities. Students of historiography have shown that all historians, even the most rigorous, are engaged in an unceas-

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ing process of reinterpreting the past in the light of contemporary circumstances.15 In roughly similar fashion, political scientists and other social scientists are also engaged in linking recent events with what went before, even if we are unaware that we are doing so. If all of this is true, why isn’t it obvious? Why do most people instinctively resist the idea that they are constantly engaged in making and remaking analogies? And if you, too, are skeptical, why? The answer is that most analogy making is done unconsciously. Unconscious analogies enable us to move through our daily routines with a minimum diversion of attention that allows us to focus on nonroutine matters. A closely related reason is that many ordinary analogies have become dead metaphors whose analogical origins we forget due to repeated use: “she hit the nail on the head,” “I pried the secret out of him,” “we came to a meeting of the minds,” and so forth. Computer users employ an especially rich assortment of dead metaphors: “folder,” “desktop,” “file,” “firewall,” and “memory,” to name just a few.16* As these examples illustrate, many of the analogies that we use to describe intellectual and social processes derive from the physical world.17 In an analytical sense, analogies and metaphors are equivalent because they perform the same cognitive function of comparison, despite the formal distinction conventionally made between analogies and metaphors by literary scholars.18 Analogy making, according to Hofstadter and Sander, occurs in all realms of thought, ranging from household chores to the study of particle physics. Some analogies are rudimentary, but others are profound. On this view, expertise is an intellectual capacity to make especially sophisticated analogies. In any given field of specialization, the main difference between experts and laypersons lies in the kind of analogies they can construct. Experts know which analogies are (or promise to be) the most revealing; laypersons can’t distinguish insightful analogies from misleading or superficial ones. This contrast is what distinguishes Einstein as a physicist from virtually all the rest of us.19

SHARP-­E DGED CONCEPTS VS. FUZZY CONCEPTS

This brings us back to the analytical role of concepts in the social sciences. Dichotomies, which are the most familiar variety of sharp-­edged concepts, are widely used in political science, sociology, and other fields.20 Dichotomous concepts require that all data be classified as black or white, without allowing for any shades of gray.21 They are often the basis of large-­N stud-

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ies that rely on statistical analysis. And in certain circumstances they have great utility, not least because they help us avoid vague or tautological statements. To be able to define or identify a phenomenon, we must be able to define or identify its opposite. Unless we can do this, we do not really understand what the relevant concept means. And unless we do understand, it is easy to slide into what scholars call conceptual stretching, by lumping fundamentally dissimilar things into the same category.22 The result may be what Giovanni Sartori has sarcastically labeled the “cat-­dog” concept, that is, a concept that accommodates both cats and dogs but by itself is useless for most analytical purposes.23 In short, pooling black and white may produce only gray confusion.24 Sartori’s view, however, is not the whole story. Sometimes cats and dogs do belong in the same category; everything depends on what we are trying to analyze. Cats and dogs fit together quite comfortably in the category of “small domesticated animals,” which could be useful in comparing animals that have been domesticated with those that exist only in the wild. In other words, Sartori’s point of view is indispensable when we analyze phenomena using dichotomous categories. But his approach to conceptualization is not intellectually comprehensive, because it fails to take account of other types of conceptualization that are not dichotomous and sharp-­ edged.25 That is to say, some alternative types of conceptualization do make intellectual allowances for various shades of gray (and more).26 Why is this important? A great deal of political life is anything but clear-­ cut, even though people often view it in those terms. Oversimplifications and caricatures are, after all, common features of political controversy, but these practices should be barred from the realm of scholarship. A central theme of this book is that societal realms such as politics and economics are full of different shades of gray, and that the social sciences must make room for them. Fortunately, during the past two or three decades, some leading thinkers have wrestled with this problem and devised a novel approach to conceptualization based on what they call “fuzzy-­set” concepts. Fuzzy-­set concepts are different from sharply defined classes like dichotomies.27 Working with sharp-­edged concepts, you must count an event or phenomenon as either black or white, but not both. Working with fuzzy-­set concepts, you can categorize the event or phenomenon as matching a particular concept completely, somewhat, or only slightly. In other words, fuzzy-­set thinking allows degrees of membership in a category, with the precise degree defined in relation to the number of indicators you as the analyst require for inclusion. A less abstract way of imagining this style of reasoning is to think about the members of a biological family.

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Under this kind of conceptualization, these individuals may all be viewed as belonging to the concept of “the family,” because they share a number of physical features with their biological relatives, even though they lack some individual features that other biological relatives have.28 The precise assortment of family traits and the minimum number of traits required for inclusion in the category can be specified by the analyst. And depending on how many of the total assortment of traits each individual has, that person can be said to belong to the family in various degrees.29 Here it’s worth pointing out that both sharp-­edged and fuzzy concepts are “socially constructed.” “Social construction” is a metaphor for the historical processes that produce durable social concepts. Although the metaphor of “construction” is useful, it has given rise to considerable confusion in social ­science research.30 All social ­science categories are socially constructed, in the sense that they are human creations, but they are not all constructed in the same fashion. Formally “objective” concepts employed in social research, such as GDP data, are socially constructed, even though some researchers are unaware of the fact. That is, these concepts are based on the indices chosen by a researcher or a government administrator before any empirical data can be gathered. They rest on the gatherer’s personal judgment about what kind of information is needed, and why.31 In Seeing Like a State, James Scott emphasizes that such categories can be misleading and can sometimes omit important information. One striking example is the Western (or at least US) practice of excluding unsalaried homemaking and child rearing from the official categories of “employment” and “work.”32 “Fuzzy” concepts are also socially constructed, but in a different sense. They embody the researcher’s decision to allow an event or phenomenon to be included in the category when it satisfies some but not necessarily all of the criteria used to define the category. That is the meaning of the “fuzzy” label. Different degrees of membership in the category are possible. A phenomenon can be “completely in,” “partly in/partly outside,” or “entirely outside” the concept as designed. In my view, many concepts commonly used in scholarly analysis and public debate are of this type, even though most analysts and commentators are unfamiliar with the notion of fuzzy concepts.33 In my opinion, fuzzy-­set concepts are often preferable to sharp-­edged concepts because they are usually truer to life. Rather than rely on classes with absolute membership (e.g., black or white), they rest on schemas of meaning that allow the degree of membership to vary depending on how many of the features stipulated by the researcher are in evidence. In this

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sense, the fuzzy concepts used in social research are socially constructed, but so are the concepts used in biological research.34 Family member A may coincide with the central “essence” of the category by exhibiting all the possible family features, but member B may be further away because she exhibits only some of them, and member C may be marginal because he exhibits only one.35 As it happens, this view of concepts and concept formation dovetails closely with the understanding of categorization presented by Hofstadter and Sander.36 In categorization based on fuzzy concepts, specific objects or phenomena are located at different “intellectual distances” from the central ontological essence of the concept. For example, objects A and B may belong at the center because they both exhibit the same five criteria for membership in the category, whereas object C may be further away from that essence because it exhibits, say, only three of the five criteria, and object E may be furthest away, in the “halo” at the outer edges of the concept, because it exhibits only one of the criteria.37 Such gradations of membership can be applied to political concepts like “empire,” as we shall see in a moment. Figuratively speaking, the development and modification of categories resemble the process of urban growth.38 The most important feature is the city center, the point at which the city originated. As the city grows, it develops outlying suburbs situated at varying distances from the center. Depending on the geographic pattern of urban expansion, the growing suburbs may gradually shift the city’s commercial center away from its original location. That is, the ontological essence of the category is modified by the incorporation of new elements into the category. In addition, the most remote suburbs may be located midway between the city center and the center of another city, making them peripheral elements of both urban regions. In other words, it is possible for a peripheral element to belong to more than one category. This unfamiliar version of concept formation may seem confusing at first, but it makes the analysis of complex cases much more sophisticated. Take, for instance, the complicated question of whether the USSR was an empire. In the decade following the breakup of the USSR, specialists devoted a considerable amount of energy to trying to answer this contentious question with a simple “yes” or “no.”39 In contrast, if we apply a fuzzy or family-­resemblance approach to the concept of empire, we can stipulate the features of a “pure” or complete empire, then categorize particular cases as full members, partial members, or nonmembers of the category.40 We might posit, for example, that the essential features of empire are (1)

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rule by an emperor or king, (2) a dictatorial form of government, (3) a large territory, (4) dominance of subordinate nationalities by a ruling nationality, and (5) large-­scale use of coercion against some inhabitants. If we require that a particular case exhibit all five features in order to be included in the category, the Tsarist state would qualify as an empire, but the USSR would not qualify because it was not formally led by an emperor or king. On the other hand, if we required that a particular case exhibit only four of the five features to be included in the category, the USSR would qualify because it exhibited features 2 through 5. To take another example, the nineteenth-­ century United States would not meet the four-­feature threshold to be considered an empire, but it could be categorized under a three-­feature definition, since it arguably exhibited features 3 through 5. If you are an American, you may think that this threefold definition of empire is too loose and that to call the United States an empire is misleading. The United States was a leader—­arguably the leader—­in the enactment of democratic principles. As Alexis de Tocqueville and many subsequent thinkers have explained, it was a democracy. If we apply the dichotomous concepts of “democracy” and “nondemocracy,” we would have to classify the United States as a democracy by comparison with almost all other nineteenth-­century regimes. However, Tocqueville’s treatment of the United States demonstrates that dichotomous categories sometimes conceal as much as they reveal.41 Tocqueville regarded the United States as a democracy because it lacked a European-­style aristocracy and therefore offered many citizens exceptional opportunities for political independence and the acquisition of wealth. Put differently, he classed the United States as a democracy because it lacked the hereditary aristocracy that he took to be the key feature of nondemocracies. In reality, however, there are several different types of nondemocracy, and they exhibit different features. One of them, for example, rests on official racial discrimination, and another on gender discrimination. Tocqueville’s dichotomous approach to the question of democracy led him to understate the importance of slavery in the United States. Nor did he take account of the legal prohibition on voting by women that persisted until the end of World War I.42 Slavery, of course, was profoundly antidemocratic by any standard of human justice. Based on violent coercion, it was a key precondition for US economic development in the North as well as the South, but Tocqueville did not factor it into his general conclusions about American democracy or into the conclusions he drew from US experience for the future of Europe.43 In this respect, his work exemplifies the pitfalls of a dichotomous style of thinking that mistakenly assumes that the available data constitute a complete set

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of cases. Democracy in America is a classic work full of profound judgments, but it also demonstrates the limitations of analysis based on dichotomous concepts. Had fuzzy-­set concepts existed at the time, using them might have saved Tocqueville from this major intellectual omission. Fuzzy concepts help us make more refined comparisons among cases. But we must pay a price in the narrowed scope of our generalizations. Using fuzzy concepts provides a more accurate depiction of cases and a sounder basis for comparisons, but it also means that we cannot pretend to generalize from those cases as fully and abstractly as some social scientists aspire to do. Large-­N studies must be based on clear-­cut classifications, not on fuzzy concepts that are pliable. And this distinction has important implications for the research process. Researchers engaged in case-­study or small-­N research may adjust the criteria for assigning cases to categories in the course of their investigations; but researchers doing large-­N research must stick with their predefined classification criteria from the beginning of their project to its end.

SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC CONCEPTS: STATIC CONDITIONS VERSUS DYNAMIC PROCESSES

Another important methodological distinction separates concepts that denote static conditions from those that denote dynamic processes. A few important social ­science terms have both kinds of meaning, and failure to recognize this ambiguity can make sensible analysis impossible. For instance, industrialization, bureaucratization, modernization, democratization, and globalization all have dual meanings. Each of these words can be used to denote both a process and the final outcome of that process.44 If we are analyzing the consequences of industrialization, for example, the static version focused on outcomes might lead us to list enhanced GDP per capita, a better popular standard of living, widespread education, and perhaps political stability as consequences. But the dynamic version focused on the process of industrialization might lead us to cite very different consequences: the impoverishment of urban workers, the growth of child labor, labor unrest and clashes with capitalists, and perhaps revolutionary instability.45 Similarly, if we are analyzing the consequences of democratization, we must not confuse the process of democratization with the outcome it could (but may not) produce. One need look no further than the reversal of postcommunist liberalization in Russia under Vladimir Putin to grasp the significance of this distinction.

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Or take “modernization.” In the United States, this word came into vogue in the 1950s, but the word “modern” has a genealogy extending back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Ever since, “modern” has been a word to conjure with, and it has been the object of almost continuous controversy, as various thinkers have invoked it to validate their preferred models of an advanced society.46 The word’s history of ideological contestation during the past three centuries sheds useful light on the concept of modernization.47 In the United States after the Second World War, that concept became the intellectual keystone for a noncommunist vision of the future that was invoked to combat Soviet predictions of communism’s ultimate global triumph. Embedded in the concept of modernization were numerous assumptions—­most of them unexamined—­that had far-­reaching implications.48 Not the least of them concerned what, if anything, would come after modernity was reached. Was modernization a terminal condition, or was it an ongoing process? And if the former, would historical change then be frozen in time?49 As this question suggests, the static-­dynamic distinction has profound implications for the way we think about the relationships among the past, the present, and the future. It is usually a mistake to assume that a process occurring in the recent past has reached its final culmination in the present. Until sufficient evidence can be gathered, it is better to assume that a process of change has not yet run its course and may continue into the future. Adopting this view will help you avoid the common human tendency toward presentism, which generally presupposes that current circumstances are natural and will therefore persist in the future.50 The unreliability of this assumption helps explain why the term “postmodern” entered the American scholarly lexicon in the 1990s. Human social development had not stopped at the stage previously described as modern, and some sort of marker was necessary to take account of this fact.51 Significantly, recent observers have sometimes resorted to the clumsy “post-­postmodern” label in an effort to avoid this pitfall. A nonpresentist outlook has normative implications as well as analytical ones. Take, for example, the notion of democratization. If rapid sociopolitical change occurred not only in the past but will continue in the future, we must exercise great caution in applying this term to any country, including the United States. For instance, the United States was not democratic in 1828 in the same sense that it was democratic in 1928. After all, in 1828 slavery was still a central part of the American political economy, regardless of the ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Moreover, the United States was not democratic in 1964 in the same sense that it

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was democratic in 2010. Indeed, when judged by its actualization of democratic ideals, the contemporary United States is far from fully democratic and might well become less democratic (or more) depending on future events.52 This is one reason Robert Dahl chose to categorize the United States as belonging a new category of polities he called “polyarchies.” Dahl defined polyarchies as pluralistic political systems characterized by multiple centers of power. His purpose in devising this new category was to avoid using the term democracy to legitimize the persisting non-­ or antidemocratic features of the American political system.53 In the social sciences, the meaning of central concepts is often subject to scholarly debate influenced by philosophical values. These “essentially contested concepts” are unavoidably affected by scholars’ ontological assumptions about the character of human interactions and the factors that affect them.54 At the time, some scholars criticized Dahl’s classification of the United States as a polyarchy on the grounds that this category impugned the standing of the United States as a democracy. Dahl’s exploration of the meaning of “power,” another key concept for political scientists, likewise influenced the thinking of many scholars.55 But in my opinion, power has more dimensions than Dahl captured in his initial conceptualization of it.56 Key concepts used in the other social sciences must likewise be handled with care. Concepts such as “culture” in anthropology and “market” in economics are sometimes contested, but in many cases not as probingly as they should be.57 This holds especially, in my view, for the abstract concept of “the market.”58 Scholars who apply such concepts cannot avoid making philosophical and normative assumptions, whether or not they are aware they are doing so.

MUST CONCEPTS ACTUALLY BE FORMED?

Must concepts actually be formed? The short answer to this question is yes. When writing my dissertation, I didn’t fully understand the importance of concept formation, but I do now. Concept formation is a crucial task that you must wrestle with to produce a solid dissertation or book.59* Over the past century or two, social thinkers have attached quite different meanings to many of the key words we commonly use in social analysis. Put differently, each of these words has been used to represent multiple concepts, including concepts that are quite inconsistent with one another. (“Liberalism,” discussed earlier, is a striking example.60) Unless forewarned, other scholars are likely to read one or another of these accumu-

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lated meanings into your finished study, even if you don’t intend for that to happen. Moreover, failing to engage in concept formation increases the chances that you will unconsciously associate a key analytical term with more than one of these accumulated meanings, thereby confusing not just your readers, but yourself. Scholarly concept formation always entails the creation of new analogies. This is true even though the new analogies are often generated implicitly and with a minimum of conscious thought. As stated earlier, scholarly expertise consists of the ability to generate and apply profound analogies and to winnow out superficial ones.61 Within their specialized domain, scholars know which analogies are superficial and which ones illuminate the essential core of their specialty. Non-­experts, on the other hand, cannot distinguish between core analogies and superficial ones. This, by the way, is one reason that social scientists do not enjoy the high status of physicists and biomedical scientists.62 Many of the concepts we use often strike laypeople as self-­evident, even banal, and they have commonsense analogies ready to hand. By contrast, the exotic terminology of the natural sciences lies far beyond an untrained layperson’s comprehension. A few examples, some from my own experience, will clarify the importance of concept formation. Two terms that hovered around me as I wrote my dissertation were “ideology” and “bureaucracy.” Since I was studying Soviet politics, it seemed natural to use these terms in my research. Writing the dissertation, however, made me aware that these terms, even though they may point to crucial realities, also conceal many pitfalls. “Ideology” is an extraordinarily elastic term, and in research on Soviet politics it was often a facile explanation for things that otherwise were unpleasantly difficult to account for. The term became a catch-­all concept that frequently obscured more about the Soviet system than it revealed.63 The constant risk was that analysts would reify Soviet ideology and treat it as if it were an unchanging, transhistorical force independent of other factors. The basic problem was that this approach could not adequately explain ideological differences inside the regime or, especially, when and how official Soviet ideology actually changed.64 In the study of US politics, by contrast, the word “ideology” has been used much less often. In the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, a feeling spread that the advanced Western countries were experiencing “the end of ideology” and were consequently becoming increasingly “pragmatic.”65 American ideology was indeed profoundly different from the Marxist-­Leninist variety, but it did exist, and it was not entirely benign. Indeed, the slogan of “pragmatism” was sometimes used

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as an ideological smokescreen that skirted the need for deeper political analysis by excluding important issues from public discussion. Arguably much of American ideology was informal and unarticulated; but this made it subtler and more difficult to challenge head-­on.66 That was one secret of its durability (and still is). “Bureaucracy” is another elastic term, although it is not such a shape shifter as “ideology.” The term seemed indispensable to any analysis of Soviet industrial politics, and so I used it in my dissertation. I gradually learned, however, that analysts use the word to describe many kinds of large organizations that behave in very different ways. In an effort to take account of these divergent patterns of behavior, I therefore devised a four-­ fold classification of bureaucratic types. The classification highlighted important differences among these types, such as the presence or absence of highly trained experts, the novelty or repetitiousness of the organization’s main tasks, patterns of information flow inside the organization, and so on. But the dissertation did not apply the typology consistently. More important, I failed to take account of two vital aspects of any social science concept: intelligibility and resonance with readers.67 When I tried to publish an article elaborating on the typology of bureaucracies, reviewers found it too unorthodox (or even oxymoronic), and the article was rejected.68 A similar note of caution is in order if you draw on other common terms. Take the word “elite,” for instance. Which social actors belong in this category? Unless you define it explicitly in terms of governmental power, wealth, or aristocratic origins, it is likely to make your analysis tautological or self-­contradictory. Indeed, you may have to wrestle with the question of whether “elite” or “elites” is the right analytical category, since the two words have distinct structural implications. Or consider “society.” It is one of the most elastic words in the English language, and it nearly guarantees confusion. Does “society” encompass everything in a particular country except the government? Does it include only the social collectivities that behave in socially acceptable ways, or do criminal organizations also qualify for membership? Does society include only active groups, or do inert groupings that exist just as census classifications also qualify? These different definitions have different analytical implications.69 The same holds true for other common categories, such as “market,” “power,” “leadership,” and “national interest.”70 If you still doubt that important social concepts are variable and change over time, consider “gender.” Many years ago, when I was still in high school, gender was strictly a grammatical term. In Spanish class, it was

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always necessary to know the gender—­meaning the grammatical status—­of the new words we were learning. Was a new word masculine or feminine? Two or three decades later, “gender” began to be used as a stand-­in for “sex,” meaning biologically male or female. When we filled out health forms, we had to specify our gender, either as a man or woman. Fast forward a decade or two more, and gender began to mean something almost completely different. It began to reflect the dawning public awareness that sex roles are not fixed by biology but also are shaped by social values and political power. Moreover, gender, even in a biological sense, is a fuzzy concept, not a clear-­cut dichotomy. In recent decades this evolving notion of gender has ramified dramatically through political science and the other social sciences; it is an object lesson in conceptual change.71

CONCEPTS, YOUR PRESENT, AND YOUR FUTURE

For all these reasons, concept formation is an indispensable element of your research project. Without thoughtful concept formation you won’t be able to produce an insightful dissertation. Concept formation is related to concept operationalization—­that is, the specification of the empirical indicators used to apply the concept in practice—­but it is intellectually deeper. And it shouldn’t be confused with inventing catchy neologisms, which usually obscure reality rather than clarify it.72 Thinking hard about analytical concepts will be a key not only to completing your dissertation but also to creativity in your postdissertation career. Sustained engagement with concept formation is essential to intellectual discovery. Refreshing your conceptual armory will help you strengthen control over your own professional knowledge. It will also help you—­along with thousands of other scholars—­adjust your outlook to encompass the novelties of ongoing historical change.73* As Theodore Lowi’s words at the start of this chapter suggest, concept formation is a form of intellectual play, play not as a frivolous pastime but as the imaginative activity of “walking around” a subject to see it from new angles. Playing with metaphors to establish revealing new concepts is the imaginative heart of scholarly creativity. According to one historian of science, “[I]n the work of the active scientist there are not merely occasions for using metaphor, but necessities for doing so, as when trying to remove an unbearable gap or a monstrous fault.”74 That is because the limits of inductive reasoning produce a “necessity built into the process of scientific ratio-

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nality itself, an epistemological necessity that favors the search for and use of metaphors.  .  .  . Where logic fails, analogic [reasoning] continues. The bridge is now made no longer of steel but of gossamer. It breaks often, but sometimes it carries us across the gulf; and in any case there is nothing else that will.”75 Although the natural and social sciences differ in many respects, they are linked by this generative intellectual procedure for seeing the world anew.

IX

 | Theories, Hypotheses, and Research Designs [I]t is in . . . theory frames and not in fully developed and tested empirical theories that we find the strongest advances in the social sciences over the last 150 years. —­Dietrich Rueschemeyer Social science research involves a quest for new theories as well as a testing of existing theories. . . . Regrettably, social science methodology has focused almost exclusively on the latter. The conjectural element . . . is usually dismissed as a matter of guesswork, inspiration, or luck—­a leap of faith and hence a poor subject for methodological reflection. . . . There are two moments of empirical research. A lightbulb moment and a skeptical moment, each of which is essential to the progress of a discipline. —­John Gerring Methodological traditions are like any other social phenomena. They are made by people working together, criticizing one another, and borrowing from other traditions. They are living social things, not abstract categories in a single system. —­Andrew Abbott The qual-­quant distinction is erroneous and misleading: ‘quantitative’ researchers do make interpretations; ‘qualitative’ researchers do count. The terms have become a proxy for deeper divides concerning the character of social reality and how it might be known. —­Dvora Yanow

Theory and hypothesis are ubiquitous words the social sciences, but each word can mean several different things. To make matters worse, they are sometimes used interchangeably. “Framework,” another term researchers often use to organize their investigations, also conceals potential pitfalls. Whenever you use one of these words or see it in print, ask yourself what it really means. Unless you follow this rule, you may misunderstand the scholarly literature pertinent to your research, and developing a coherent dissertation design will be a steep uphill climb.

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ust as with the formulation of substantive political concepts, clear conceptions of key methodological terms are also necessary. For instance, what do we mean by a “research question”; is it different from other sorts of questions? How is a research question related to an analytical framework? And what about “theory”; is it different from a hypothesis, and if so, how? Come to think of it, what is a hypothesis, anyway? Theories and hypotheses frequently are formulated with respect to “cases,” but are you sure what a case is? Finally, what do we mean by that most complicated of terms: an explanation?1 These questions are taken up in this chapter and the two that follow.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORKS

The most important thing in doing research is choosing which question to ask. Saying “which question” probably understates the significance of this decision, because the wording could be taken to mean that a fixed menu of questions already exists. But it almost certainly doesn’t, or at least it shouldn’t. Imagination has a crucial role in formulating creative research questions. Qualitative researchers underscore this point when they highlight the importance of case research for theory creation (as opposed to theory testing with multiple cases). One way of being creative is to “play” with your question—­for example, by reversing your working assumptions and asking why a certain phenomenon sometimes fails to occur rather than why it sometimes does occur.2 This helps you “walk around the problem” by looking at it from various angles. That’s what Theodore Lowi meant in the quotation at the start of the previous chapter when he talked about finding “one or more concepts.” Careful formulation of your central research question is a prerequisite of doing real scholarly work and meeting the standards of your faculty examiners and colleagues. You must formulate the central question in an open-­ended fashion that permits more than one plausible answer or explanation. If only one answer is plausible, then you’re almost certainly not doing real research. Likewise, if your project proposal contains the phrase “this dissertation will prove,” you’re on the wrong track. Until you’ve actually done the research, your task is to ask, not prove. In addition, your question should not have been definitively answered by other scholars. If it has been answered definitively by others, your pursuit of it may qualify as personal research, but not as original scholarship. (Note, however, that old questions can be reopened with respect to new

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events or new evidence, in which case they may yield original findings.) Nor should your central question be slanted toward a predetermined intellectual outcome; the answers should not be built into the question. If they are, then you’re probably engaging in biased analysis rather than dispassionate investigation.3 The challenge is to pose an open-­ended question that can be answered empirically and that will enlarge both your knowledge and the knowledge of your readers. When drafting my dissertation prospectus, I faced this problem, but without understanding at first that it was a problem. When I started the project, I was locked into dichotomous thinking: Did the Soviet system promote technological innovation, or did it not? This either-­or formulation of the question was virtually useless, because neither of the available answers was remotely plausible. Plainly the USSR did promote some kinds of innovation, and it failed to promote others. The crucial issues were, how did the system operate when it succeeded and how did it operate when it failed? Ultimately I shifted from “yes or no” approach to a “how and how much” approach, but it took me quite a while to figure out that this was a much more fruitful analytical perspective to apply. It was also a prerequisite for asking the most important political question of all: how did the Soviet leaders themselves feel about the system’s performance, and how were their views evolving? Your research question is tied to the analytical framework you adopt to structure your project. A research question can be investigated empirically only within a clearly stated and internally consistent analytical framework. When scholars talk about their project’s analytical framework, they generally mean something close to the third definition of theory discussed below; we might also call it their “working paradigm” for the research problem. When I was a young scholar, “framework” and “analytical framework” were standard terms used to identify the distinctive angle from which the writer was approaching his or her topic.4 But most social scientists had no understanding of how powerfully a framework could affect the questions we asked and the answers we found. I certainly didn’t. Pioneering social psychologists were discovering the impact of framing on how ordinary people viewed social and psychological issues in everyday life, but we didn’t grasp how important framing was in the world of scholarship.5 Since then, we’ve learned more about how the human mind works. Research by cognitive scientists and political psychologists has confirmed that framing exerts a powerful influence not just on ordinary people in their daily routines, but on the scholarly work of sophisticated researchers.6* The postmodern turn in social thought and philosophy also contrib-

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uted to this awareness, sometimes denoted by the term “reflexivity” or by my preferred term, metacognition. Metacognition can help us avoid analytical approaches that bias our research toward predetermined outcomes. Another way of saying this is that framing defines what we regard as “natural,” in the sense of the conditions we consider to be “given” and don’t bother to examine or try to explain. But exactly what are we “given,” and by whom or what? Your assumed dividing line between sociopolitical phenomena and nature is crucial for your analysis. Asking where the dividing line between society and nature is located may strike you as suspiciously metaphysical. But your operational definition of that line is loaded with intellectual implications. Defining the category of the natural or given is a matter of fundamental significance.7 Why? Because choosing a framework or a paradigm means deciding not only which subjects or analytical perspectives to include, but which ones to leave out. My personal experience shows that omissions of this kind can be highly consequential. Soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Karen Dawisha and I decided to write a book surveying key features of the new states emerging from the Soviet collapse.8 The book covered many important topics: historical memory, national identity, domestic politics, the armed forces, economic reform, and others. But in our discussion of politics and economics, Karen and I said virtually nothing about corruption, which has become a central aspect of political development in most of the post-­Soviet states (as well as in the study of politics generally). We didn’t omit this theme on purpose. At the time, some existing scholarship already emphasized the importance of corruption in the Soviet system, but Karen and I had been Kremlin watchers, and Kremlin watchers were focused on other aspects of the struggle for power at the apex of the system. Looking back, I think omitting the issue of corruption was probably our book’s biggest deficiency. Karen subsequently corrected this omission by publishing a pioneering study of politics and corruption in Russia under Putin.9 But the book we wrote together shows how time and circumstance can mask issues whose importance becomes evident only when viewed from a different analytical angle. The moral is that unreflective framing of a research problem conceals serious potential pitfalls. Here are a few other examples from my experience. In the years of the Cold War, studies of relations between the superpowers were a staple of Western scholarly research. Often the titles of these studies took the form “Soviet-­American relations from Soviet leader X to Soviet leader Y.” But when Raymond Garthoff wrote a definitive study on this broad theme, he called it Detente and Confrontation: American-­Soviet

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Relations from Nixon to Reagan.10 Note that the title puts “American” before “Soviet” and defines the period in terms of American, not Soviet, leaders. As Garthoff said in the preface, he chose this wording in order to challenge the American assumption—­widespread but rarely recognized—­that US international actions were simply taken in response to the USSR’s international moves; in his view, the truth was often the opposite.11 Another example comes from the collaborative research project that Karen Dawisha and I organized to study the evolution of the post-­Soviet states.12 In planning the project, we picked “nationalism” in Russia and the other post-­Soviet states as one of the principal themes. But then a few scholars, especially scholars from the post-­Soviet states themselves, pointed out that “nationalism” was a pejorative term, not only in Marxist thought but in Western liberal thought as well. The connotations of the term suggested that the activities associated with it were socially harmful by definition. Based on this advice, we changed the research theme to “national identity” to take account of the fact that the long-­term survival of any state requires a supportive national identity that is built and maintained through nationalist activities of one kind or another.13 In the American lexicon, of course, “nation building” has usually been a good thing, unlike nationalism. A third example of the importance of analytical framing comes from the study of American politics, specifically, the analysis of de facto segregation in US urban housing. On its face, a 1968 law prohibiting racial discrimination in housing opened a legal path for African Americans to find new homes anywhere they could afford to buy, working through the free market. The view that the legislation solved the problem of housing discrimination is held by many present-­day opponents of targeted programs designed to help poor African Americans find better housing, and with it better jobs and better schools for their children. Philosophically, the view is based on methodological individualism, that is, on the ontological assumption that in this situation all relevant causal factors can be found on the level of individual choice, action, or inaction. In truth, however, the provisions of existing law were only one of the obstacles to obtaining full access to better housing and education through the housing market. The 1968 law lacked strong enforcement mechanisms, and President Nixon quietly intervened to block federal use of the remedies that were legally available. Moreover, redlining by banks kept many potential African American buyers from obtaining mortgages to buy homes outside the inner cities, and federal housing programs explic-

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itly denied government support for such purchases by African Americans.14 Taking account of these additional levels of analysis makes the plight of many inner-­city dwellers look very different from the picture painted by champions of the Horatio Alger myth of the “self-­made man,” that is, the view that Americans succeed or fail entirely on the basis of their own ambition and effort.15

THEORIES AND HYPOTHESES

In organizing your research, it’s vital to recognize that the word “theory” has several meanings. It can denote a provisional proposition that requires validation through empirical research, as in “that’s just a theory.”16 Or it can denote a proven proposition already validated through empirical research, as in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Alternatively, “theory” can stand for a general paradigm or way of looking at a subject, as in the Marxist theory of class conflict. Theory of this paradigmatic variety overlaps with theory in a fourth sense: political philosophy. This fourth meaning is less common than the others, but it is still employed by political thinkers whose central concerns are normative. In this sense, “theory” includes explicit judgments about ontology and about ethics, judgments situated in the borderland between science and values.17* Yet another crucial distinction demarcates “theory” from “theories.” These words may seem nearly identical, but they embody very different intellectual ambitions. When it comes to the pursuit of “theory” in the singular, my motto is “Be careful what you wish for.” As noted in chapter 4, social scientists have sometimes pursued the holy grail of unified theory in their chosen discipline (and occasionally beyond it). This sort of quest, by dominating scholars’ thinking, can consume a great deal of mental energy, and it can divert their attention from important but less captivating intellectual objectives. In the words of one astute observer, “There are very few general theories accepted by the majority of scholars in any discipline; the best known theories are specialized theories: they are what [the sociologist] Robert Merton calls middle-­range theories, which do not encompass an entire discipline, but only a part of it.”18 A note of caution is especially warranted when assessing theories whose creators aspire to unveil permanent “social laws” unbounded by time and place.19 Here the risk of ignoring essential societal particulars for the sake of theoretical consistency or elegance is especially large.20 “Modernization theory,” discussed in an earlier

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chapter, is a prime example. So is the Marxist-­Leninist theory of societal development. Both theories make assumptions about stages in the political and economic evolution of all societies that are, in the view of most current scholars, untenable. Another example comes from the study of International Relations. One long-­standing source of disagreement among IR theorists—­as among political scientists in general—­has been the assumption that there must be a single, “correct” paradigm for understanding a given class of phenomena. Hence there must be one “main cause” for a phenomenon such as wars among states, and a single theory that explains it.21 But this perspective is too simple. In my view, the social world is full of phenomena that may result from any of several independent causes or sets of causes, phenomena that result, in other words, from equifinality.22 If this is true, scholars should spend less time arguing about which paradigm is definitively true and more time arguing about which paradigm best explains particular instances of the phenomenon.23 Economics, according to one practitioner, exhibits a related but different problem. In their professional writings, economists have created and recognized many different models for markets, depending on the particulars of the markets being examined. But when economists make public pronouncements on policy issues, they tend to revert to a single overarching model of an idealized “market” that is often irrelevant to the issue under consideration, or worse.24 Like “theory,” the word “hypothesis” has several meanings. It can denote a provisional explanation of a single event or outcome yet to be gauged against the evidence. This is the sense in which historians and social scientists doing single-­case research often use the term. Alternatively, a hypothesis may be a provisional identification of correlations among categories of events or phenomena. It may also signify a provisional identification of causal relations among such categories.25 These other meanings of the term are typically used by researchers doing small-­N or large-­N comparative studies. Combined with careful empirical research, well-­formulated hypotheses can lead to the confirmation or rejection of a proposed theory. Several kinds of tests can be used for this purpose, ranging from laboratory experimentation to observational tests based on large-­N samples and observational tests using small-­N or single cases.26 Applied with care, such tests may lead to a satisfactory explanation of the patterns or events being investigated. (What makes an explanation satisfactory is a complicated issue that will be the focus of the next chapter.)

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CHOOSING RESEARCH TECHNIQUES AND STRUCTURING RESEARCH DESIGNS

In any field of scholarship, pursuing the most rigorous explanation for the phenomenon under study is arguably the distinguishing characteristic of serious research. This pursuit stems from the human drive to create new knowledge and integrate it with old knowledge. But there are serious tensions between the drive for unity and the drive to develop knowledge using the diverse regimens and techniques offered by different disciplines.27 During the past two centuries, all of the social sciences have been affected, in varying degrees, by the drive for quantification and measurement. Note that this trend emerged simultaneously in studies of society and studies of nature, and not primarily because social scientists were aping developments in the natural sciences.28 In the social sciences, this trend has been most pronounced in psychology and economics, less marked in political science and sociology, and perhaps least noticeable in anthropology.29 It is certainly a vitally important historical tendency, but at the same time its significance should not be misinterpreted.30 When applied to the appropriate problems, the pursuit of quantification has yielded major benefits, but it has also sowed considerable confusion about what “methodology” encompasses. In several social science disciplines, many scholars have tended to equate research methodology with quantitative techniques and to contrast these techniques with qualitative approaches assumed to rest on little more than common sense.31 This assumed equivalency between methodology and quantification, however, obscures important epistemological and ontological questions that affect the utility of both quantitative and qualitative methods. Properly understood, methodology entails more than analytical techniques of any kind. It also requires making unavoidable assumptions—­whether thoughtfully or thoughtlessly—­about the nature of history and social reality.32 As Dvora Yanow has pointed out, drawing a thick line between the two families of analytical methods “is erroneous and misleading: ‘quantitative’ researchers do make interpretations; ‘qualitative’ researchers do count.” In actuality, she concludes, “the terms have become a proxy for deeper divides concerning the character of social reality and how it might be known.”33 The black-­and-­white contrast between the two families of methods has harmful intellectual effects. Not only does it tempt researchers to resort to quantification by default, it also obscures important methodological variations among different kinds of qualitative methods, and it diverts attention

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from the need for rigor in qualitative-­methods training. Moreover, it risks equating the use of quantitative data with objectivity and moral neutrality; but this automatic association is deeply misleading.34 Much better to recognize that “qualitative research” and “quantitative research” are in fact fuzzy categories, as is the notion of “science” itself.35 During the past two decades the status imbalance between quantitative and qualitative methods in some social sciences has perhaps begun to shift, thanks to efforts by the champions of rigorous qualitative research techniques, but the imbalance in doctoral training remains pronounced, if the situation in political science is indicative.36 According to a recent survey, only 60 percent of twenty-­five top doctoral programs in political science offer any training in qualitative methods, in stark contrast to the ubiquitous training in quantitative methods.37 If you find yourself in a program that neglects such training, you should take the initiative to obtain it through the summer Institute for Qualitative and Multi-­Method Research Methods at Syracuse University. Here it’s important to register the wide range of approaches encompassed by the summary labels “quantitative” and “qualitative.” The energetic debates among quantitative methodologists show that they recognize that there are multiple approaches to quantitative inquiry.38 Less recognized, however, are the important methodological differences in research styles typically covered by the qualitative label. Within that category there are major differences between interpretivists, on the one hand, and practitioners of what might be called structural case studies on the other. Interpretivists work hard to study the ideas and motivations of social actors empirically, without prejudging what those motives are. They believe that adequate explanations of political outcomes hinge on a detailed understanding of the thinking of major actors.39 Advocates of structural case studies, on the other hand, tend to assume that the motives of political actors are generic or can be inferred from the political context in which they operate. It should be emphasized that most interpretivist research does not completely ignore structural factors, and that most structural case studies pay some attention to actors’ motives. But the two approaches are still substantially different.40 The significance of interpretivism may be clearest in studies of race and gender, but it also has broader relevance. My own research projects have always included a sustained effort to get inside the minds of major actors—­even when those actors were mouthing Marxist-­Leninist slogans which seemed stupefyingly boring on the surface—­and that effort has usually paid off by clarifying the political outcomes that occurred.41 As I see it, methodological pluralism is the best overall approach to studying social reality. For some research topics, several methodological

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options can be brought to bear. In recent years, using a multimethods approach has become fashionable in political science, and in many instances it’s probably the best rule of thumb to apply, although such methodological eclecticism has been challenged.42 Be that as it may, quantitative data and statistical analysis have a vital place in disentangling problems for which the relevant variables can be accurately identified and measured.43 Formal styles of analysis, such as game theory, can perform a valuable heuristic function in comprehending the interactions among actors’ strategic calculations, although, again, the assumptions underlying the formal models must be meticulously scrutinized.44 Other kinds of formal modeling can also help clarify a scholar’s intellectual approach, both for the scholar and for the scholar’s readers. And qualitative case studies—­either single-­ or small-­N—­ can help create new hypotheses and identify the causal processes behind large-­N patterns. That said, my personal conviction is that methodology should generally be subordinated to substance, not vice versa. As a matter of principle, the choice of analytical techniques should depend on the question a researcher chooses to ask. Scholars should not allow “methodological intoxication” to determine the questions they elect to study or to divert them from studying the questions at all.45 In the words of a shrewd philosopher, “to become obsessed with a method for its own sake and try to use it where it is unsuitable is thoroughly unscientific.”46 There are too many burning societal problems in the world for us to ignore some of them just by methodological fiat.47* Overcommitment to a particular method or methods puts the cart before the horse by dictating what we choose to study and, indirectly, what we choose not to study. When selecting a research topic, you should continue to mull over your personal and professional values, so as to avoid such an outcome. If you’re a careful reader, you noticed that the header of this section includes the words “structuring research designs.” I added the phrase because the draft chapter seemed to give too few details about this crucial process. But the specifics of the process can vary enormously, depending on the methodological decisions you make (methodological in the full sense discussed above.) When I did a quick search of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences for “research design,” it yielded more than one hundred relevant articles. In view of this fact, I can’t offer much useful advice in one chapter, except that you shouldn’t slight the philosophical judgments that will contribute to your decisions. Perhaps the most helpful suggestion is to pay careful attention to the research designs of the scholarly works you read—­especially the paradigmatic ones—­and to discuss these issues repeatedly with your fellow researchers.

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 | Case Studies and Comparative Methods Political science is a harder science than the so-­called hard sciences because we confront an unnatural universe that requires judgment and evaluation. —­Theodore Lowi For some problems the prospect of finding adequate solutions looks so onerous that neglect, avoidance, and underestimation appear to be the most reasonable strategies. —­Jan W. van Deth Americans have always studied what they define as their past better than they have studied other present-­day societies. —­Jeremi Suri He who knows only one country knows none. —­Giovanni Sartori

“Case” is a common term in the social sciences—­but what does it really mean? One question you should always ask is: “A case of what?” Like substantive concepts such as democracy and bureaucracy, the concept of case raises the issue of degrees of membership. Whatever the category of phenomena you are studying, you must decide how fully your chosen instance belongs in or outside of the case category as you have defined it. “Comparison” is also more complicated than it seems. Different analytical methods categorize cases in terms of different properties and can produce divergent findings. Keep these issues in mind as you frame your research project.

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hat is a case? The term denotes a relationship between a chosen subject and a broader set of subjects to which it is assumed to belong. The chosen subject fits within a category defined by the observer. When we suggest that “X” is a case of the Alphabet group, we assume, at least for the moment, that a meaningful analogy exists between X and letters belonging to the group. In other words, cases are logically linked, explicitly or implicitly, by comparison.

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These linkages, although real, aren’t always spelled out. Quite commonly, scholars describe their study of a single country or single occurrence of a phenomenon as a “case,” but without fully specifying the boundaries of the larger set of cases. This practice reflects the social sciences’ abiding ambition to create reliable generalizations about classes of phenomena and events. The ambition is embodied in narrowly focused books and articles whose introductions and conclusions refer in passing to possible parallels or contrasts with other cases; and also in studies whose main titles sound loud themes that are quickly muted in their subtitles.1 These rhetorical formulas reflect the intellectual tension between specialized research and the pursuit of generalizations. What is comparison? As a graduate student, it never occurred to me to ask this question. If comparison is something we do intuitively all the time in daily life, why does the process require special attention? The answer, in a nutshell, is that “comparison” is an elastic label for a range of mental activities that social scientists must distinguish in order to avoid basic intellectual errors.2 Historians engage in comparisons, but often those comparisons are implicit rather than explicit; social scientists aim to make social comparisons more explicit and more rigorous.3 Note, by the way, that asking about the nature of comparison is an example of metacognition: inquiring about how our minds work when we think about things that interest us. If you doubt that intuitive processes of comparison deserve your close inspection, consider the familiar phrase about comparing apples and oranges. It’s a rhetorical put-­down meant to clinch the point that a proposed comparison is nonsense. In actuality, however, comparing apples and oranges makes perfect sense.4 To compare things is not necessarily to find parallels between them; it may in fact reveal only differences. Whether we find similarities or differences depends on the criteria of assessment we apply. Apples and oranges all grow on trees, all are fruits, and all are edible (more or less). True, they aren’t the same color and they do taste different, but these two criteria are far from being the only yardsticks we can use to compare foods. And if thoughtfully framed comparisons show that an object has nothing in common with our chosen comparators, then we may have discovered something new under the sun, that is, something of genuine importance.5

WHAT SHOULD YOU COMPARE, AND HOW?

What should you compare? The choice of things to compare depends on the guiding purpose of your research and your judgments about the kind of

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evidence needed to fulfill that purpose. According to one leading authority on methodology, “researchers’ judgments about case comparability are not, strictly speaking, matters that can be empirically verified.” The assumptions necessary to carry out comparisons amount to “an ontological element of research design,” that is, a philosophical attitude about how reality works at the deepest level.6 In addition, decisions about what to compare are influenced by your personal values and judgments about what would make the finished project innovative or otherwise admirable.7 In other words, these scholarly decisions are bound up with the development of your own values and intellectual priorities, as discussed in chapter 7. Systematic comparisons of cases may focus on many different kinds of units, varying in quantity and chosen according to varying criteria. The possibilities are almost endless.8 The potential units may include countries selected from one or several geographical areas; types of political systems, such as democracies and autocracies; specific types of institutions, such as legislatures and armies; types of processes, such as the selection of administrative officials and the education of citizens; types of events, such as elections and coups d’état; different periods in the history of one entity, such as a central bank; or many other analytical units. Depending on the purpose of the research, you may analyze your chosen units on different scales: singly, with only tangential comparisons to other cases; in small numbers (small-­N) that retain some empirical depth for the sake of causal analysis but provide a basis for limited generalization; or in large numbers (large-­N) that expand the project’s generalizability but shrink its potential to reveal causal mechanisms.9 Comparisons can be arranged along a continuum according to the number of cases they involve. Similarly, they can be situated along a continuum of research methods extending from the highly quantitative to the highly qualitative.10 In framing your research project, you will have to select from this wide assortment of approaches and methods. Assuming that you are studying in a mainline social science department, your faculty advisors may point you toward a large-­N or small-­N dissertation subject.11 This may be good advice, especially from a career angle. But you should recognize the philosophical ramifications of choosing one or another approach and ask whether the approach matches your own emerging scholarly values and interests. Nor should you dismiss out of hand the idea of a single-­case study. As noted above, single-­case studies and small-­N studies aren’t separated by a rigid dividing line. With the benefit of hindsight, I see that my own dissertation, focused strictly on the Soviet Union, exemplifies one of these forms of comparison, thanks to its diachronic character.12 Moreover, single-­case studies give much more latitude for analyzing the behavior of political actors

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through an interpretivist lens, as described in the previous chapter. Perhaps most important, single-­case studies can identify novel phenomena or create new hypotheses about previously studied ones. Rapid sociohistorical change makes both of these tasks intellectually important undertakings.

THE EMERGENCE OF COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

A little disciplinary background can help you as you weigh these decisions. Although social thinkers have long recognized the importance of comparison in principle, the basic methodological distinctions discussed above have become clear only in recent decades. In the 1960s, when I began my graduate studies, scholarly methods of political comparison were still in their infancy. Indeed, being a specialist on a foreign country and being a comparativist were regarded as almost identical. Virtually all research on politics in countries besides the United States was considered to be “comparative politics.”13 To the degree that earlier scholars had engaged in cross-­national comparisons, these were mostly qualitative studies focused on the countries of Western Europe.14 Early on, some scholars sensed that the tasks of studying the industrializing countries of the communist world and the less-­developed countries of the Third World were different from studying Western societies, but the methods for comparing whole countries or specific political phenomena cross-­nationally were weakly developed. Under these conditions, the desire to create a universal approach to classifying and analyzing political life caused many leaders of US political science to emphasize structural-­functionalism and modernization studies as the keys to disciplinary advance.15 A similar trend occurred in sociology during the heyday of Talcott Parsons. These intellectual tendencies were reinforced by America’s ideological competition with Soviet communism.16 In retrospect, these broad approaches look overly ambitious and too distant from the real substance of politics and social life, despite their comparative intent.17 Since then, practitioners of comparative methods have become much more sophisticated about the complexities of comparison and the pitfalls of universalism. This is true, at least, of political science, the field I know best.18* In that respect, the social sciences have made genuine progress, even though the underlying epistemological conundrums of comparison will probably never be fully resolved. Especially during the past four decades or so, US political science has assigned heightened value to comparative research and analysis as scholarly pursuits. Overall, this is a constructive trend that should be welcomed.

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It has resulted partly from the drive for logical and quantitative rigor inside the profession, coupled with an enduring determination to formulate transnational generalizations. The end of the world’s socioeconomic bifurcation between communism and capitalism and the ensuing acceleration of globalization powerfully reinforced this impulse in the study of comparative politics and international relations alike. On balance, comparative data have become much easier to obtain, thanks partly to the creation of massive new scholarly databases susceptible to quantitative or qualitative comparative analysis. Some of these databases have been generated by the push for quantitative comparative research on the part of multilateral organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, and the Internet has vastly increased the accessibility of new data to scholarly investigators.19 The development of more sophisticated methods for comparing cases has been stimulated both by the internal dynamics of the social sciences and by changes in world politics. Until the 1950s, Europe was the main external focus of US political and commercial elites, and the study of politics outside Europe and North America was still in its infancy. The broadening of research to include a wider assortment of foreign countries was prompted largely by the geopolitical imperatives of World War II and the extension of US global power after the war, starting with the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and then widening to many other politically significant regions. The number of regions requiring study multiplied due to the dismantling of Europe’s overseas empires and the extension of the Cold War into the newly independent former colonies.20 In this respect, political science was following in the footsteps of Western anthropology, which had focused from the beginning on so-­called primitive or “underdeveloped” peoples and regions.21 Since then, the research establishments of other ambitious great powers on the rise have shown similar intellectual tendencies.22 What the political science discipline’s heightened general emphasis on comparison shows about specific research trends, however, is not easy to say. Because “comparison” is a fuzzy concept, deciding what to count under this rubric is far from self-­evident. Measured by the shift in professional rhetoric, large-­N and small-­N comparisons have become notably more fashionable than single-­case studies in the study of politics. But the actual impact of this change of fashion on the research practices of most working scholars has not been thoroughly investigated and remains unclear.23 After all, neglect of contextualized research was one of the main complaints of the Mr. Perestroika movement to reform political science, and the movement did produce at least some tangible changes in the discipline.24*

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Recent trends are difficult to clarify partly because leading observers have painted them in contrasting colors. In comparative politics, for example, the prevailing pattern of scholarly practice has been characterized in contradictory terms by different observers. A chapter in the 1996 New Handbook of Political Science states that small-­N comparison is the methodological approach increasingly preferred by researchers in the subdiscipline.25 By contrast, an overview of comparative politics published a decade later asserts that “much” of the research with that label is still “not even strictly comparative, that is, it does not compare at the very least two political systems.”26 These divergent generalizations are attributable partly to the complex cross-­currents in the subfield; they also reflect different prescriptions about how it should develop in the future. As in other field surveys, it isn’t easy to separate disciplinary descriptions from prescriptions. Similar discrepancies appear to exist in the subfield of International Relations.27 Despite the increasing disciplinary enthusiasm for comparative analysis, US research focused on foreign regions has generally been declining for the past two decades or more, in terms of both prestige and material support. This is true, at any rate, if we take area studies to mean research that emphasizes analyzing the domestic politics and international behavior of foreign countries within their national cultural and geographical contexts.28 Among PhD candidates and untenured scholars, a commitment to the interdisciplinary study of an individual region or country as preparation for focused research on the territory’s politics is diminishing.29 A prospective scholar’s willingness to expend the time and energy needed to learn the relevant foreign language(s) is arguably the best index of a serious commitment to area expertise, and many political science departments attach no value to the acquisition of such linguistic tools.30 In recent decades graduate-­level enrollments in foreign-­language courses have been shrinking. One reason is that material support for foreign-­area training from the US government, foundations, and universities has diminished sharply.31 That said, this general pattern probably varies significantly among regional specializations. A few specializations, such as China Studies and Middle East Studies, may still be growing, thanks to the challenges to the United States from the rise of China and the spread of Islamic radicalism during the past two decades. Certainly the appetite for such research from the US government and business has grown. But the overall level of US support for foreign-­area research is unquestionably in secular decline, rather like the American media’s shrinking coverage of international affairs.32 The causes include the mounting fiscal pressures on American

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higher education, the weakening level of official US engagement with the outside world, and disciplinary trends inside political science itself. At first glance, it may seem paradoxical that this apparent decline of disciplinary interest in studying foreign cultural groups has coincided with heightened academic study of previously neglected cultural minorities inside the United States (African Americans, Latinos, and others.) Intellectually the paradox is real, because questions about the role of foreign-­area studies within the discipline resemble the issues of values and analytical methods posed by the creation of programs to study domestic American minorities.33 From the standpoint of America’s internal politics, however, the asymmetry is quite understandable. The political mobilization of minority groups inside the United States since the 1960s has forced the social ­studies disciplines to adjust—­albeit grudgingly and incompletely—­ but today there are no equally outspoken US domestic constituencies pressing to expand the study of foreign countries.34 This is regrettable, because the decline in the contextual study of foreign areas has weakened the US capacity to deal intelligently with the outside world.35

COMPARATIVE TRADEOFFS AND YOUR RESEARCH CHOICES

How is all of this relevant to your preparation for researching and writing your dissertation? It means, to begin with, that you should chart your scholarly course with an open mind and be prepared to change direction if necessary. In principle, none of the forms of research outlined above is more rigorous than the others. Scholars engaged in quantitative analysis have historically had more numerous formal techniques at their disposal than have scholars using qualitative techniques. But qualitative research is steadily becoming more formal and systematic, and besides, wielding sophisticated techniques does not automatically ensure intellectual rigor. The crucial issue is the fit between the techniques you use and the questions you ask. Every methodological approach necessarily omits some elements of reality. In every comparative study, the key question is whether the omitted elements could basically alter the conclusions of the analysis. This is a question you should ponder carefully over an extended period, using your courses and your preparations for the doctoral exams to sort out your views. The answers you arrive at will depend, in part, on your view of social ontology. If you believe in the causal importance of contextual factors such as geography and culture, you will be inclined to do a study focused within

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one region on either a single case or a small number of cases.36 If you believe that such contextual factors have little explanatory significance, you’ll be inclined to do either a large-­N study or a small-­N study with cases drawn from multiple regions.37 There are many reputable scholars in each of these intellectual camps. If you decide to compare types of political institutions or phenomena in more than one country, you must make several decisions. First, what type of institution or phenomenon do you want to examine? Second, at what level of generality will you investigate it? If your main aim is to identify broad regularities and potential causal factors, a large-­N study will probably be most appealing. If you want to zero in on demonstrable causes, you may choose to do a small-­N study. Choosing the cases for a small-­N study from multiple regions may give your findings more analytical bite and draw wider professional attention, but it will also increase the problem of controlling for variations in the geographical and cultural contexts of the cases.38 Focusing on a single thematic problem in a single country will help you skirt some of these problems. If you do decide to write a single-­case or small-­N dissertation focused within a region, here are some basic questions to consider. First, how is the area defined geographically, and how much of it are you examining? Are you studying all of it, or part of it? Which aspects of your country or countries are you explicitly (or tacitly) comparing with which parts of the region? If you are studying a country’s foreign relations, how do you conceive of the other countries or regions with which your country interacts? And how have policymakers in your country of interest conceived of those countries or regions, as friendly, hostile, or neither? Conducting a narrowly drawn study of a single case has both pluses and minuses. On the plus side, such studies can be a source of creative ideas. Their “very fuzziness . . . grants them an advantage in research at the exploratory stage” because it allows the researcher “to test a multitude of hypotheses in a rough-­and-­ready way.”39 On the other hand, a single-­case study has a restricted empirical reach. It can suggest only hypothetical explanations for the class of cases it appears to typify, and these general explanations must be tested against other cases before being elevated from the status of tentative theories to proven ones. The tradeoffs between breadth and depth cannot be decided definitively, although some types of intellectual problems may be more susceptible to one or another approach. It is up to you as a scholar to decide which type of analysis you will commit yourself to.40 These days, dissertations still come in a variety of flavors. A less than

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scientific sampling of recent dissertations at major research universities suggests that they use an assortment of methodologies: a few large-­N, more small-­N, and some mixed-­methods. They also include a substantial number of single-­case studies that deal, for example, with China and Russia. Given that these dissertations were successfully defended at top-­flight research universities, this range of approaches should embolden you to pursue the methodological path you find most satisfying.41 Area-­studies research always poses—­implicitly, at least—­the question of how the area under investigation should be defined. We sometimes talk as if one or another region is clearly defined and homogeneous, but that is a serious oversimplification. Geographers will be the first to tell you that regions and areas exist partly in the eye of the beholder, depending on exactly which indicators are being used to define the region as a category.42 In most instances, areas and regions with conventional names are examples of fuzzy concepts that shade into each other.43* Take, for example, East European Studies. The place of Eastern Europe within Soviet Studies (sometimes called Soviet and East European Studies) was a source of intellectual tension during the Cold War. Specialists on the USSR tended to assume that the East European communist countries differed little from the Soviet Union, since those regimes had declared their formal loyalty to Moscow’s prescriptive model of political and economic organization. By contrast, specialists on Eastern Europe emphasized the importance of understanding the distinctive histories and cultures of those countries in order to explain the dynamics of their national development and political behavior. The tension over such issues peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Poland and its East European neighbors broke decisively with Moscow and turned westward politically. Similar tensions soon arose over the study of Russia versus the study of the non-­Russian regions that broke away from inside the former USSR (such as Ukraine). These tensions were reflected in disagreements about the applicable geographical terminology.44* During the following decade, academic practices and conventions shifted toward treating the countries of Eastern Europe as components of the West, not only because of the collapse of their domestic communist regimes but because of their gradual incorporation into NATO and the European Union.45 Arguably the new academic balance shifted too far toward a unifying liberal view of Europe, given the rightward nationalist turn that later occurred in Poland, Hungary, and other parts of the region. But the addition of these countries to the fuzzy concept of “Europe” remains defensible, given that right-­wing nationalist currents have since

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developed in several West European countries as well. This episode shows, incidentally, that the “West” is also a fuzzy concept, and that its characteristics may change over time.46

VALUE JUDGMENTS AND YOUR NATIONAL CONTEXT

By virtue of your personal profile—­no matter what it is—­applying an area-­ studies approach will always raises an implicit question: How are the countries I’ve chosen different from my own, and how are they similar? How are their interests related to the interests of my country? These questions usually carry an emotional charge, sometimes a powerful one.47 The high-­voltage controversy over “Orientalism” in the study of the Middle East that broke out during the 1980s is a good example.48 Controversies over the ideas and conduct of Soviet Studies researchers as supposed apologists for Moscow are another.49 Disputes over the study of the political economy of “dependencia” in US-­Latin American relations are yet another.50 These contentious debates show how challenging it is for researchers to sort out the relationship between their scholarly investigations and their personal values, and how tricky it is to manage the relationship between those investigations and the opinionated views of commentators outside the academy. It therefore behooves you to remember your own cultural and historical context. Whatever decisions you ultimately make about your dissertation project, you should be aware of how your situation as a PhD candidate in a social ­science department in the United States (or in any other country) may influence your choices. To put it plainly, if you are studying in the United States, you are, unavoidably, situated within the “American case.” As citizens, Americans have tended to regard ourselves as qualitatively different from—­and, often enough, superior to—­the citizens of other countries, and so serious comparisons between the United States and other countries have usually seemed out of place.51* Consequently, the structure of research and teaching in colleges and universities has traditionally exempted the United States from rigorous cross-­national empirical analysis.52 It has also tended to minimize the impact of international factors on the domestic evolution of the US political system.53 In the past two decades, this situation has started to change at the level of scholarly research. The emergence of “American Political Development” as a strand of political science marks a significant comparative innovation.54 Still, there are good reasons to doubt that this tentative intellectual

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reorientation has substantially affected most of the country’s PhD programs in political science. A major academic change of this kind would require that many influential faculty members and researchers revise their professional outlooks.55 It would also have to overcome two recent trends in American society as a whole: the surge of American exceptionalism that was unleashed by the nominal US victory in the Cold War, and the public turn toward a mood of xenophobia that has sharply intensified since 9/11. That said, the recent public mobilization reflected in the Black Lives Matter movement has generated new pressure for revised treatments of the United States in higher educational curricula. These national trends are background elements of your personal academic situation that you should keep in mind as you frame your dissertation project.

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 | Logics of Explanation Disciplines seek to be complete worlds unto themselves; they aspire to explain everything, albeit in their own way. —­James Chandler While there are certainly turning points or crucial events in human history, there cannot be big bangs. —­William H. Sewell Jr. [E]very causal explanation implies a narrative and every narrative implies causal explanation. —­Lynn Hunt Indeterminacy in contexts of strategic interaction—­which is to say, in virtually all social contexts—­is an issue that is constantly swept under the rug because it is often disruptive to pristine social theory. But the theory is fake: the indeterminacy is real. —­Russell Hardin

Analyzing human societies and behavior is exceptionally hard. That’s why each social science specializes in examining a limited range of human activities. This division of labor promotes disciplinary progress, but it also sidesteps a fundamental reality: Human beings frequently engage in more than one type of behavior at the same moment, and their behavior usually results from multiple causes. Because single-­factor explanations of human action are often incomplete, scholars seeking to produce causal accounts of specific types of behavior face a formidable challenge. Understanding that challenge from the get-­go is far better than pretending it doesn’t exist.

T

alking about logics of explanation in the plural probably strikes you as strange. But the phrase highlights a fundamental feature of social knowledge. No single field of study—­not economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, or any other discipline—­can fully account for the extraordinarily complex variety of human social behavior.1 Each of the social sciences aims to understand a certain type of behavior

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using its own analytical lens, while tending to ignore other types of behavior as irrelevant. This intellectual situation is a by-­product of the continuing processes of disciplinary and subdisciplinary specialization discussed in earlier chapters.

DISCIPLINARY DIFFERENTIATION AND EXPLANATION

Although I have argued that there are no sharp dividing lines among the social ­science disciplines, many scholars would probably reject this idea. For the past half-­century the dominant American trend has been for each of the social sciences to concentrate on the forms of human behavior that fall within its intellectual domain and to accentuate its intellectual separation from other fields of social inquiry.2 This is especially true of each discipline’s autonomy from the study of history.3 The resulting division of scholarly labor has generated a much richer and more detailed picture of human motives and social relations than existed in earlier periods. In other words, genuine progress has occurred in each of the social sciences. Consider the concept of “human nature” as an example. A few centuries ago Western social thinkers thought about human nature primarily in philosophical terms and tended to believe that it was a constant (although they often disagreed about what this constant was).4 Today we have a far more nuanced picture of human beings and their behavior, based on the vast store of empirical research that has been built up in the modern era.5 All human beings have some basic needs and impulses in common, but there also are so many variations of behavior across diverse times and places that we might almost be justified to speak of “human natures” in the plural. Almost, but not quite!6 While the various social ­science disciplines assign different weights to this reality, all of them must deal with it in one fashion or another to achieve disciplinary progress on their own terms. On average, the fields of anthropology and history probably give human variation the greatest weight, while mainstream economics gives it the least. Political science, sociology, and psychology (ironically) probably fall somewhere in the middle.7 Although the modern pattern of intellectual progress through specialization rests on arbitrary disciplinary assumptions, those assumptions are essential for the conduct of research. Every social researcher faces a few practical questions that are unavoidable: What can I take as a given, what must I explain, and what will an adequate explanation look like? Put metaphorically: Where should I start, how should I proceed, and where can I

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stop? By providing working answers to these questions, each social ­science discipline enables its practitioners to conduct research that is likely to be recognized as valuable by other members of the discipline, and that may possibly be useful to society at large. Political scientists, for example, tend to be satisfied when we show that a political event or structure can be attributed to the pursuit of power or self-­interest, broadly construed.8* Economists tend to be satisfied when they show how certain economic events or outcomes can be traced to the pursuit of profit by individuals or groups. Sociologists and anthropologists are arguably the social scientists least wedded to a central animating idea or explanatory scheme.9 The vital point is that these working assumptions vary across the social ­science disciplines and that none of them is beyond challenge. The academic distinctions among the political, economic, and social realms may seem like common sense, but that is primarily because we have been taught to think of them that way.10* Before the late eighteenth century, European thinkers did not imagine that separate realms called “society,” the “economy,” and “politics” existed. Hence a conscientious social researcher can accept such distinctions only provisionally. The various social sciences regularly focus on the same human actors from different angles, and each of these actors may potentially engage in political, economic, and social activities at the same time. One disciplinary angle may fully explain the particular behavior of a particular actor at a particular moment, but only if the actor’s behavior is motivationally “pure” from a disciplinary standpoint. A small thought experiment will illustrate this point. Imagine an analysis of Actor X by two scholars trained in different disciplines. Scholar A, a political scientist, says, “I care about Actor X only when he behaves according to the tenets of my discipline; the other things he does should be analyzed by other scholars.” Scholar B, an economist, similarly declares that X’s behavior interests him only when X behaves according to the tenets of economics. But what if Actor X mixes the different types of behavior at the same time? That’s where the story gets complicated. Consider, for example, the chairman of a large corporation pursuing the time-­honored economic goal of increasing corporate profits. Seeking this goal, the chairman might elect to follow a political strategy of lobbying to repeal antitrust legislation in order to destroy his business competitors through bare-­knuckle competition; or he might follow an economic strategy by firing some employees to reduce wage costs; or he might pursue both strategies simultaneously. An adequate analysis of his behavior will depend on discovering which of these three options he favors. In other words, we must evaluate the executive’s mindset and decisions, rather

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than simply assume we know these things by virtue of our own discipline’s preferred working assumptions. Efforts to analyze actors’ behavior from a single disciplinary standpoint will frequently—­although certainly not always—­obscure such essential information.11 That is one reason that the hybrid scholarly field of political economy has become fashionable once again, after being temporarily eclipsed for more than a century.12

EXPLAINING INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP BEHAVIOR

Political scientists aspire to understand the political behavior both of individuals and of groups. Economists have similar aspirations toward economic behavior. But what does it really mean to explain the behavior of an individual? As a political scientist, economist, or sociologist, you may ask: Isn’t this really a question for psychologists? Well, yes and no. It is a question for psychologists, but it is also a question for other types of social scientists. Whatever our disciplinary specialization, we must be wary of equating the behavior of the individual we study with the motives “allowed” under the assumptions favored by our chosen discipline. Economics is a case in point. One prominent economic thinker has declared his belief that “the average human being is about 95% selfish in the narrow sense of the term.”13 By contrast, another economist critical of this view has remarked that “the emphasis on narrow self-­interest in economic models has had some regrettable side effects.”14 Undoubtedly, profit-­maximizing “Economic Man” really exists under certain conditions, such as trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, but outside those contexts, real human behavior can diverge dramatically from this disciplinary model. Orthodox economic thinking often glosses over the discrepancy by positing that the preferences of humans are determined by self-­interest in nearly all situations. But this assertion is unwarranted. Instead of Homo economicus, human behavior sometimes exemplifies Homo empathicus, that is, a person motivated by empathetic understanding of another person’s needs.15 This nuanced perspective is consistent with experiments in which the subjects decide to divide monetary benefits with one another more generously than the model of purely self-­concerned behavior can explain. According to one careful economic observer, this experimental evidence “is a fairly stunning refutation of the theory that most people are selfish and maximizing.”16 To state the point more generally, it is a mistake to assume that self-­ interest and the preferences of an individual necessarily amount to the

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same thing. The concept of self-­interest is notoriously elastic, and economics often skirts this issue by assuming that human behavior is rationally based on individual “preferences,” without investigating empirically what these preferences actually are.17 The same can be said, incidentally, of parts of political science. This is an intellectual elision that Adam Smith, arguably the father of modern economics, did not make, even though many contemporary economists and political scientists believe that he did. In assessing human interactions, Smith assigned substantial weight not just to narrow self-­interest but to other human social sentiments as well.18 It is fair to link behavioral rationality with the preferences of individuals, but exactly which preferences is the analyst taking into consideration? These cannot simply be defined by fiat. Real human preferences vary dramatically from one individual and one situation to another, and moral philosophers have cast valuable light on the trade-­offs humans often make.19 For instance, a charitable desire to help other human beings at one’s own expense is a type of human preference, but it does not jibe with the orthodox model of self-­interested rationality in economics and political science. The orthodox model can be deeply misleading, especially when it is extended to the non-­economic behavior of individuals, and sometimes to their economic behavior as well.20 Due partly to the high professional prestige of the economics discipline, however, the assumption of narrowly “self-­interested” behavior has been taken up by many political scientists, whose rational-­choice approach to social analysis has, in my opinion, done considerable intellectual harm.21 A social ­scientific preoccupation with self-­interested behavior can have another intellectual consequence: failure to comprehend common behavior that is neither self-­interested nor empathetic. Some human acts stem from emotions that are other-­regarding in a negative sense: anger, envy, pride, cruelty, the desire for revenge, and so on. Impulsive behavior triggered by these emotions can produce outcomes that violate the actor’s own interests in any normal sense.22 Given the plentiful evidence of anger and malice in contemporary politics—­including US politics—­scholars should not neglect such motivations. A substantial number of Americans, for example, have supported leaders whose policies violate their own material interests. The attraction of those leaders is that they aim to punish the migrants and other villains who have supposedly caused the supporters’ misfortunes. That is why each social ­science discipline should explore the insights made available to it from other disciplines. Experimental psychologists try to isolate human behavior from its social context by performing laboratory experiments, and they have achieved notable successes in this

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endeavor.23 Since their findings are relevant to political and economic affairs, there is also a hybrid field of study called political psychology.24 Political psychologists apply the insights generated by psychological research to the political realm, on the grounds that the political behavior of individuals cannot be adequately understood without these insights.25 This perspective is necessary to understand the choices of both political leaders and ordinary citizens.26 We can’t, however, pretend to explain the political or economic behavior of individuals just by studying the psychology of individual persons. Individuals act partly in response to their general socioeconomic environment, which usually differs from laboratory settings in important respects. For example, the same person may join national demonstrations demanding democratization in one situation, but decide to emigrate in another, depending on the perceived odds for and against real change in the political system.27 In politics and economics, as in other fields of action, individual choices are shaped in part by cultural and institutional constraints. This illustrates what is customarily called the level-­of-­analysis problem. Students of domestic politics, for instance, must decide whether to focus on the conduct of individuals, the activities of social groups, or the workings of a country’s political structure in its entirety. Similarly, when studying international politics, IR scholars must decide whether to concentrate their attention at the level of particular leaders, particular states, or of the international system as a whole. Which of these levels is most important?28 Comparable choices must be made by economists, who must focus on the macro-­ or micro-­levels, or sometimes on the intermediate “mezzo” level consisting of economic institutions. Note that the “levels” in question are metaphorical. They help us focus our attention on some phenomena or on others, but they do not refer to entirely separate realms of human activity. Deciding which realm to focus on is also a choice about which other realms to neglect. In other words, it’s a substantive analytical problem that can’t be wished away. This is an example of what philosophers call an ontological question, and scholars cannot conduct political and economic research without adopting (or unconsciously assuming) an answer to it.29 A scholar’s choice of focus has fundamental importance for the kind of analysis that results, and there is no correct formula applicable in all situations; the preferable answer depends on the specifics of the given case, and it always requires deciding what to ignore, as well as what to concentrate on.30 Decisions about what to ignore are often handled by invoking the phrase ceteris paribus (“other things being equal”). But this seemingly innocuous phrase can

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veil critical assumptions and uncertainties. How do you know that “other things” really are equal? Note that the research results produced by this sort of ontological choice may tend to validate or invalidate divergent policy prescriptions. Consider, for example, some recent theorizing about the effects of globalization. “Methodological nationalism” is the study of contemporary national political systems with little attention to their international setting. Often its scholarly practitioners, taking that setting as a given, have highlighted the strength of the internal pressures pushing national elites toward domestic political and economic liberalization in response to the imperatives of globalization. Seen from this angle, the international system is not entirely excluded from view, but it is assumed to generate one-­way pressures on emerging economies. But when examined in a broader framework that includes actors’ reciprocal interactions with the international system, the dynamics of national political and economic development look dramatically different. An enlarged framework reveals that globalization sometimes allows predatory elites to stash their illicit gains abroad and thereby enjoy the best of both worlds without engaging in domestic reforms.31* This reciprocal dynamic has important implications not just for studies of national political development but for the conclusions we draw about the possible systemic outcomes from the process of globalization as a whole. A revised picture of globalization looks especially plausible after the “Pandora Papers” revelations of international tax evasion by the world’s rich on a massive scale.32 Likewise, previous ideas about globalization must be revised to take account of the international practice of foreign cyber-­ intervention in the domestic affairs of other states—­for example, Russia’s efforts to thwart the democratic operation of US electoral procedures through electronic phishing and the manipulation of US social media.33 Here’s another illustration of the same general point. The history of US race relations shows the potential pitfalls created by an analysis based on only one level of explanation, in this instance methodological individualism.34 As you may recall from the discussion in chapter 9, analyzing the effects of laws against housing discrimination without taking account of factors operating above the level of individual choice obscures major obstacles to the achievement of genuine racial equality. The takeaway from these examples is that no neat formula for dealing with level-­of-­analysis problems can be found. Hence any thoughtful scholar must bear such complexities in mind and use good judgment when framing a research project.

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AGENCY AND STRUCTURE: THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL

Whichever level of analysis you decide to emphasize in your research, you must deal, wittingly or unwittingly, with the thorny issue of free will.35 When I took social psychology as a college freshman, another student in the course asserted that all human thoughts and actions are determined by the physical laws studied by natural scientists. Although my classmate’s idea struck me as implausible—­and also quite unsettling—­I couldn’t come up with a convincing reply. Today, if I had a time machine, I would go back and ask him where his own theory of psychological determinism came from. Presumably it, like all other human ideas, was determined by physical laws; but then how could he claim that it was more plausible than my skepticism about it, which was also presumably determined by the same physical laws?36 None of the advocates of complete physical determinism has found a convincing way out of this logical dilemma. For the advocates, this deterministic view creates what one critic calls the “self-­refutation problem.”37 In other words, there are compelling reasons to reject rigid determinism of this kind.38 But there is no fully satisfying alternative outlook that tells us exactly how to analyze human decisions and how much weight to attach to the characteristics of individuals in particular instances. The problem of interpreting human agency is hard for all disciplines, but it is especially difficult for political science.39* Broadly speaking, how to treat the issues of free will and determinism may be what most separates the US study of politics from political studies in some other countries, particularly Great Britain.40 Perhaps the most popular contemporary American version of the deterministic style of explanation rests on the assertion that all human behavior is programmed by our DNA. This widespread notion is linked with the belief that the natural selection of distinctive human traits during eons of evolutionary competition fully explains contemporary human behavior. Biological evolution undoubtedly does help explain humanity’s present-­ day repertoire of possible behaviors. But it cannot adequately explain the behavior of particular individuals and groups in particular settings.41 Philosophers and social scientists who have explored this question rigorously have concluded that a large proportion of human behavior can be accounted for only by taking sociocultural factors into account.42* Viewed in this light, sociocultural evolution, which occurs far more rapidly than biological evolution, continuously exerts a powerful impact on the actualization of our dispositions and capabilities as individuals.43

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But since modern human cultures take many diverse forms and continue to develop along semi-­independent trajectories, the behavior of individuals and whole societies cannot be fully explained even if we employ reasoning based on both biological and sociocultural evolution. The personal temperaments and choices of leaders and followers must also be considered. Processes of human choice and learning—­or, often, mistaken learning—­are a critical element in explaining collective human behavior and its consequences.44 Only by adopting a multifactor approach to societal activities can we escape the analytical paradox that my college classmate inadvertently framed decades ago. Only in this way can we avoid the assumption that we as scholars magically stand outside of human history and are intellectually superior to all the people we study.45 But within political science and the other social sciences, what kind of explanation can we aim for? The pursuit of a single-­factor explanation has strong intellectual and aesthetic appeal. Other things being equal (sic!), a simpler explanation is indeed a more satisfying one. The risk is that the search for simplicity may cause us to overlook important factors that should be taken into account. This is true of scholarly investigations conducted at every level of analysis. Research focused on any single level of analysis risks omitting causal factors operating at other levels. For example, an IR theory focused strictly on state behavior cannot fully explain the causes of the outbreak of World War I, which include not only the distinctive calculations of various national statesmen but also the decision of Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand.46 Nor, for quite different reasons, can a single-­level analysis explain the end of the Cold War between the superpowers.47 These points about individual behavior have important implications for how we explain the behavior of human collectives. Although we must analyze the psychological temperament of individuals to understand their political behavior, that kind of analysis obviously cannot reveal the whole story. An exclusive focus on the individual overlooks the particular context within which each person thinks and acts.48 This context includes many different components, ranging from the natural environment to existing institutional structures and dominant cultural values; as noted above, these macro factors powerfully affect the minds and behavior of individuals as well as whole societies.49 To take an example from your own life, think about how you ended up in the university where you are pursuing your PhD or postdoctoral career. You chose to enter the field of political science, economics, or some other discipline, but your decision was influenced by prevailing social ideas

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about the value of obtaining a doctorate and the possibility of using it to find a rewarding job. Equally important, you were influenced by institutional factors: the high school and college you attended, as well as the university or universities to which you applied for doctoral training.50 Perhaps you wanted to enter one PhD program but were accepted only by another. Whether or not this was the case, the institutional setting in which you decided to pursue your degree will most likely have a fundamental impact on your professional options—­including your job prospects—­and your intellectual outlook. Without taking this setting into account, your career path and intellectual development cannot be adequately understood. My own graduate experience reinforces this point.51 On the other hand, explanatory schemas that focus exclusively on such institutional factors also risk neglecting important elements of reality. Adequate explanations must combine individual choice and human agency with structural factors if those schemas are to bear any resemblance to lived experience, including our own lived experience as scholars. My decision to specialize in the study of the USSR, for instance, was shaped by my personal interest in the black-­box mysteries of Soviet politics and in the totalist political religion of communism. The decision was also influenced by broader factors, such as the plentiful fellowship support offered by the US government to encourage this kind of research as part of its geopolitical competition with the USSR. In view of such complexities, it should be no surprise that social scientists differ over what makes an explanation adequate. As pointed out earlier, each discipline predisposes its members to accept a certain type of explanation, but substantial variation still exists within each discipline, and within each discipline the dominant pattern of explanation varies across time. A dozen years ago, one shrewd observer remarked that until recently the general mindset of the social sciences “assumed a broad, structural approach to causation.” This “macro focus  .  .  . was often accompanied by the implicit message that ‘structures count’ and that individual-­level behaviour would follow more or less ineluctably from those structures.” Now, however, “all this has decidedly changed. Macro is out, and micro is in. Instead of nations, economists now focus on the behaviour of individuals. Similarly, in political science many scholars have dropped down a level of analysis—­from the nation-­state to particular regions or communities, or individual-­level data.”52 This altered mindset reflects shifting professional priorities and personal value judgments about what makes good scholarship.53 Generally speaking, the changing mindsets and fashions within individual disciplines can be traced to several sources. In addition to the meth-

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odological priorities prevailing in each discipline, these sources include personal scholarly preferences for concentrating on one or another level of analysis, as well as persisting philosophical disagreements about human nature.54 Broad cultural influences also play a role. Dominant notions about the causes of societal phenomena have shifted across time periods and cultures, and it is arguably impossible to establish that any one of these outlooks is definitively correct.55

MODELS AND SIMULATIONS

One way of addressing such daunting disciplinary complexities is to resort to formal modeling. Modeling can be applied to both individual and collective behavior, and since the mid-­twentieth century the practice has become widespread in several of the social sciences, particularly economics.56 Pursuing game theory and model building can sharpen our understanding of the options and the choices that actors make (or fail to make). Perhaps the oldest form of simulation is war gaming. For centuries, great-­power military establishments have tried to prepare for war by engaging in military exercises and mock conflicts in the field against actors representing their potential enemies. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, theoretical simulations of the decision making that nuclear conflicts would require have been an essential tool for strategic thinkers seeking to understand the potential dynamics of such conflicts.57 The attempt to understand such dynamics was originally a major stimulus to the development of formal games and game theory, which were needed to simulate events too dangerous to analyze through actual experiments.58 Formal games are the most logically rigorous type of simulation. This makes them especially elegant and helps account for their strong appeal to scholars with a mathematical bent. They are also the form of simulation that is most decontextualized—­that is, most removed from the sociopolitical context in which leaders and citizens normally operate (or would have to operate in, during a nuclear war). The value of such modeling is that it can strengthen our analysis and interpretation of real-­world political phenomena. It captures a critical dimension of politics: the nearly continuous interactions among agents who make choices based on their calculations of what other agents may do. For that reason, it can provide vital heuristic benefits. But formal modeling should not be confused with empirical research.59 Especially original exercises in game theory and modeling can be justified in their own right, because they suggest innovative ways for other scholars

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to analyze empirical reality.60 But without empirical applications, model building risks becoming an arid exercise, and sometimes a misleading one. It can become a channel for smuggling into the analysis unarticulated assumptions about empirical questions that remain open and unaddressed.61 Such discrepancies, incidentally, are the most serious charges leveled against advocates of the rational-­choice approach to social analysis, even though most of them would probably reject the suggestion that they are engaged in abstract modeling that may actually be counterfactual. The most harmful consequence of game theory (and modeling in general) is that it tempts unsuspecting model builders to believe that they are engaged in empirical explanation, when in fact they are not.62* It has been argued, for example, that a careful historical reconstruction of the Cuban missile crisis shows major discrepancies with the interpretations supplied in retrospect by some proponents of game-­theoretical analysis.63 As I see it, the test of a model for most scholars ought to be how well it serves to explain the empirical societal phenomena they themselves are studying.

CAUSES AND COUNTERFACTUALS

This brings us to the subject of causal analysis. Most political scientists believe that causal analysis is a hallmark of our discipline. But what is causal analysis, and what counts as a cause? In most research, we cannot arrive at a convincing explanation without engaging in counterfactual reasoning—­that is, about how a change in one or another condition might have changed the outcome that we want to explain. The question is whether we do this consciously, in a systematic fashion, or unconsciously, by incorporating unexamined assumptions into our investigation.64 Moreover, any causal analysis in social science assumes that we have identified all the major causal variables and can therefore discount other aspects of the context in which a given outcome occurs. This is a very large assumption that raises deep epistemological problems for notions of causality, especially in the social sciences, but in some of the natural sciences too.65 An expression that often occurs in discussions of causal analysis is “causal mechanism.” This attractive term seems to impart solidity to the analysis of social causes, until we recognize that the idea of a causal mechanism was called into question almost a century ago in the natural sciences by challenges to the Newtonian worldview from the pioneers of quantum physics, followed by similar challenges from other branches of science.66* Indeed, careful reflection reveals that the notion of a social mechanism is in

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actuality a metaphor, most commonly a dead metaphor whose metaphorical character is unrecognized by the writers who employ it. If you doubt that this is so, try a thought experiment: How, physically, would you recognize any social mechanism when you are in its presence? You can easily recognize a steam engine when you see it, but not a social mechanism. Except perhaps for instances of the physical coercion of one person by another, observable signs of a social mechanism based on social forces are very hard to find. That is because the “social forces” assumed to drive mechanisms are, in most cases, also metaphors, metaphors that can be quite useful analytically, but metaphors nonetheless.67 This probably explains why one rigorous analyst has detected nine distinct senses in which the phrase “mechanism” is used for causal explanation in the social sciences.68 Mechanismic metaphors can pave the way to more rigorous empirical analysis, but only if their metaphorical character is recognized and their various possible senses are disentangled.69 One promising response to some of these problems has been a recent emphasis on “process tracing.” Some of the leading experts working on this approach have correctly pointed out that this term likewise embodies a metaphor: the physical tracing of a pattern.70 The notion of tracing focuses attention on the need for accuracy in analyzing social processes, and that is certainly an advantage. But just what do we mean by a social process? “Process” is a highly abstract term, and even when restricted to the social realm, it can stand for many different things.71 If we want to apply the term, we must designate the temporal, spatial, and thematic boundaries of the process in question. In other words, we must make conceptual decisions defining the context most useful for explaining the events or structures we are investigating.72 We must also recognize that in social processes, as in domains of natural science, causal influences sometimes come from the “top down” rather than only from the “bottom up.” This means that the surrounding context of a phenomenon can fundamentally shape the specific pattern of the phenomenon, and we must be wary of relying entirely on bottom-­up reductionism.73 Our decisions about the delimitation of context carry major implications for our grasp of the realities affecting the phenomenon we are studying.74 In any case, however we define these boundaries, all processes are characterized by two elements: the passage of time and an interplay among some components of the process. To put it differently, any social process represents movement, a movement of individuals or societal entities vis-­à-­ vis one another through time. Moreover, the interplay is often mutual. That is, not only is the behavior of some components of the process influenced

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by the behavior of other, “causal” components, but the behavior of the “causal” components is also then influenced by the same interactions. In those instances, the social causality that occurs is not unidirectional, but multidirectional and reciprocal. That is where the intentions and choices of human actors enter the analytical picture and must be recognized for the sake of explanatory completeness.

CONCLUSION

If what I’ve said above has done nothing else, it has at least explained why this chapter is called the “logics” of explanation instead of the “logic” of explanation. The problems explored in the chapter show why the social sciences are so complicated, indeed, more complicated than the natural sciences because they study especially complex entities. This needn’t mean a lapse into extreme postmodernism, but it is something to ponder. In the words of Theodore Lowi quoted previously, “political science is a harder science than the so-­called hard sciences because we confront an unnatural universe that requires judgment and evaluation.”75 That is why the social ­science disciplines are so challenging, so changeable, and so important.

PART IV



 | Your Quest From Planning to Finishing

XII

 | Planning Your Project and Writing a Prospectus Doing original research requires that you be certain about a few things but uncertain about many others. —­Anonymous It is a surprising fact that many good students, when they sit down to write course papers or bachelor’s theses or even doctoral dissertations, fear that they have nothing to say. —­Andrew Abbott What is needed is a new and heightened awareness among sociologists, which would lead them to ask the same kinds of questions about themselves as they do about taxicab drivers or doctors, and to answer them in the same ways. Above all, this means we must acquire the ingrained habit of viewing our own beliefs as we would those held by others. —­Alvin Gouldner

If you’ve identified a research question that intrigues you, you’ve made important progress. Still, moving from that question to a workable research project is a big job; to complete the move you must produce a solid work plan. Here are four guidelines: (1) don’t confuse planning your dissertation with writing it; (2) seek advice from experienced scholars and advanced dissertation writers; (3) make sure your prospectus includes essential logistics and a work schedule; (4) recognize that your finished prospectus can’t really be final, because you’ll have to revise it repeatedly as the project evolves.

A

lthough it happened decades ago, I still have a vivid memory of the elation I felt after passing my final oral PhD examination. My two-­ hour encounter with five senior scholars had gone much more smoothly than expected, and I felt buoyant. “Almost there!” I thought as I strolled happily around the Columbia University quad. “Now the only thing I have left to do is the dissertation.” Today I remember that moment with wry amusement, because it shows how naïve I was. The dissertation

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proved to be far harder than any prior academic work I had done. And that was because it was so different from any of my previous academic undertakings. It didn’t take long for this reality to sink in, although it took many years for me to figure out exactly why it was true.1 Six months after my jubilant stroll around the quad, I had made no discernible progress on my dissertation. True, I had completely redrafted my prospectus in the mistaken belief that I was moving the dissertation forward, only to have my supervisor tell me that I was now proposing to write an entirely different dissertation from the one I had first outlined. What a shock! I thought the revised prospectus was a major step toward completing the dissertation. My supervisor thought that I’d taken a backward step—­or, at best, a step sideways—­ and he was right.2 In retrospect, I see that this sobering episode was caused by my static outlook on the whole project. I didn’t understand that a dissertation must pass through several stages of development that are analytically distinct, even though they often shade into one another. Put differently, I had no personal historical perspective to help me imagine the likely trajectory of the project, and without that perspective I was becalmed. That’s why you should strive to see your project from a developmental angle. Of course, doing this is much easier for an experienced scholar than a doctoral candidate, but it’s something to shoot for. An awareness of the dissertation as an evolving undertaking will keep you from expecting that everything will suddenly drop into place and from being crestfallen when that doesn’t happen. Unless you recognize the existence of different stages and can situate your current efforts in one or another of them, you’re likely to drift far off course.

HOW SHOULD YOU PICK THE SUBJECT OF YOUR DISSERTATION?

Doing dissertation research in primary sources is different from writing a paper based on secondary sources, even if you chose the paper topic on your own. To begin with, it is radically more open-­ended, and therefore more disconcerting. As discussed earlier, imagining and carrying out a dissertation project raise unfamiliar challenges of conceptualization. You must live with a large measure of uncertainty over a protracted period, a situation that’s hard to cope with. In addition, you must read more deeply into the existing scholarly literature than you have before, and you must locate and manage research materials on a much larger scale than at earlier stages

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of your academic career. For those reasons, you must formulate more detailed academic plans, and revise them more frequently, than you’ve done in your previous studies. Writing your prospectus is pivotal step in adapting to these new conditions. It’s the stage in which you start seriously weighing the intellectual choices and decisions that will lead, after a long journey with many unexpected side trips and dead ends, to the completion of the dissertation. The first decision, of course, is what to write about. You should choose a problem that strongly interests you and, secondarily, that can be made interesting to your dissertation readers. When I was in graduate school, my intellectual and emotional uncertainty made this step especially perplexing. On numerous occasions, one professor told me and other members of a comparative politics research seminar, “don’t be afraid of your own interests!”3 It was wise counsel, but hard for me to follow. A professor can suggest a potentially interesting topic, but he or she can’t make it interesting to you. Only you can decide on the subject that warrants expending so much of your time and energy.4 To put the matter differently, faculty advisors have an important but limited role in your decision making at this point. An advisor should not try to impose a topic on you, nor should you accept a proffered topic unless you become genuinely convinced that you want to work on it. Don’t do a dissertation simply because your advisor needs it to fill in or extend his or her own scholarship. On the other hand, advisors’ responses to your provisional ideas do matter. The most important thing advisors can do is to warn you if a topic you’re exploring is too hard or impossible. You should take such advice very seriously. At Columbia, my supervisor warned me about a topic that interested me but for which too little source material was available, and if he hadn’t insisted that I have a fallback project, I would have gone to the USSR on an academic exchange and spent a whole year searching fruitlessly for sources that didn’t exist.5 Most likely you’ll have to do a lot of brainstorming to clarify what really interests you. Brainstorming can take you far afield, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While I was preparing for my comprehensives, I toyed with the idea of writing about Soviet environmental politics or the role of Ukrainian nationalism inside the USSR.6 A more focused way of brainstorming about topics is to identify existing books and articles that you’ve found especially compelling. This might be called the “gee-­I-­wish-­I’d-­ written-­that” strategy. It involves looking for paradigmatic scholarly works in your specialty and figuring out how you could apply their questions or techniques to a different body of empirical material. Yet another method is

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to skim the titles and abstracts of completed dissertations, especially those successfully defended in your own department. You can get the texts of most of the departmental dissertations through your university library (unless the text has been temporarily embargoed by the author). You can get a much wider sample of successful dissertations by skimming ProQuest’s “Dissertations and Theses,” an electronic database searchable by author, advisor, institution, and other criteria. As you conduct your reconnaissance missions, don’t overlook the value of personal contacts. To assay possible topics, go to conferences, speak with visiting lecturers, and work on building up your network. Once you’ve zeroed in on one or two attractive possibilities for your dissertation topic, try to establish direct contacts with established scholars working in the area that interests you. Skype and Zoom make such contacts easy if the scholars are receptive, even if they are based at other universities. The key to establishing such professional links is to have a well-­founded sense of those scholars’ profiles, to have read some of their work carefully, and to ask them questions based on that work. Google Scholar is a useful device for sorting through the profiles and publications of scholars who might be useful interlocutors. Whatever subject you ultimately choose, you must frame the topic to make it workable. That is, you must carefully assess whether your available resources match the scale of the topic. This rule of proportionality applies to your available time, money, and access to research materials. It also applies to your research skills: your knowledge of the requisite languages, the applicable research techniques and software programs, and so forth. Attempting to apply this rule won’t protect you against some miscalculations, but it will reduce your chances of making a massive error. The predissertation stage of my own graduate career provides a graphic example of shaky judgment about these issues. After enrolling in the comparative politics research seminar mentioned above, I impulsively told the professor that I wanted to write a term paper comparing Marxism and Christianity as ideological systems. As it happened, I’d just read a leading Kremlinologist’s provocative essay comparing the Roman Catholic Church with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.7 The essay highlighted many intriguing issues that caught my attention partly because of my undergraduate major in religious studies. Attractiveness and feasibility, however, are separate things. When I suggested the topic, my professor, smiling wryly, replied that my proposed topic was “not really a researchable subject.” It’s true, of course, that the

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comparative essay I’d just read did raise fascinating questions of authority, belief, and heresy, and intellectual historians have carefully traced several of the philosophical motifs shared by Christian and Marxist worldviews. But as an empirical research project my proposal was absurdly ambitious, even for a dissertation, let alone a research paper. The category of “Marxism” encompassed an assortment of disparate beliefs and practices spanning about a century, and “Christianity” encompassed a range spanning almost two millennia! The vastness of the mismatch showed that I didn’t really understand the meaning of serious empirical research, nor its material requirements. Most likely you won’t make a mistake as foolish as mine, but you’ll still have plenty of room for miscalculation. That’s why planning in advance is so important. In writing your prospectus, you should carefully delimit your topic by subject, time interval, and type of sources. Note that these delimiters resemble the dimensions, discussed in an earlier chapter, you can use to expand or shrink the intellectual contexts surrounding the phenomenon you want to study. This delimitation of the intellectual terrain is important not only for the feasibility of your project but for the credibility of the final product in the eyes of your readers. If your dissertation reaches conclusions that ultimately turn out to be incompatible with other evidence, the fact that your boundary markers have excluded that counterevidence—­if they have—­ will provide a defensive bulwark of sorts when you present the dissertation. If such discrepancies surface during the dissertation defense, you’ll have a respectable response, even if you’re forced to acknowledge that you haven’t covered some important sources. Once you receive your degree, you’ll have time to do further research and then adjust your conclusions if you elect to turn the dissertation into articles or a book. To get the scale right, it helps to think of the project as several separate groupings of tasks, represented by concentric circles. The smallest circle (circle A) contains the topics and information that are the heart of the project. That’s where you’re starting from, figuratively speaking. The next, larger concentric circle (B) contains other important topics and information that are relevant. The third circle (C) contains issues and information that would widen the dissertation’s coverage and could be woven into it, but which aren’t essential to the project’s success. Note that the domains in each circle can be delineated using chronological, thematic, or spatial criteria. If you approach researching and writing your dissertation with this

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mental template, it will give you valuable options, provided you use the template wisely. The key to success is to start in circle A, then proceed to circle B if that seems necessary, and then perhaps even to circle C, depending on what you and your supervisor decide. That will make your research efficient. It won’t be efficient in an ideal sense, because original research never is. But it will be efficient in the sense that it will give you some options about deciding where to finish without having to expend an enormous chunk of time and effort in vain. Working from the smallest circle outward, you’ll have off-­ramps where you can reasonably stop if you and your supervisor decide you’ve done enough to satisfy the departmental dissertation requirements. If, however, you start by doing the research in circle A and then jump to researching circle C, this choice will most likely impose a painful burden on you. To justify the time and effort you’ve invested in each circle, you will have to do the work in circle B to connect the two circles you’ve already done. If you’re lucky, you can still elect to base the whole dissertation on just circle A. But in that case, you’ll have to jettison all the work you’ve invested in circle C or else plow through circle B to get to C. Either way, your project will be needlessly inefficient, and the decision will hurt. Real research, of course, is usually messier than this schematic depiction suggests. But you can take steps to reduce your vulnerability to the bridge-­too-­far dilemma I’ve just outlined. Remember the ways contexts can be delimited: topically, spatially, and chronologically. If you start by defining each of these dimensions of your project narrowly, you can research them thoroughly, and then you can expand the dissertation’s coverage of one or more of these dimensions if you have the necessary time and energy. If, however, you define the dimensions too broadly at the outset and scatter your research efforts, you’ll be in a tough spot. This is an issue to keep in mind all the way through your project. In writing my own dissertation, I started with a fairly tight focus, and then expanded the chronological coverage of the thesis at the prompting of my supervisor. As mentioned earlier, he helped me see my topic in a new light by urging me to write a historical background chapter. Then, however, he told me to write another historical chapter to link the new one with the others I’d already written. In the long run, this advice paid off when I turned the dissertation into a book. But in the short run the new structure made the project much more taxing, because it added several decades and two chapters to the dissertation’s coverage.

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NAVIGATION, SEARCH, AND MORE SEARCH

As you wrestle with problems like these, talk them over with any faculty members or colleagues whose academic profiles are related to your interests. You may feel hesitant to engage in discussions that reveal your underlying uncertainty, but you should plunge ahead anyway. Often, we don’t know what we really think until we voice our opinions out loud. Besides helping you sort out your ideas, these discussions will also help you identify potential members of your dissertation committee. The faculty committee formed during the early stages of a dissertation may include several or all the examiners who ultimately participate in the dissertation defense. The composition of these committees is broadly regulated by departmental rules, but a dissertation writer usually has some latitude to influence their makeup.8 Assembling a roster of prospective committee members will also facilitate the creation of your prospectus, or dissertation plan. But what will the subject of your prospectus be, embryonically speaking? As explained earlier, one meaning of “paradigm” is a scholarly work worthy of emulation; surveying books and articles that you think might fit this definition can help you think about the possibilities for your own project. Another way to prime your imagination is to look at dissertations that have already been defended successfully, defended at your own university, certainly, but at other universities as well. This will give you a feel for the normal range of topics and their scale. You can do this by perusing the abstracts shown in the ProQuest Theses and Dissertations database. If you want to look at dissertations on particular topics, you can do keyword searches in the database and, unless an author has embargoed distribution pending publication, you can look at the full text of the dissertation as well. If you want to know what kinds of dissertations have been done under the supervision of an especially prominent scholar whose work interests you, you can also search the ProQuest data base by advisor. If you want to pick your topic with an eye on the current research priorities in the political ­science discipline, you can get a sense of the topics that mainline political scientists regard as especially important by reviewing the lists of recent winners of the APSA dissertation prizes. The association gives annual prizes in a range of subjects, and the prizes are listed on the APSA website.9 As you start to zero in on a promising topic, you’re likely to hear a small voice asking, How do you know someone hasn’t already written a dissertation on your topic, or worse, written a definitive book on it? The APSA keeps a database of members’ research in progress; although I’ve never

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investigated the thoroughness of its coverage, it’s a good place to look for answers. Even more important, though, is to talk with your advisor and other prospective professors of your defense committee. They will have a practiced sense for what qualifies as original and what doesn’t, as well as the topics that leading scholars may be working on. This stratagem helped me. After my advisor first suggested that I work on the politics of Soviet technological progress, I discovered that a large, authoritative OECD study of the organization of Soviet research and development had just been published, and I worried that it had pre-­empted my project. My advisor looked at the study for about fifteen seconds—­ specifically, at the table of contents—­and told me I had nothing to be concerned about. The OECD study was complementary to my interest in the political side of the issue, but it took my supervisor’s advice to clarify the difference. For what it’s worth, my experience as an advisor suggests that most dissertation writers’ fears of being pre-­empted are exaggerated. The political universe is much bigger than the galaxy of dissertation writers, and the political universe changes almost nonstop from year to year. Still, flying blind is not a good idea.

THE PROSPECTUS AND ITS PARTS

Writing the prospectus is one way of sharpening your sense of the stages your dissertation must pass through. To achieve this result, however, you must understand what a prospectus is and what it is not, something I plainly didn’t fathom when I wrote mine. A prospectus is a plan for research and writing that lays out, to the best of your ability, all the intellectual and logistical aspects of your project. The crucial point is that it is a work plan, not the introduction to your whole dissertation. It should be businesslike rather than eloquent. You may ultimately incorporate parts of the prospectus into the introduction to the dissertation, but writing the introduction will come later, perhaps much later. At this stage, what matters is to include all the nuts and bolts, in the right proportions.10* The watchwords are comprehensiveness and concision. Although prospectus requirements vary from one department to another, it’s a good bet that yours will include most of the following elements. Abstract. By the time you finish the prospectus, you should be able to write an incisive abstract that summarizes it without a misplaced or wasted word. Keeping the abstract short is essential. It’s a way of forcing yourself to decide (at least for the time being) what features make your proposal

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important and distinctive. But don’t wait to draft a preliminary version of the abstract until you have the full prospectus; work on them in parallel. Writing in miniature on the micro level is an effective way to manage large bodies of material on the macro level.11 It is also a way of eliciting constructive comments from your advisor and other readers; they’ll be more responsive if you tell them at the outset what to look for in the prospectus and why the project matters. The abstract matters to your project’s success not only intellectually, but also financially. A cogent abstract will be indispensable for winning fellowship support for your research further down the road. Busy members of fellowship committees often form their judgments quickly, and a sloppy abstract will predispose them to turn down your request for support without further ado. For many of your readers, the abstract will be the most salient and important part of the prospectus. Rationale for the Dissertation. Why does your project matter? Faculty readers and fellowship providers will invariably ask this question, so you need to present a rationale that will win them over. But formulating a persuasive rationale is also important for you in a more personal sense. To generate the energy and endurance needed to complete a project lasting several years, you must believe that the effort is worthwhile. So you must convince yourself, not just outside readers. If you concentrate on this question for some time but still can’t generate an answer that you find persuasive, you should modify or change your topic. In most cases, a solid rationale for your project will gradually crystallize through the sort of personal ruminations discussed in chapter 7 on values and priorities. A prospectus rationale should explain the central intellectual problem to be investigated and should spell out the central questions the dissertation will answer. It should briefly summarize the state of the relevant scholarly works and should be framed in terms of other scholars’ prior writing on or around your topic. What have they neglected to do that you can do? What have they done that you can do differently and better? Here nuance is important. The aim is to critique previous scholarship without branding it worthless (unless it really is worthless). To become a genuine scholar, you must both appreciate the accomplishments of other scholars and pinpoint the limitations of their work. Formally speaking, two basic justifications for a dissertation are possible: (1) relevant primary sources on the topic exist but have not been examined by other scholars; or (2) relevant primary sources exist but have been misinterpreted by other scholars.12 Note that after the publication of research on any sociopolitical topic, new events and the passage of time

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almost automatically raise the question of whether the findings of that research remain valid or should be modified. This possibility is worth bearing in mind as you read the books and articles relevant to your research interests. Have events since that work was published given any basis for reassessing its conclusions? Description of the Research Design and Working Hypotheses. This part of the prospectus defines the time interval to be covered, summarizes the analytical methods to be used, and flags any special problems these methods may entail. It should present working hypotheses that indicate tentative answers to the central research questions.13 It should also spell out the types of source material that will be analyzed (e.g., secondary sources providing intellectual or historical background; archival sources; memoirs; contemporaneous books and periodicals; contemporaneous government documents; retrospective interviews of participants; contemporaneous interviews of participants; opinion surveys; and databases.) The section should carefully address the issues of research design discussed in chapters 9 and 10. Sources of Information. To demonstrate your project’s feasibility, the prospectus should also present a systematic list of relevant documentary sources and other data. In addition to naming the types of information, it should provide plentiful examples of the items in each category. Although some annotations may be included for each variety of material, usually this section is primarily a thorough list of relevant sources broken down by categories.14* When I gave my advisor the first draft of my prospectus, he told me to find more published books and articles and add them to the bibliography. This was good advice. For the writer of a dissertation or book, having too few sources is much worse than having too many. When faced with an excessively large body of sources, you may be able to narrow your topic to make the amount of empirical material manageable. On the other hand, if you face a shortage of sources, you’ll probably be stranded; you can’t simply manufacture them, and without them, your study won’t have the necessary empirical foundation. Treatment of Human Subjects. If you plan to do field work in the form of interviews or surveys, you should take explicit account of the ethical implications for the subjects you intend to work with. Most universities have institutional review boards that must approve certain types of research with human subjects. These boards were originally established to protect the subjects of medical research from harm or abuse, and their role in social ­science research is a matter of considerable disagreement.15 In the

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past, however, there have been egregious cases of harmful misconduct by social researchers, so this is an issue you should think through carefully. The way to start is by consulting the IRB guidelines of your university and discussing their applicability to your project with your supervisor and other faculty members. They can give you a feel for how to handle the formal requirements. Outline, Logistics, and Schedules. Prospectuses typically include an outline of the dissertation chapters as currently planned. This is an important tool for sorting out and organizing your material and themes. Naturally, the outline will change as your research proceeds, but it will give you a provisional structure within which to work. The prospectus should also cover key logistical questions, such as research travel, obtaining access to foreign libraries or archives, the sites where you’ll do field work, and the potential complications that may arise (such as physical danger if you’re doing field research in risky regions.) A schedule for completing research tasks, broken down by types of research material or activity, is a key planning tool. So is a schedule for writing the dissertation, broken down by chapters. In practice, few things will go exactly as you’ve planned. But formulating your intentions in a prospectus will help you circumvent avoidable disruptions and cope with the truly unpredictable ones.

XIII

 | Mapping Research Resources and Gathering Evidence Before observing, one must establish rules for one’s observations. —­Jean-­Jacques Rousseau Discovering where generalization is possible is a taxing empirical task. Perhaps it should proceed on the basis of trial and error, perhaps on the basis of theoretical argument, perhaps some combination. What should not drive it, however, is the ready availability of data and technique. —­Ian Shapiro Most of my colleagues admit quite freely to operating in a perpetual circle between questions and results. The finished logic of our articles and books is a façade, put on after the fact. —­Andrew Abbott

Researchers sometimes fail to think through the processes of “hunting and gathering” systematically. The key rule for mapping research resources is to develop a thorough grasp of the existing universe of pertinent materials and the rules of selection you will use to choose among them. The key rule for gathering evidence is to ensure that the data you are collecting are actually relevant to the question you want to answer. Luckily for you, legions of scholars, librarians, and database managers have created many tools to help you apply these rules.

J

ust as most of us assume that we learned how to read effectively long ago, we tend to assume that we mastered essential research skills when we were in college. If you hold this view, you are almost certainly wrong, at least if my own experience as a graduate student can be taken as typical. I still remember being intimidated by the great libraries where I began my dissertation research, and I was right to feel intimidated, because I lacked the navigational tools needed to unearth the treasures buried somewhere in their stacks. I’m certain that I wasted many months—­if not years—­for want of such navigational aids. Today, thanks to years of practice and phenomenal technical improvements in research tools, I almost never experi-

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ence such feelings.1 In other words, you will be handsomely rewarded if you take the time to learn about key research tools before plunging into the thickets of your dissertation. I had no inkling of this when I began research on my dissertation, and my introduction to the Library of Congress therefore left an indelible impression. The LC’s main reading room is a vast space below a vaulted ceiling covered with beautiful murals. But I noticed the beauty of the place only on later visits. In those days, library holdings were still indexed in physical card catalogs, and the first time I entered the reading room, my dominant emotion was fear bordering on terror. Far below the ceiling, on the main floor, were several hundred elevated wooden cabinets, each containing about fifty long drawers filled with file cards, and that formidable array made me intensely anxious. How was I going to make my way through this massive storehouse of cards and sources to find what I needed? How could I keep from drowning in enormous swells of random information? In the age of computerized catalogs and the Internet, most PhD students never have this experience. Perhaps you’ve never had it, either. But if you haven’t, you may have missed an important lesson and learned a bad one instead. Now, far more than at any time in the past, social researchers are floating on vast oceans of data that are constantly expanding, and the idea that computer technology alone can solve this problem is a dangerous illusion. We live in an age of information that cries out for systems of management that are more than purely technical. And research libraries institutionalize centuries of accumulated human knowledge, not just knowledge about particular subjects, but knowledge about techniques for navigating among those subjects to discover something that is new.

MAPPING RESEARCH RESOURCES

In the long run, my fear in the LC was salutary, because it made me aware of how desperately I needed help. Self-­assurance would have been a recipe for unending trouble, because it would have perpetuated my ignorance of the tools that were available. You can’t possibly read everything that’s potentially relevant to your dissertation; but that makes the thoughtful identification and selection of research materials doubly important. Like reading itself, the process of searching for what to read involves a nearly endless series of small decisions. How thoughtfully you make these decisions will determine what you discover and what you overlook.

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Sophisticated searching is the key to true research efficiency. But an erroneous view of efficiency can easily give you self-­defeating feelings of impatience and lurking fears about “wasting time.” Genuine research unavoidably requires some open-­ended exploration and the sampling of unfamiliar materials in large amounts. Any researcher must invest a great deal of time searching for materials, and some of that time will be unproductive. But the ratio between productive and unproductive searches can vary enormously. The key is to find the unfamiliar materials that are most promising by using all the available navigational tools, without spending long days trolling expanses of ocean that lack any fish. The good news is that past generations of explorers and pathfinders can be enlisted in your quest. Over decades and even centuries, dedicated archivists, bibliographers, librarians, and database managers have charted large regions of the ocean for you. These helpers are no less important for your project—­and in some ways more important—­than the fellow researchers working on topics related to yours. Their cumulative efforts are an enduring embodiment of intellectual cooperation among persons committed to the advancement of knowledge. Although at first glance your university’s research library may look like nothing but a huge warehouse of material, it is in fact a precision machine carefully designed and maintained to help you find whatever you seek.2* Computerized catalogues and bibliographies may be the most obvious elements of the machine, but other parts are arguably even more important. For example, the indexing of books by subject according to a sophisticated set of standardized terms will enable you to locate materials relevant to your work that you could never locate using all the computer keywords you could possibly think of. That is, librarians and cataloguers have already scouted out many potential intellectual connections that can be of great help to you. (I didn’t fully understand this essential truth until my PhD students and I attended a seminar on research methods led by Thomas Mann from the Library of Congress.3) To use this extraordinary research machine effectively, you must be prepared to ask questions and learn exactly how it works, a necessity that I certainly underestimated at the start of my career. You can find out how the machine works only if you shake off your anxiety and hesitation. If you’re like my young self and many other researchers just getting started, you have the mistaken notion that you must do everything on your own—­ above all, that you must avoid asking basic questions that reveal your ignorance about how to do research. Changing this attitude should be at the top of your personal agenda, because it will slow you down and impose a

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heavy emotional burden. Asking frank questions about research methods, no matter how basic, is essential to your success. This won’t upset the people you ask; far from it. Reference librarians enjoy answering questions because it allows them to demonstrate their own knowledge, and they will never report you to the academic police! Think about the matter this way. If a brilliant ghostwriter offered to write your dissertation on contract for a negligible fee, would you be tempted to say yes? Saying yes, of course, would be a grave violation of scholarly ethics and would negate your claim to have earned your PhD. In the case of librarians and other scholarly pathfinders, however, you can request and receive help without engaging in any wrongdoing. In fact, asking for this kind of help is a sign of scholarly maturity. The keys to succeeding as a researcher are to learn from the answers you receive and to build on them. So you should work hard to master the tools you discover from librarians and fellow scholars.4 To cite a personal example, in the early 1970s I was especially fortunate that a fellow graduate student in Oxford mentioned a series of lectures on Russian and Soviet bibliography by J. S. G. Simmons, the great British authority on the subject. Without following up this tip, I would have struggled through oceans of Soviet published material without any notion of what I was missing.5 Equally important, you should regularly spend time scouting for new tools on your own. This kind of inquisitiveness is one hallmark of a sophisticated researcher. I recommend that you set aside some time each week—­a half hour or an hour, perhaps—­to widen your knowledge of the available scholarly tools and how to use them. For instance, when I do research, the service I rely on most often (apart from my university’s electronic catalog) is the Web of Science. Web of Science is an extraordinarily valuable suite of bibliographic tools that can make you a master navigator in the world of scholarly publications. Here are a few specific examples. The Web of Science citation indexes allow you to pinpoint the most frequently cited articles and books in your field across a wide array of top-­ranked disciplinary journals. For your purposes, the most useful citations indexes are probably the Social Science Citation Index and the newer Book Citation Index. And the Web of Science Current Contents Connect database can enable you to stay abreast of intellectual trends in your specialty by notifying you of the contents of the newest issue of almost any serious scholarly journal you select (I regularly scan notifications for fifteen or twenty journals). In addition, Web of Science also allows you to engage in forward bibliographic searches (also known as prospective searches.) That is, you can start with a seminal article or book

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you’ve read to find other articles and books that cited it and were published in the period after your chosen article or book appeared, right up to the present.6 This is especially useful when you’re putting together your literature review. Moreover, you can develop a personal system for tagging the items you discover that groups them into useful categories—­for example, sources organized by theme or by chapter of your project.7 JSTOR, a journal database that you probably use regularly to access journals, offers a complementary software application. JSTOR’s “Text Analyzer” allows you to paste into the analyzer any piece of text, such as the introduction to a paper you’re writing, and launch a journal citation search using search criteria you can adjust. My personal discovery of Web of Science and JSTOR’s Text Analyzer are good examples of gaining essential craft knowledge by asking questions of expert librarians and bibliographers. Intellectual creativity occurs via more oblique paths as well. Studies of successful scientific and technological innovation show that the availability of uncommitted “slack” time and resources is one precondition of innovative thinking.8 Many of our most creative insights come when our mind seems to be wandering but is unconsciously mulling over new ways to approach a problem that has stumped us.9* For instance, browsing in bookstores and in the library stacks can lead to serendipitous discoveries, and virtual shelf lists now enable you to “walk through” the library stacks right from your computer terminal. Serendipitous insights can also come from reading about subjects having no manifest connection to your chosen dissertation topic. Several parts of this guide wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t done such reading.10 With all the tasks already piled on your plate, hearing that you should take time to browse in the library stacks and read some nondisciplinary publications may sound completely unrealistic, but it’s true. James C. Scott, a heterodox leader in contemporary political science, has reported that he spends a third of his work time reading and thinking about topics outside the discipline of political science.11 Obviously, as a graduate student you can’t afford to commit this much time to diversified reading; but you should do some of it, in order to counteract the narrowing of intellectual outlook that professional socialization almost unavoidably entails.12 It can also be fun, and every ambitious researcher can use some fun.

THINKING ABOUT EVIDENCE: FIRST STEPS

Now let’s talk about evidence and zero in on some specific methodological terms that deserve your careful attention. Like other methodological con-

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cepts such as theory and hypothesis, the words we use to describe evidence are more important than they seem at first glance. In this connection several methodological concepts based on metaphors are worth thinking about: data, bodies, and less commonly, universes, pools, and oceans. Data is a slippery word that can mislead researchers because of its connotations. It’s derived from Latin, and its Latin meaning is things “that have been given”—­that is, more than just one thing.13 But the word’s meaning in English is hazy. To begin with, the word “data” is sometimes used as a singular noun, even though its Latin grammatical form is plural. Implicitly this raises the question, in English, of whether data is one thing or are several things. Here the point is not to carp about semantic details (although I do suffer from a serious case of grammatical OCD). It’s that this word conceals an unspoken assumption that can subtly lead you astray. Talking about data in the singular implies that the word represents one discrete thing. By contrast, using “data” in the plural implicitly recognizes the variety of the information you have or must find to complete your project successfully. Just as using the word “media” in the singular is a recipe for oversimplified political analysis, treating data as one thing amounts to putting on intellectual blinders. The notion of actively collecting data to make databases helps guard against this tendency, but it does pose the question of who—­if not you—­gathered the data, and using what criteria? This is a question you should always ask before using any assortment of statistics or other data you have not compiled yourself. Unless you do, you may unwittingly absorb the compiler’s prejudices or other intellectual errors. Recent revelations about the racially discriminatory effects of certain algorithms used by Big Tech companies illustrate the general problem. Similar caution is in order when you think about the ways to describe evidence. Bodily metaphors have a long history in social thought. Think of the “body politic” (for a political system as a whole) or the “long arm of the law” (for one facet of government). Sometimes we talk about evidence using a similar metaphor: “the body of evidence.” Such organic metaphors can easily confuse us by insinuating teleological assumptions into our thinking about political systems; and they can have a similar effect when we think about research. Why, after all, should there be just one body of evidence? What if there are two bodies, or a hundred? Earlier I mentioned the view that no “natural kinds” exist in nature (sic!). That is, nature is a spectrum of entities and phenomena that shade into each other, rather than being neatly fixed and separate from one another. If that is true, why should natural kinds exist in the social realm, or in intellectual life? “Universe” is another metaphor for evidence. This metaphor has the

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advantage of seeming more inclusive than the term “body.” Like the notion of a body, the idea of a universe of evidence implies that everything that could be relevant has been included; it also tacitly assumes that the relevant evidence is already structured according to some principle. There is, however, an important proviso. What if there’s more than one universe of evidence? Centuries ago Giordano Bruno argued for the existence of “multiple worlds,” and some contemporary cosmologists suspect that our physical universe may be just one of many “multiverses.”14 Speaking of “the” universe in a metaphorical sense doesn’t resolve the problem of multiple sources of relevant evidence, but it will help you to cast a wide net at the beginning of your research. Finally, there’s the notion of a “pool” or “pools” of data. These words imply that the relevant evidence has substance, but not inherent form. Social scientists don’t use these terms much in a broad sense, although they do talk about “pooling” evidence from different sources and databases.15 “Ocean” and “oceans” are similar metaphors, which I favor and which I used at the start of this chapter to describe the danger of being swept off course and drowned by irrelevant information. The ocean metaphor is useful because it reminds us of the importance of having reliable navigational tools. We are, indeed, afloat on vast seas of information, and we cannot succeed without such devices. We especially need navigational tools to adjust our course as we make new discoveries or, at least as often, when we fail to make the discoveries we’d hoped for. We’ll get to those tools in a moment. But first I need to say something about the attitudes you should adopt toward the scholarly sources you come across.

SIZING UP SOURCES: HOW MUCH TIME, AND HOW MUCH TRUST?

Throughout your research, it’s vital to gauge the relationship between your intellectual needs and the sources you are looking at. This will, to begin with, affect how much time you allocate to reading or scanning any given source. Just as you can’t possibly read everything that’s potentially relevant to your subject, you can’t read everything that does seem relevant in an identical fashion—­not, at least, if you’re a sophisticated investigator well into your dissertation research. There are, after all, degrees of relevance, and you should choose your reading strategies to match the importance of particular sources. The rule I suggested earlier for allocating your attention when preparing for your doctoral examinations also applies here. Once you’ve found and read a source, how much should you rely on it?

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Ordinarily social scientists don’t make much use of historians’ elaborate procedures for establishing the authenticity of original documents, because the provenance of most of the writings we use is already known.16 But you should always ask yourself about the validity of anything you read, including other scholarly works. If a work is central to your purpose, you should pay close attention to how other scholars have treated it. That’s why turning to specialized encyclopedias is a good exploratory tactic. It’s also why footnote chasing in authoritative books can be so productive. That said, you should recognize that there can be degrees of reliability even within a publication that is generally trustworthy. This requires that you consider the author’s purpose as well as your own. When pursuing a topic that’s important to your research, you should avoid treating a peripheral discussion of that topic in any book or journal article as authoritative. Consider, for example, the mention of Giordano Bruno and cosmology in my discussion of the “universe” of evidence above. You can usually trust what this book says about central topics like drafting your dissertation. But if you’re studying the history of cosmology, you should not take this book’s statement about astronomers’ ideas of multiple universes at face value. Instead you should verify the accuracy of that claim by going to a proven reference work like the online Britannica Academic, which has an informative article on the multiple models of multiple universes currently advocated by some cosmologists. From there, if the issue is do-­or-­die important for your research, you can move on to the scientific publications cited in that article. Incorporating this graduated approach into your research routines will sharpen your awareness that individual publications embody forms of knowledge whose precision may vary, depending on how their authors have allocated their own intellectual efforts.

RESEARCH STAGES, CIRCLES AND SPIRALS

Your search for sources and for data will almost inevitably begin at a desk. Chapter 12 enumerated some of the essential tools: general reference works, specialized encyclopedias, Wikipedia (useful for initial exploration, but not as a final source), bibliographic programs and databases, and databases of publications and unpublished papers, such as the Social Science Research Network. These are the essential tools you need to guide your explorations, and studying how to use them will make your research much more efficient.17* You may have noticed, incidentally, that a considerable amount of the information in this guide is drawn from specialized encyclo-

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pedias.18 They also provided leads to many of the books and articles I’ve cited directly. Using these tools, you’ll begin a process of inquiry that will take you back and forth among your hypotheses and the sources you discover. It will be a multistage undertaking, but not a linear one. Earlier I suggested that in the discipline of political science as a whole, an orderly narrative of stage-­by-­stage progress is misleading, as it almost certainly is in the other social sciences. The same holds for the production of individual dissertations, books, and articles. Andrew Abbott, quoted at the start of this chapter, has provided a nuanced picture of scholarly research as it really exists (in contrast to how it’s usually depicted after the fact).19 Your own research will be an iterative process in which you move back and forth repeatedly among familiar and unfamiliar sources. As you move, you’ll sharpen some of your questions, discard others, and generate new ones. Think of the desk phases of your research as a spiral leading upwards. On some days, of course, your path will be nothing but a flat circle. But on most days, you’ll inch upward along the spiral as you map the intellectual terrain. And on a few lucky days, you’ll have true epiphanies. You should not, however, let the complexity of this process obscure one imperative. Before you begin any field research, you should systematically apply these desk tools to solidify your project’s structure. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this principle. After you’ve traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to start your field work, you don’t want to discover that you still need to do essential library research. In earlier times, this would have been a nearly hopeless situation. Today, thanks to the Internet, you might be able to access some of your university library’s resources from the field. But many of those resources will still be out of reach, and even if you can get at them remotely, you’ll be wasting precious time you intended to spend on the work you can do only in the field. Careful preparatory desk work is the prerequisite for effective field research.

DOING FIELD RESEARCH

“Field” research comes in two basic varieties: finding evidence about the past in archives; and gathering firsthand evidence about the present (or more precisely, about the very recent past), in the form of interviews and surveys with live respondents. Neither of these types of research is my strong suit; my personal experience has been limited to small sets of inter-

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views and a tiny amount of archival research I did to augment my research in published sources when writing my books and articles.20 Archives. Most political science guides to doing field research don’t count working in archives as being in the “field.” That’s because political scientists don’t commonly use archives and, more importantly, because working in archives doesn’t permit direct personal contact with the people being studied (which is the most common way of defining field research). Nonetheless, I’ve included archives here for several reasons. Using archives does involve some of the same unpredictable logistical challenges that conventional field research poses. And handling archival materials raises some of the same epistemological issues that interviews and surveys involve. Not least, for some political scientists, archives contain invaluable data that shouldn’t be overlooked. This is true, for example, of researchers studying the high-­level political decision making that can produce new government policies and, internationally, can sometimes cause wars.21 One of my former students used Soviet archives to show that the notion of locally based “clans” in Central Asia was generated by an internal Soviet ideological struggle during the 1980s and was then uncritically absorbed into Western scholarship by Western observers.22 To make effective use of archives, you must deal with at least three problems.23 The first is to figure out whether archives relevant to your central research question actually exist. Archival records—that is to say, unpublished documents and other materials—can be found in government archives, university libraries, museums, and privately held collections (including the personal archives of US presidents since FDR, each of which is located in a separate city).24 The best way to find them is to consult the available guides to archival collections and methods of doing archival research. Major guides for finding archives are available online, and many individual archives maintain their own websites.25 A important point to remember is that government archives are organized differently in different countries. In Great Britain, for example, they are highly centralized; Italy is just the opposite. The second research problem is to get access to materials in the archives you discover. Major archives may digitize some of their documents and make them available online, but most likely you will have to visit the archive personally. Using archives is more complicated than using a research library, so you need to prepare carefully before arriving.26 Do not neglect this logistical dimension; some archives have short working hours, and they occasionally close for extended periods (weeks or even months.)

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If you’ve traveled a long distance to get to the archive, neglecting such details can cost you substantial time and money, not to mention frustration. It can easily derail your schedule for completing your research and starting to write the dissertation. The third problem is to locate relevant material inside the archive. The internal organization of archives is more idiosyncratic than that of libraries. Many archives have finding aids prepared by the resident archivists, and some of these are available online. In any case, it’s important to contact archive administrators in advance to explain the details of your planned visit and circumvent avoidable snags. Communicating directly with archivists can help you discover and track down elusive material. Personal contacts are especially useful after the archivists have gotten to know you and the profile of your project, particularly if you’ve impressed them by working hard on whatever materials you’ve already received. Interviews. Interviews are a type of investigation that sets political scientists and some other social scientists apart from many historians, although the distinction isn’t cut and dried. Over the past half-­century historians studying recent events have built up oral-­history archives to tap into the personal experiences of participants in those events while they’re still alive. Social scientists and these historians face some common problems, although the logistical complications facing social scientists are probably on balance more severe.27 The biggest challenges are how to locate the right people to interview and how to ensure that you don’t inadvertently create signals or incentives that prompt them to give the answers they think you want to hear. Surveys. Systematic surveys of public attitudes were launched in the United States around the time of World War II and are now conducted on a global scale.28 They were initially developed by several groups: academic investigators seeking to give substance to notions like “society”; commercial firms serving businesses that wanted information about popular attitudes for purposes of marketing and sales; and consultancies that wanted similar information they could use to win political campaigns and gauge the likely effects of proposed government policies.29 In recent decades, the methods of conducting surveys have become far more sophisticated and technically complex. If you want to incorporate an original survey into your dissertation project, you should take the relevant methods courses at your university and study the plentiful published guides.30 You should also note that vast stores of opinion data have been compiled and archived by the Inter-­university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Eurobarometer, the World Values Survey, and other survey organizations. With

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careful planning, you may be able to obtain access to those data, thereby eliminating or reducing the need to conduct a survey of your own. EXPERIMENTS AND SIMULATIONS

The ability or inability to conduct controlled experiments is one way of drawing a line between the natural and the social sciences.31 But although this distinction is important, the line separating these two domains is actually a hazy one, as noted earlier.32 Astronomy and geology, although they rely on advanced instrumentation and observation, are not experimental in the way that chemistry and physics are, and even physics has room for thought experiments. (Think, for instance, of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What a thought experiment that was!)33 On the other side of the natural-­social line, at least one social science, psychology, relies heavily on laboratory experiments. And in political science, experiments are becoming more widespread, along with quasi-­experiments meant to imitate the advantages of full-­fledged experimentation.34 In political science, experiments have both benefits and limits.35 The key questions are first, how closely the experimental design conforms to designs in the natural sciences, and second, whether the experiment accounts adequately for the real-­life conditions it is intended to clarify.36 Experiments are most useful in analyzing political attitudes and behavior at the level of the individual or small group. Some examples are experiments included in opinion surveys and experiments examining the impact of the media on the behavior of prospective voters.37 At a more general level, the effects of racial identity on household mortgage lending have been studied experimentally. Field experiments with US bank lenders have shown that fictitious mortgage applicants whose socioeconomic profiles are identical except for race do not obtain mortgages with equal frequency; the applicants identifiable as African American are rejected at substantially higher rates.38 Important as such studies are, it is quite clear that many important questions in political science are not susceptible to experimental study, because this kind of study would be impracticable or unethical, or both. International Relations theorists, for example, could not mount full-­scale experimental tests of a theory about the causes of interstate war because the prospective participants would be unwilling to submit to the control of the experimenters, and even if they were, testing the theory might well ignite an actual war.39 Another example concerns the effectiveness of centrally planned econ-

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omies. Between the 1930s and the 1970s this question was a matter of heated debate between the Soviet proponents of state socialism and the Western proponents of free-­market capitalism. As I studied these debates for my dissertation, it never occurred to me to think of them as a candidate for analysis through experimentation, even though, practically speaking, the Cold War did amount to an uncontrolled experiment of sorts.40 Of course, neither Stalin nor Wall Street would ever have agreed to a controlled experiment, and given the disastrous human price of the Stalinist system, no ethical social scientist could ever have proposed this kind of test.41 One way of trying to deal with the limitations of actual experiments is simulation or role playing. Perhaps the oldest form of simulation is war gaming. For at least two centuries, great-­power military establishments have tried to prepare for war by engaging in military exercises and mock conflicts in the field against actors representing their potential enemies. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, more abstract simulations of the decision making that nuclear conflicts would require have been an essential tool for strategic thinkers seeking to understand the potential dynamics of such conflicts. This attempt to predict wartime interactions between nuclear combatants was a major stimulus to the development of formal games and game theory.42 It is an especially arresting example of a simulation designed to understand events too dangerous to analyze through actual experiments.43 Formal games are the most logically rigorous type of simulation. In this sense, they are the most elegant variety of simulation, and the one that appeals most to scholars with a mathematical bent. They are also the variety of simulation that is most decontextualized, that is, most removed from the sociopolitical context in which leaders and citizens normally operate (or would have to operate in, in case of a nuclear war).44 They are therefore divorced from reliable empirical information, in extreme cases because the hypothesized event has never occurred.45 The explanatory value of such games was discussed in chapter 11, where I spelled out my reservations about the intellectual limits on their scholarly value for empirical research. Their limitations as explanatory devices are well described by a sophisticated sociologist. Although elegant and intellectually appealing, he remarks, games and simulations all “share a breathtaking disattention to . . . the reference from model to reality.”46 Let me close this chapter with a caution about a mundane but important matter: note taking. As you plow through large bodies of evidence and non-­evidence, it will be tempting to abbreviate your notes on sources of information and their contents. After all, you have a huge amount of

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ground to cover, careful note taking requires a lot of time, and it can be quite boring. But unless you keep meticulous notes on what you’ve read and seen, you will be consigning yourself to a long stretch in purgatory, if not worse. After six months, many of your notes will be terra incognita. Unless you’ve faithfully recorded exactly what you’ve read and what it says, you’ll end up in a no-­man’s land. In that case, you’ll be fated to wander for weeks on end trying to find the particular bibliographic details and other information you could have written down so easily at the time. Of all the aggravations of scholarly research, this is one of the worst; and it is easy to avoid if you set your mind on it from the start.

CONCLUSION

As you plunge into this phase of your project, remember that mapping research resources and gathering evidence are not simply mechanical processes. To be a good researcher, you must be on the lookout and always exercise your imagination.47 Thomas Mann, author of the authoritative Oxford Guide to Library Research, began his career as a private detective, and thinking about yourself in similar terms isn’t a bad analogy. You are working out a puzzle, perhaps even solving a mystery. And who knows? In the end you may star in the movie version of the drama, or at least the theatrical version performed in an examination room.

XIV

 | Producing a Draft Academic training includes induction into a culture of scholarly individualism and intellectual mastery; to admit to struggle undermines our professorial identity. —­Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber The social science disciplines tend to view the self of the social scientific observer as a contaminant. The self—­the unique inner life of the observer—­is treated as something to be separated out, neutralized, minimized, standardized, and controlled. . . . We learn to become invisible authors. If we cannot be objective, at least we should not call too much attention to the fact of our subjectivity. —­Susan Krieger One of the most common misconceptions inexperienced writers have of writing is that it is simply a mechanical process of reproducing already-­formed ideas on paper. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In reality, writing is virtually inseparable from the process of developing our ideas. —­Eviatar Zerubavel Naming matters. It focuses agendas and attention. It identifies causation and strategies of action. It collects (or rebuffs) allies. —­Daniel T. Rodgers

At first glance, creating a dissertation may seem like writing an especially long academic paper. But producing a finished dissertation is much harder. That’s why most dissertation writers experience waves of doubt about whether they’re making progress and will ever finish. A good way of looking at these issues is to view the creation of your thesis as an extended process of gradually reducing your intellectual uncertainty about your topic. Adopting a few specific practices will help you keep moving forward. Above all, learn to write in miniature, and stay in touch with your friends.

C

reating a dissertation calls into play your deepest hopes and fears about yourself. To succeed, you must be aware of this reality and take steps, both intellectual and emotional, to deal with it. For starters, avoid drawing an analogy between the project and the term papers you’ve written in the past.1 Of course, you’ve had lots of practice in researching, draft-

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ing, and revising academic papers, and they usually turned out well. But that’s exactly the problem. Writing a dissertation is an entirely different experience, and assuming it’s the same is a recipe for unnecessary pain. It’s a fundamentally novel challenge that exemplifies the adage coined long ago by a great pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates: “Experience is a hard teacher, because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.”2

WHY IS DISSERTATION WRITING SO HARD?

Dissertation writing is harder than many other difficult activities because it combines large doses of intellectual uncertainty with equal amounts of emotional uncertainty. As a doctoral candidate, you are in the process of developing and refining your own academic style. But this process is much deeper than acquiring technique; it involves formulating settled views about what you regard as intellectually important and what you believe is intellectually defensible. These questions are especially difficult to work through, precisely because there are no definitive answers to them. In a real sense, you must answer these questions existentially, for yourself. Finding satisfactory personal answers requires a significant amount of time and sustained interactions with your scholarly contemporaries, as well as with the thinkers whose work you read. You must test your judgments against the judgments of other scholars, starting with your advisors and teachers. If the atmosphere in your department is conducive to probing discussions with faculty members, seize the opportunity for these conversations whenever you can. On the other hand, your relations with most faculty members will be based on a natural power asymmetry, so freewheeling brainstorming may be difficult, especially if your dissertation supervisor prefers a master-­apprentice relationship with doctoral students. Plunging into venturesome conversations sometimes seems risky, even when it demonstrates an open-­mindedness that most faculty members value. That’s where conversations with your fellow PhD candidates can be particularly useful. They’re in the same boat as you, more or less, and you can generally count on them to listen empathetically to your intellectual ideas (as well as your academic troubles.) Hence you should make a point of seeking out your classmates and fellow dissertation writers to talk on a regular basis. Unhurried, open-­ended conversations with intelligent listeners are a great way to sort out and sharpen your ideas. As a graduate student, I didn’t do this nearly often enough, especially when writing my dis-

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sertation, perhaps because my self-­doubt made it seem like a recipe for trouble. Looking back, I think it might have saved me a good deal of angst and futile effort.

THREE AVOIDABLE PITFALLS

Most dissertation writers must work their way around at least three potential pitfalls. The first is the danger of excessive optimism, that is, the sort of Panglossian optimism I felt coming out of my qualifying exams: “All I have left to do is the dissertation.” If you enter the dissertation stage with this outlook, it won’t last long, but recuperating from the gloom that’s likely to ensue will waste time and energy that you could better spend making workmanlike plans and digging into your initial research. A second pitfall is the danger of excessive ambition. This is where your self-­expectations come into play and can cause trouble. Bear in mind that your dissertation is the start of your scholarly career, not its culmination. The PhD will be the highest degree your ever earn, but your dissertation will almost certainly not be the best thing you ever write, even if you produce just a handful of published articles in the rest of your career. The dissertation is, first and foremost, a learning experience, and the expectation that you can master all the requisite scholarly skills in just one go is unrealistic.3 Senior professors sometimes praise certain colleagues as “mature” or “seasoned” scholars, and they use these words for a reason. Acquiring scholarly maturity or seasoning takes years beyond completion of the dissertation. In the early part of my academic career I didn’t grasp this reality, but now I do, and so should you. Understanding it will help you set realistic goals for yourself in the dissertation stage. A third potential pitfall is the danger of despair, which can insinuate its way into your thoughts during the middle stages when your project’s shape is still hazy and refuses to snap into focus. Writing a dissertation requires hard, continuous work, and there’s no guarantee of when or how the necessary flashes of insight will occur. Under the circumstances, the best approach is to treat the dissertation as a job—­albeit a demanding job—­ and to show up every day for work. Don’t wait for a muse to appear, and don’t reproach yourself during the days and weeks when the muse seems to have gone AWOL.4 Instead, keep chipping away at the many specific tasks you’ve laid out in your finished prospectus, and if your morale flags, remind yourself of how many of those tasks you’ve already completed.5

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FINDING YOUR INTELLECTUAL FOOTING

So much for the informal side of drafting the dissertation. What about the formal side? One big challenge you face is to situate your project intellectually—­in other words, to spell out how it relates to prior scholarship on the subject and explain what new information and insights you will add. As a college student I was oblivious to the importance of doing this, and even as a graduate student, I tended to misunderstand paper-writing as an exercise in creating knowledge and new ideas out of thin air. I didn’t grasp that the essence of scholarship is to survey the work of other scholars as a point of departure and then to modify or extend their work. Perhaps that misunderstanding came from my unconscious fear that other people had already said everything worth saying and from my belief that I could be “original” only by starting from scratch. Except for Einstein and a few others, scholarship doesn’t usually progress in that fashion, and alert minds interested in sociopolitical reality can always find new questions to explore, not least because societal realities keep changing. The formal way of situating your project is to provide a literature review at or near the start of the dissertation. The review should show that what you’re promising to do in the dissertation hasn’t been done before (this includes correcting prior scholarship that you regard as factually or analytically erroneous). Apart from your research in the library stacks, the most useful way to develop your literature review is to search systematically for pertinent literature reviews published by other researchers. As explained earlier, these are a special type of article in which an established scholar thoroughly surveys the most recent writings on a given subject, thereby saving you a great deal of legwork and reducing your risk of overlooking significant recent publications relevant to your project. Chapter 11 explained how to locate such articles using Web of Science. Even with help from review articles, your own literature review will probably have to go through several iterations. Using review articles is easiest when you know exactly what your intellectual objective is, and that objective can still be hazy as your write your first draft. This means you may have to revise your literature review once you’ve gotten a better fix on the dissertation as a whole. In any case, the revised review should be closely linked to the structure of your project. Note in this connection that our professional habit of talking about “the literature” in shorthand is misleading. A single, unified literature on any given research problem rarely exists. Instead there are hundreds or thousands of books and articles that

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may be related in one way or another to what you’re doing and that you must take into account. (Think back to the discussion of variable scholarly “traditions” in chapter 5.) In other words, putting together your literature review will involve some ingenuity and artifice. Ideally, the final version won’t be a simple catalog of items—­although comprehensiveness is essential—­but a bibliographic essay that traces themes, ideas, and omissions in the publications of other scholars working on topics related to your own.6 The dissertation’s literature review should pave the way for a chapter or chapters in which you frame your research problem and spell out your hypotheses about that problem. These topics were covered in chapter 9; the only thing to add is that you should link the discussion of research design fairly closely to the literature review. Then there’s the question of writing a separate “theory” chapter of the dissertation. “Theory,” as explained earlier, can mean several different things. Dissertation writers usually use the word to denote a set of general ideas that frame the project’s overall intellectual orientation and give it structure. Among other things, the framing of your project provides the basis for singling out a certain corpus of publications as the literature relevant to your investigation. Setting the bounds of “theory” in this sense is not an easy task. It calls for intellectual judgment and a sense of proportion that are hard to come by, especially early in the drafting stage. Looking back at my own dissertation, I see that the theory chapter was grossly inflated. Writing it was a way of crystallizing my thoughts about the relationships between politics and science and relations among large-­scale organizations such as corporations and government bureaucracies. The chapter, however, tried to present a definitive view of these complex issues, which was foolish, and which in any case I now believe to be impossible for epistemological reasons. As a result, it was two or three times longer than it should have been. Just as important, it was so wide-­ranging that it didn’t really help readers grasp the empirical findings from my research on the USSR. The chapter wasn’t entirely wasted in the long run, because it was a step toward sorting out these analytical issues for myself. But it was too big and too elaborate. When I turned the dissertation into a book, my extended foray into theory became four printed pages in the book’s first chapter. This story illustrates a problem concerning degrees of comprehensiveness. A degrees-­of-­comprehensiveness problem sounds like the level-­of-­ analysis issue discussed in earlier chapters, but the two aren’t the same.7 In drafting the theoretical chapter, I was trying to develop a general theory of

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the role of markets in the evolution of various forms of business organization and government administration. But a general theory of this kind wasn’t necessary for the dissertation, and my effort to create one actually detracted from the thesis. Flagging the main analytical issues in the chapter would have been enough; trying to provide a definitive theory that included other cases besides the one I was studying was too ambitious. It was also asking a lot from the members of my defense committee (who no doubt skimmed the chapter very rapidly, if they read it at all).

CHARTING YOUR COURSE: BRAINSTORMING, WRITING, AND WRITER’S BLOCK

Dissertation writing is a struggle between creativity and rigor. This same tension characterizes all scholarly work, but it’s usually more painful for dissertation writers because they’re not used to dealing with it and haven’t yet settled on practical definitions of creativity and rigor. When writing a first draft, it’s especially hard to keep the two things straight and to strike a balance between them.8* Schematically speaking, first you’re supposed to generate lots of innovative ideas, then you’re supposed to refine them until only the valid ones remain. But drafting rarely follows this neat sequence; instead it keeps oscillating back and forth, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what stage you’re currently in, except possibly a state of confusion. When drafting your chapters, you must avoid letting your inner critic—­ whose talents you honed to a fine pitch when preparing for your doctoral exams—­paralyze your writing process and sap your momentum. Of course, you can’t completely separate drafting and editing your text; if you did, it would probably be utter gibberish. But try to draw a psychological line between drafting and editing, and cut yourself some slack while you’re in the drafting stage (at least for each chapter). Just keep writing, courtesy of modern word processing. You can go back later after a good night’s sleep (or maybe after a week of researching other topics) and decide what needs to be changed or cut. Thinking about the relationship between writing and rewriting reminds me of a fine arts course in painting that I took in college. At the start of the course, I had a clever idea: to paint a still life with a bottle directly in front of an open door whose sunlight was refracted through the glass. It was a good idea, but I had a lot of trouble turning it into a decent painting. The biggest obstacle wasn’t my lack of technical skill—­although that certainly was a problem—­but my inability to paint freely. Once I got a small section

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of the canvas the way I wanted it, I was afraid to touch it again for fear it might disappear forever. As a result, the finished canvas had a paint-­by-­ numbers look. In contrast, the experienced art majors around me had no trouble repainting large sections of their canvases, or even the entire canvas. This taste of the studio was instructive, giving me a quick push away from the creative arts toward social science. But several decades had to pass before I could grasp the relevance of the experience to my life as a scholar. Thinking about drafting your dissertation as a series of overlapping efforts, with plenty of repainting, can help you avoid writer’s block. In this dialectical struggle, one generic problem keeps popping up: Managing the relationship between the general and the particular. In a sense, the whole dissertation project is designed to teach you how to manage this relationship, or, more precisely, these relationships. Your main task is to clarify the relationships between the evidence you find and the generalizations you make about your topic at each step of your analysis. This is, arguably, the central challenge of dissertation writing. Adopting a few writing techniques can help you meet that challenge. Manage the macrocosm through the microcosm. In advising dissertation writers, the writing tip I most frequently offer is this: manage the macrocosm through the microcosm. It is far easier to maneuver intellectually at the micro level, where rethinking and reordering your ideas involve dozens or hundreds of words, than at the macro level, where rewriting may require you to move around dozens or hundreds of pages. For this purpose, certain parts of your manuscript can serve as compasses that help you navigate large expanses of ocean that may otherwise seem trackless. Just as your prospectus is a compass—­albeit an imprecise one—­for structuring and developing the dissertation, focusing on key features of the dissertation text can help you gain control of the dissertation as a whole. The key elements to keep your eye on are the dissertation title, chapter titles, chapter introductions, chapter conclusions, section headings, and the topical sentences of individual paragraphs. Using these elements wisely can enable you to set your intellectual course, adjust it when necessary, and ultimately steer the whole massive ocean liner into its final port. Dissertation title. Pay close attention to what you name your dissertation, and what you rename it, as you probably will do. In the course of my dissertation saga, I must have spent weeks trying out one or another title for it, and then circling back later to try out yet another. This was more than a way of avoiding real work; I was trying to decide exactly what, at bottom, the dissertation was about. I was also trying to decide what to tell my faculty readers it was about. That’s why it was important to reach a firm deci-

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sion about what to call the enterprise. Ruminating about the title was a significant element of concept formation for the project.9 Chapter titles and headings. Chapter titles and headings within chapters are also important road signs. Choose your wording for these signs with the utmost care; they may be your best chance to communicate with your readers and keep them on track. I remember giving a long dissertation chapter to an interested friend who, having courageously slogged through it, begged me to break it into sections with clearly worded headings. He had waded through almost a hundred pages of typescript with virtually no signposts to tell him where the argument was going! And when I set about subdividing the chapter into sections, it became quite evident that I didn’t have a clear idea either, so the headings were necessary for me to find my own way intellectually. Chapter introductions. Apart from the introduction to the whole dissertation, the introductions of the individual chapters are probably the most precise compass-­setting devices at your disposal. When drafting a chapter presents you with a stubborn problem of disorganization or internal inconsistency, try to sort it out by revising the introduction to the chapter; once you’ve achieved a satisfactory revision of this miniature version, you can amend the full text much more efficiently than if you had tried to revise the whole chapter by plunging directly into the weeds. When writing this book, I rewrote the chapter summaries dozens of times. Near the end of the process, I also realized why one of my graduate school classmates, Gordon Schloming, always got better grades than I did, even though I studied just as hard as he did. In a nutshell, Gordon put imagination and key ideas first, whereas I put “the facts” first.10 Topical sentences. A similar technique can help you reconstruct individual paragraphs that are giving you trouble. Ordinarily each paragraph should begin with a clear, strong topical sentence. This topical sentence is a small compass that can help your reader and you trace the stages of your argument through the paragraph. First, review the sentence to be certain it says exactly what you want it to. Then excise any material from the paragraph that doesn’t mesh with the topical sentence. Or, alternatively, revise the topical sentence until it captures everything you want the paragraph to cover. If neither tactic works, consider whether you have tried to put too much material into a single paragraph. It’s usually best to put only one major idea into each paragraph. If a paragraph contains a second major idea, make that idea into the topical sentence of a separate paragraph; this will sharpen the writing and help your readers follow the steps of your argument.11

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Coordination. Once you’ve produced a full draft of a chapter, you can strengthen it by juxtaposing and coordinating the chapter’s conclusion with its introduction. This will help tighten up the chapter logically and stylistically. The introduction makes promises; the conclusion should show that you’ve kept them. End the conclusion with a strong sentence that is decisive and produces a sense of closure, that is, a sense that you really have completed the intellectual tasks outlined in the chapter introduction. Then make sure that the chapter text fits neatly between these bookends by reading consecutively just the topical sentences of all the paragraphs, without the intervening material. Taken together, those topical sentences should present a coherent argument in a logical series of steps. If they don’t, keep revising until they do. After completing the draft of a chapter, set the draft aside for a minimum of several days before reviewing it. When you go back to it, picture your most skeptical friends and try to identify the points at which they might misunderstand or resist your argument. Then focus on buttressing those points with detailed subarguments and evidence. Naturally, actual feedback from faculty advisors and honest friends will facilitate this process.12 The more time has passed since you wrote the draft, the easier it will be to catch these problems and solve them. So waiting for a few weeks to revise will make it easier. In expository writing, the most effective writing style—­or at least the most elegant one—­is invisible, but that quality can be achieved only through careful craftsmanship.13* Electronic aids. Almost as important as these intellectual devices are some strictly technical ones. Take full advantage of the capabilities of your word-­processing software. Using its tools will help you gain intellectual control and save you months of confusion and frustration.* When I wrote my dissertation, word processors didn’t exist, so every time I changed the sequence of paragraphs or sections in the draft I had to use scissors and a stapler—­literally—­to cut off the old footnotes and attach them to the new text. Software programs like Word contain many tools that let you avoid such vexations. For example, as you compose, you can insert marginal notes to yourself in “comments” bubbles that flag additional questions or tasks that you can follow up later without losing the writing momentum you’ve generated. That’s why it pays to learn about the relevant functions of your software—­not just some of them, but all of them. The companion website to this book contains more details. This discussion of drafting is a good place to say something about footnoting. Your draft must provide careful documentation of your intellectual path in the form of citations. Citations are a vital part of good scholarship, but they

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can also be abused. One abuse is failing to engage with the scholars cited in your footnotes, but pretending all the while that you are engaging with them. It’s important to swear off what Andrew Abbott calls “decorative footnotes,” superfluous citations added for psychological rather than intellectual effect. Indulging in this practice is a disservice to the scholars you cite, to your readers, and to yourself. For the sake of clear thought and clear communication, you should always know the precise part of the scholarly work you’re referring to, and you should transmit this information to your readers. It follows that you should not only cite article and book titles but should also provide page numbers. Using page numbers is an important form of self-­discipline that helps curb the temptation to create straw men. (For example, when I critiqued Barrington Moore’s and Francis Fukuyama’s writings in chapter 4, I went back to their books and located the relevant passages to make sure I wasn’t caricaturing them, something that’s especially important when discussing a work that’s made a big splash and been widely discussed.) For more than a decade, Andrew Moravcsik and like-­ minded colleagues have conducted a public campaign against sloppy, title-­ only citations, and I’m with them 100 percent.14 Another footnoting misdeed is closely related to the first: citing works you’ve never read but implying that you have. The advent of citation counts as a measure of professional standing has reinforced the natural scholarly tendency to create bloated footnotes. One shrewd observer of academic folkways states that “in some humanities fields scholars can be measured by the size of their footnotes—­the mark of professional display.”15 But this academic illness isn’t confined to the humanities; it’s flourishing in the social sciences as well. “In the marketplace of ideas,” says another observer, “the footnote is the unit of currency.” Due to this trend, “citation indexing becomes a basis for promotion and tenure, for grants and fellowships.”16 In other words, the trend has become deeply embedded in American higher educational institutions.17 Inflating your footnotes may be a logical consequence of current academic culture, but it is a disservice to serious readers, because it directs them to sources that may be redundant or irrelevant. It is a clever head fake designed to gain extra academic yardage, not a sign of scholarly respect or cooperation.

THE BIG PICTURE: HOW LONG SHOULD THE DISSERTATION BE?

If you’re like most PhD candidates, you wonder from time to time about how long your dissertation ought to be. In my experience, the size mat-

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ters only within very broad limits. A sample of sixty dissertations recently approved in several major political science programs averaged 320 pages in length and ranged from 135 to 570 pages.18 In my opinion, a reasonable target for the total length of a dissertation is around 225 pages. Naturally, expectations on this score will vary from one faculty member and department to another, so you should talk it over with your supervisor and committee members well before completing your first draft. My guess is that once you pass the 200-­page threshold, most of your readers will be satisfied. Beyond that point, the dissertation’s size will matter less than its quality. As long as you’ve scaled your thesis according to the concentric-­circles principle laid out in the chapter on writing your prospectus, that should be plenty. Looking back at my own dissertation, I see that it was too long by at least one hundred pages, and probably more. I was determined to write something important, and since I wasn’t sure I was actually doing that, the extra pages felt like an insurance policy. Moreover, I wanted to show my committee members how much work I had done: the tons of stupefyingly boring Communist Party speeches and editorials I’d slogged through, reading word by word for the rare nugget of insight they might occasionally yield. What’s more, the opacity of this evidence strengthened my tendency to overload the dissertation with detail. I didn’t yet appreciate Jacques Barzun’s observation that a researcher serves his readers by sparing them the monotony, fruitless effort, and dead ends that are unavoidable elements of original research. My dump-­truck approach to treating evidence was easier—­for me, not the readers—­because it required fewer decisions and less substantive shaping from me. In retrospect, the whole experience recalls the joke about an author who, when asked why his book was so long, replied, “because I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” It took additional professional experience to show me the wisdom of this joke. When I revised my thesis for publication, the MIT Press accepted it only on the condition that the text, which I thought was ready to send to the printer, should be cut drastically. In the end, I had to shorten the manuscript by about two hundred pages, pruning it line by line. This surgical marathon—­so grueling that it felt as if it should be recorded in the annals of medicine—­made the book much more readable and convincing. But I was still too close to my struggle with the dissertation to understand the need for the cuts until after I was forced to make them. Once I switched roles and became a faculty advisor to PhD candidates, the lights really went on. The biggest dissertation I read as a young defense committee member was more than seven hundred pages long (!) Plowing

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through it showed me the value of concise prose, and I began to amend my own writing habits accordingly. Incidentally, so did the author of that massive dissertation. After getting his doctorate, he made the thesis into an excellent book about 190 pages long, or some 285 pages in typescript.19 In other words, he slashed the dissertation’s size by about 60 percent before publishing it. The moral of these stories is that redrafting, revising, and editing are indispensable elements of serious scholarship. They cannot be avoided, and they usually take much more time and effort than dissertation writers expect. If your own available time and resources permit, you should do a substantial amount of this essential editorial work before you defend your dissertation. Later, if you decide to turn the dissertation into a book, some of the necessary editing will already be done, although further revision will undoubtedly be required. The more important point at this stage is that careful writing and editing will elicit a positive response from the members of your defense committee.

CULTIVATING PERSONAL TIES AND COPING PSYCHOLOGICALLY

Last but not least, pay close attention to developing and maintaining your intellectual and emotional ties with other people. For a dissertation writer, personal isolation is a constant danger. As scholars in ­the making, you and your fellow doctoral candidates face a serious intellectual risk of going in circles. It’s true that new scholarly knowledge is created by self-­directed individuals, but knowledge creation depends equally on social interactions among such individuals.20 This may be most obvious in formal terms; after all, every article you cite in your dissertation is a testimonial to the cooperative aspect of the academic enterprise. But it’s also true in informal terms. In addition to universities, professional associations, and other formal organizations, the academic world consists of vast constellations of personal networks that link scholars working on similar topics, through which they exchange provisional ideas, drafts, and preprints long before their articles or books are published.21 As a grad student, you need such networks just as much as established scholars do—­in fact, more than they do—­but most likely you haven’t yet developed them. Now is the time to begin, and the easiest place to start is with your fellow PhD candidates. Presenting your preliminary research plans or findings at a research-­in-­progress seminar with other doctoral students is a useful way to do this. Preparing for such a seminar can help

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structure your work and furnish useful feedback from an engaged and understanding audience. Perhaps even more useful are regularly scheduled meetings with a small group of fellow dissertation writers to discuss “snippets” of your drafts; not whole chapters, but a few pages that you think are especially good or that you’re having trouble with.22 A group like this depends on the members’ reciprocal willingness to help one another.23 Don’t stint on offering such help to other dissertation writers, not just because of fellow feeling but because the editorial perceptions you develop in the process will improve your own writing. Of course, to obtain help from the other participants, you must be willing to admit your uncertainty and confusion, but doing this becomes easier with practice. As you’ll gradually discover, it can even become a matter of quiet personal pride. For different reasons, you should also pay attention to your relations with your spouse or significant other. It’s commonly recognized that intense scholarly commitments can cause us to neglect the people we love. Even if your partner supports your dissertation efforts unreservedly, there will be serious tensions. Some tensions will come from your need to spend large blocks of time working alone. Others will probably come from the obscurity of your topic, as seen from your partner’s standpoint. This obscurity will be seem especially pronounced during the long stretches when you’re still trying to figure out the topic yourself. Being the partner of a dissertation writer is hard. I still remember excitedly telling my wife of my latest research discovery: some of Stalin’s lieutenants had said that his doctrine of the USSR’s encirclement by hostile capitalist powers was “final and complete.” Because nobody had previously said publicly that the doctrine wasn’t complete, the remark implied that someone was now making this argument in private, as a way of advocating a less confrontational foreign policy. Thanks to such leaden conversational fare, the first year of our marriage, during which I finished the dissertation, was very stressful. The moral of the story is not that you should talk to your partner more about your dissertation; it’s that you should regularly schedule time to do things that your partner enjoys and talk about things besides your dissertation. Your fellow dissertation writers can give you more useful feedback and support on the issues connected with the thesis. Your partner needs something from you besides discussions of your latest research findings, and you need it too. The psychological risks of personal isolation are just as large as the intellectual ones, and they can’t be remedied by communicating at arms’ length with other scholars through their articles and books. For most social ­science researchers, research is a solitary and sometimes lonely

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activity. Not for nothing is one guide for dissertation writers called How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation.24* The solitude is usually most pronounced in the dissertation stage, especially for doctoral candidates who don’t have other obligatory work activities (such as being a teaching assistant). Most likely, wrestling daily with the dissertation will generate unusual mental pressures on you. Living with prolonged uncertainty and discovering that our favorite ideas are wrong are both “unnatural” experiences that trigger stress.25 If you react in this way, you’re hardly abnormal. Indeed, substantial evidence suggests that PhD students suffer levels of stress that are uncommonly high. For a dissertation writer, the most precious commodity is the thoughtful attention of interested readers; unbroken solitude is the greatest enemy. About a dozen years ago, a study of PhD students at UC Berkeley found that almost half the respondents to a careful survey qualified as depressed, and one-­tenth of them had contemplated suicide.26 Dark emotions of this sort occur even among established academics. Although undoubtedly less frequent than for dissertation writers, these feelings are probably more common among proven scholars than is generally understood. I vividly remember talking with Robert Osgood, perhaps the leading scholar of American foreign policy in his generation, at the moment he stepped down from being dean of SAIS to resume research and teaching. For him, the switch was apparently not as simple as it seemed to a junior professor. Going back to research and writing, he said to me, would show “whether I still have a mind.” He made this remark with a slight smile, but it was more than a joke. At the time, I marveled inwardly that such an eminent figure could still harbor such self-­doubt. Since then I’ve known quite a few successful scholars who’ve gone through periods of severe depression, and I myself have experienced several such episodes, most often during periods of overwork and personal isolation. In the biographies of major scholars, this mental-­health dimension tends to be neglected in favor of a simplified image of steadily rising professional achievement. For example, some English-­language accounts of Max Weber’s life and thought say almost nothing about his mental health.27 Yet Weber suffered several years of debilitating depression that put him into mental institutions and forced him to stop teaching for a decade and half.28 In a real sense, his social theories evolved in tandem with his internal struggles over self-­discipline and the expression of his deepest emotions.29 Similarly, John Stuart Mill, arguably the principal forerunner of Anglo-­ American social science, suffered a major breakdown during his early twenties. Not coincidentally, this crisis, like Weber’s decades later, was

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closely connected to his relations with his overbearing father. In the twentieth century, well-­known scholars such as Hans Morgenthau, an American pioneer in the development of International Relations and a mentor of Robert Osgood, have wrestled with demons of this kind, although usually with less dramatic consequences. It’s not difficult to imagine why such details aren’t ordinarily included in scholarly CVs or biographies. Among academics there is a persisting reluctance to discuss emotional health for fear of seeming less than completely competent. This reluctance is further compounded by the prevailing “memory practices” of our profession—specifically, the custom of writing the history of political science as the history of abstract ideas rather than the history of major thinkers. Through the process of abstraction, this analytical scrubbing effectively separates important ideas from their social context, including the psychological circumstances of the thinkers who created them.30 As a species, we humans are social beings—­that’s one reason that prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners really is torture—­and as academics, we ignore this social dimension at our peril.31 Maintaining regular ties with other people should be one part of your personal recipe for survival. Turning to professional counseling for help in times of crisis should be another.

XV

 | Through the Jungle Guiding Your Readers (and Yourself) Most academics . . . love what they do and undertake their work with a strong sense of personal engagement. Many actively desire to make a difference in the world, whether by finding a cure for a deadly disease, by enlarging our understanding of natural and cultural phenomena, or by changing the way people think. Yet these same researchers have typically been trained, either implicitly or explicitly, to strip all emotion from their academic writing. What would happen if they allowed even a modicum of the passion they feel to color their prose? —­Helen Sword First drafts are for learning what your [book] is about. . . . Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing. —­Bernard Malamud The true wellspring of our civilization isn’t writing; it is editing. —­Nathan Heller In scholarship, agnosticism is defensible; vagueness is not. —­Anonymous

Unless you’re very rare, you still have a lot to learn about writing well. Effective writing is a complex bundle of aptitudes that must be honed continuously through diligent practice. Learning to do it resembles becoming a master carpenter or a top-­ flight soccer player. In reworking your draft, you should seek input from a few thoughtful readers who can help you see its strengths and weaknesses accurately. The aim in revising is to imagine your audience clearly, anticipate their questions, and provide persuasive answers. To achieve these goals, you must become your own stern editor.

T

he previous chapter focused on the problems you’re most likely to confront in producing the first draft of your dissertation. This one focuses on the challenges you’ll encounter when you set about hammering the draft into a revised text with greater intelligibility and internal coherence.

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This is the stage at which you should seek increased professorial feedback on what you’ve written, especially as you prepare to defend the dissertation before a committee of faculty examiners. The central objective of this final revision should be to address the preliminary comments of your readers and to anticipate potential faculty critiques during the defense.

GETTING AND USING FEEDBACK

With your full draft in hand, you’ll be ready to seek new feedback from readers and make the final round of pre-­defense revisions. Obtaining feedback is an invaluable way to improve your research and writing. In the closing dissertation stage, it can seem risky rather than helpful, but it’s an indispensable way to prepare for your defense. When writing this book, I got a lot of feedback that helped me improve the text by tailoring it to the personal experiences of PhD candidates and professors. Although spontaneous give-­and-­take provides a stimulating type of feedback, at this stage you should aim to make your interactions with readers more formal. When I sent draft chapters of this book to other people, they usually responded via e-­mail, and I kept careful records of our exchanges, including which chapters I’d sent to whom. I made a practice of sending prompt point-­by-­point responses as soon as I received each reader’s comments, even when my reaction to certain suggestions amounted to no more than “I’ll have to think about that.” This routine forced me to weigh each comment and to formulate a response that sometimes could be exported directly into a revised paragraph in the manuscript. Gathered in one place and sorted by reader, these e-­mail exchanges became a valuable stock of ideas for the final round of revisions. Some readers may prefer to give you only oral comments because they’re too busy to respond in writing. Oral transmission, of course, increases the chances of miscommunication or loss of key ideas. To avoid this possibility, follow up such conversations by sending these readers an e-­mail that paraphrases their oral comments and asks whether you understood those comments correctly. Don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. Your professors and fellow PhD candidates are busy people who sometimes give imprecise responses, and occasionally even careless ones. Written follow-­up on oral comments is especially important when dealing with your supervisor or other members of your dissertation committee. Miscommunication with them can be costly. Critiques from readers aren’t always easy to accept gracefully. It’s dif-

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ficult not to be thin-­skinned when you’ve already racked your brain to make your draft incisive and convincing. But remember that the purpose of the exercise is to make the dissertation better, and that in the end you, not your preliminary readers, are the one who will get credit for the improvements. A good way to deal with feedback, especially when it’s sharply critical, is to approach it in the spirit of the “believing game.”1 Assume for the moment that the criticism has merit; ask your reader to elaborate and spell out its implications, and keep asking questions until the matter has been thoroughly aired. Following this tactic will help you be sure that you fully understand the criticism. It will also reduce the psychological temptation either to reject the criticism outright or to confess abjectly to some oversight or error that your text didn’t really contain. Playing the believing game is a relatively safe way to challenge a line of criticism that you think is wide of the mark, and it is a precision tool for sharpening the clarity of your written exposition. Almost inevitably, different readers will give you some contradictory suggestions, and you will have to decide which ones to accept. Don’t think you must make every change that your readers propose, but do try to address any major reservations that they voice. Following this rule of thumb becomes trickier, of course, if the contradictory suggestions come from different members of your defense committee. That situation must be handled delicately. You don’t want to get caught in an intellectual cross fire between committee members who disagree with each other, either about your dissertation or about social ­science research in general.2 If you get conflicting signals from the members of your committee, avoid becoming involved in separate ping-­pong matches with them. Instead, send a group e-­mail to the members who’ve given you contradictory suggestions, tactfully point out the divergences among their responses, and ask for further guidance. Not least, ask the members, when they respond to your e-­mail, to hit “reply all.” This should help them recognize that they’re operating on different wavelengths, and it should help you find some middle ground that everyone can live with. In my experience, though, awkward situations like this are not common. Usually only your supervisor and one other faculty member will read the whole dissertation before authorizing the scheduling of your defense. The other members of the committee will read the whole text only when you’ve received this go-­ahead. In any case, the main goal when you revise should be to make the dissertation as solid and convincing as possible in the light of all the feedback you’ve received.

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SHOW YOUR READERS WHAT YOU’RE DOING

Your job in the dissertation is to get your readers on track and keep them there. To do that, it’s important to spell out the sequence of intellectual steps each part of the dissertation will follow. More than an average reader, the members of your defense committee must be convinced that you know what you’re doing, which, of course, is possible only if you really do know. Deciding how fully to spell out the intellectual itinerary is difficult. You must be sure of it yourself, and it isn’t always clear as you write the first draft; but by the time you make the final round of pre-­defense revisions the path should be clearly marked. In addition, because you haven’t had much experience with scholarly audiences, gauging how much travel commentary to provide is difficult. In writing a book, this balance can be particularly hard to strike because your readers may be a mixture of experts and laypeople. In a dissertation it’s easier, because all your readers will be experts. In my dissertation, I probably erred by giving readers too many road maps and driving instructions. At the start and end of each chapter I explained laboriously what I’d just done and what I was going to do next. These running commentaries, I should add, were inserted as much for my own sake as for the sake of my examiners. Much later, when I turned the dissertation into a book, the MIT Press editor kept urging me (or perhaps begging me!) to make the chapter introductions and conclusions lean and compact. He wanted fewer elaborate windups, fewer recapitulations of what I’d just done, and more concise explanations of what I was going to do next. To put the matter differently, he wanted me to develop a better sense of the way an intelligent reader perceived the text, and to adjust the rhythm of my writing accordingly.

REVISING TO ENGAGE AND PERSUADE YOUR AUDIENCE

This brings us to the issue of how well you write. If you’re as blinkered as I was when churning out my draft, you may believe that worrying about how you write is a secondary matter, or perhaps even a sign of frivolousness. Having plowed through many dissertations in the years since I defended my own, I can testify that the quality of your writing matters. After all, your main objective is to persuade the members of your defense committee to pass the dissertation. You don’t want them to become frustrated by the disorganization or awkward style of a jumbled draft. You want them to trust you, and trust is strengthened by lucid writing.

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Why? Reading is a conscious act, but not only a conscious act. Remember that any reader’s response to a text is determined partly by unconscious cues, including stylistic ones. If your dissertation is smoothly written, it will predispose your committee members to accept the substance of your analysis, although it won’t guarantee this result. Successful dissertations almost always still have rough edges, but workmanlike revision of the draft will keep the roughness of yours within reasonable bounds. Beyond eliciting your readers’ trust, skillful writing will stimulate them to pay close attention to the arguments you’re trying to get across. In modern societies with high media saturation, attention from an audience is a scarce commodity, not just in politics, culture, and advertising, but also in the world of scholarship.3 There’s a reason why professional journals are ranked on the basis of “impact factors” and why ambitious scholars try to get their work published in high-­impact journals: they want to attract readers.4 Your committee members are being deluged continuously with books and articles they must read to stay current in their fields and sustain their own research, so it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will read your dissertation carefully.5 It’s in your interest to convince them that reading the thesis will be a worthwhile undertaking, not an aggravating distraction from more important things they’d rather be doing. That’s where effective rhetoric comes in. Most social scientists underestimate the role of rhetoric, partly because of the word’s pejorative connotation, but it has a vital place in scholarship. Used properly, it can help engage your readers and hold their attention.6* To defend the dissertation successfully, you must first persuade your readers that the work you’re presenting is necessary and that it’s new. That’s why the dissertation’s introduction should make a compelling case for the importance of the subject. The key word here is “compelling.” The rationale shouldn’t be overblown—­it shouldn’t be rhetorical in the pejorative sense—­but it should be forceful and be calculated to convince other scholars that your work matters. When I defended my dissertation, it never occurred to me to ask whether the members of my defense committee wanted to read it. I was so busy worrying about arming myself against imagined onslaughts from the examiners that this basic question escaped my ken. You should be wiser than I was. It’s conceivable that your departmental chairperson roped one or two members of your committee into the defense against their wishes, so you should take steps to persuade them that reading the dissertation will be worth the effort. No academic boss has ever forced me to read a dissertation I wasn’t at least mildly interested in, but the level of interest I’ve felt

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after beginning to read dissertations has still been strongly affected by the quality of the writing. Showing your scholarly passion through careful use of rhetoric will help persuade your readers to pay attention. A literature review that grapples rigorously with the work of other scholars will win their respect. Salting your chapters with literary devices designed to hold their interest will help as well. One useful device is to reiterate, briefly, the dissertation’s general rationale and then pin it specifically to each major step in the development of your argument. An examiner’s natural response will be to say, “OK, this person is on top of the subject, and I know what’s coming next.” Another helpful device is to give your reader a mental nudge by asking a so-­called rhetorical question.7 Here’s an example: Don’t you find it more engaging to be asked what you think than to be told what you should think? If the issue is important enough, you can follow up your question by proposing some alternative answers to it. This tactic prompts readers to consider which alternative to choose; it also shows them that you’ve worked through the various possibilities.

MODES OF PRESENTATION: FINDING THE RIGHT MIX

Talking about rhetoric brings us to the related issue of modes of presentation. Major pieces of scholarly writing usually combine two distinct modes of presentation: narration and thematic exposition.8* You may have noticed, for example, that on the broadest level, some of this book’s chapters are structured along topical lines—­in part II, especially—­and some chapters are structured along narrative lines, especially in part III. When you first looked at the table of contents, the cookbook steps for making a dissertation in chapters 13 through 16 may have been what first caught your eye, for obvious reasons. But this guide, like most books, uses different modes of presentation at different structural levels, and the presentation often shifts back and forth from one mode to the other. This chapter, for example, is one of four chapters that narrate the journey from your prospectus to a successful dissertation defense, but the chapter’s internal organization is thematic. Narration may be the most common analytical approach for scholars who are sensitive to the substantive significance of the passage of time. The broad notion of narration has become far more common in American culture during the past two decades or so, and there has been a similar trend in the social sciences.9 The proliferation of popular references to this or that

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“narrative” also shows—­or should show—­that narrative is not a single thing. Even if we confine our discussion to the nonfiction realm of historical narrative, narratives come in many shapes and sizes. Whenever you resort to a narrative form of presentation, you must always ask yourself, “What am I narrating? What are the contextual boundaries of my story, topically, spatially, and chronologically?”10 If you can’t answer this question with some confidence, you are at risk of slipping into a “default narrative.” This is a fancy phrase for a first-­this-­then-­that chronology that lacks analytical focus and hides unexamined explanatory assumptions.11 Default narrative is a sure recipe for confusion, for both you and your readers. Thinking about sophisticated narration brings us to the topic of tacit explanation. The sequencing of subjects in a text, and the allocation of textual space among subjects, implicitly send readers strong signals about how you want them to understand your exposition. If I present a narrative of three events (A, B, and C) in which C is the first event I discuss, readers will usually assume that C came before A and B, unless I stipulate that the real sequence of events was different. Hence narrative sequencing is an important issue, and not only for the enlightenment of your readers. Careless organization of a narrative account can lead you to make intuitive misjudgments about possible causal paths. That’s why the careful handling of chronology, discussed in an earlier chapter, is so important. Like the sequencing of topics, the allocation of textual space among topics sends readers implicit signals about what matters and what doesn’t. To take an example from US history, a book about the Civil War that dwells on legal questions of federalism and mentions slavery only in passing implicitly conveys an explanation of the war at odds with an account that traces sectional conflicts over slavery back to the deadlock among the founding fathers during the framing of the Constitution.12 This guide presents a different kind of example. Compared with many other guides to research and writing, it allocates a great deal of space to subjects that lack obvious connections to dissertation writing as it is usually understood. This allocation of space is designed to emphasize that you must fathom certain broad principles of analytical thought and personal psychology to create a first-­rate dissertation. When you write your dissertation—­and especially when you revise it—­ you are looking for the right mix among different modes of exposition (even if you don’t always recognize that this is what you’re doing).13 Like works of literature and music, scholarly studies have beginnings and endings.14 The challenge of scholarly analysis is to link substantive beginnings and endings in an intellectually satisfying way by finding an effective com-

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bination of narrative and topical approaches at all stages of the work. For you, the trick is to establish the right rhythm, the right balance among modes of presentation, using the right amount of variation and elaboration, to move convincingly from the dissertation’s introduction to its conclusion. Discovering an effective mix takes time and experimentation, because your personal expository “formula”—­when you finally work it out—­will become your own distinctive style of thinking as well as writing.

EDITING FOR INTERNAL CONSISTENCY AND CLARITY

Whatever formula you devise, your dissertation should be clear and consistent. Complete internal consistency—­or at least a high level of internal consistency—­is a hallmark of top-­flight scholarship, as is clarity. When you edit and revise your draft, you can best pursue these goals by focusing on key words and phrases. Naturally, this holds for titles and headings, as explained in the previous chapter. But it also holds for the text as a whole. Not all sentences are created equal, even when they all abide by the laws of grammar. Some are substantively more important than others. An apt illustration comes from the foreign assessments prepared by US intelligence agencies; typically, they are headlined by a short list of “key judgments” summarizing the arguments in the document. Like these government documents, your dissertation contains a handful of sentences and paragraphs that embody your fundamental judgments about your subject. Some of them may be clearly flagged in your dissertation draft, but others probably lie buried innocuously in the middle of paragraphs or at the ends of compound sentences. The trick is to find them, bring them into the light, and hone them until they say exactly what you want. Learning how to identify those key paragraphs and sentences is the ticket to achieving internal consistency and clarity throughout the dissertation. Following the compass rules outlined in the previous chapter will help you do this. Juxtaposing chapter introductions, conclusions, and the topical sentences of individual paragraphs will make your exposition more rigorous. Another useful technique is to do systematic electronic word searches for your key concepts and phrases across all your draft chapters, courtesy of your word-­processing software. Through these searches, you can ensure that you’ve defined and applied essential terms uniformly and that no errant definitions or elaborations have crept in by accident.15 You

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can also make certain that none of the essential concepts you’ve introduced in the first part of the dissertation inadvertently disappears in later parts (such as the conclusion.)16 Finally, methodical rereading of each chapter—­ most effective after considerable time has elapsed—­will help you pick out especially important judgments that may not have been captured by these other methods. You can reinforce this approach with certain technical tricks using hyperlinks in your word-­processing program. One is to set up a master document table of contents in which each chapter title connects with the chapter itself (and vice versa). This will enable you to move effortlessly from one chapter to another and will make revising much easier. I learned that trick while writing this book.

COMING ACROSS CLEARLY

This chapter’s central theme has been the importance of engaging your readers in your research and persuading them that your conclusions about it are true. If you finished your first draft feeling as I did when completing mine, writing style may be the last thing on your mind. But style does matter. Self-­respect aside, you have a vested interest in handing the committee members a well-­written text. And that won’t happen automatically just because you’ve done a voluminous amount of meticulous research. Quite the contrary; exhaustive research can easily become the enemy of lucid writing, as the MIT editor taught me. In a phrase: “Easy reading means hard writing.” In this enterprise, the lowly mechanics of writing matter a great deal. Precise diction (word choice) and correct grammar are the royal road to intellectual clarity; and poor diction and bad grammar will undercut your argument in the eyes of your readers even if you know your subject inside out.17* What’s more, slipshod writing will have this effect on readers even if they are unaware of exactly why they doubt the validity of your analysis. Perhaps even worse, bad diction and grammar can shunt your own thinking onto paths toward illogical conclusions and intellectual dead ends. So can excessive dependence on passive verbs; using active verbs facilitates sharp analysis because it requires that you specify the agent behind an action. Your readers will feel the difference. You can help your committee members, and yourself, by observing a few other rules of composition.18* Your text should always distinguish

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clearly between concepts and their empirical referents—­for example, between the idea of liberalism and liberalism as a political movement. Failure to observe this rule frequently leads to mistaken attributions of causality because it confuses levels of analysis. If you’re writing about liberalism, of course, one vital conceptual issue is whether you and the actors in your story understand the term in the same fashion. But a second, equally vital issue is which actors you’re talking about. Did the word “liberalism” appear in an unpublished letter from an obscure political philosopher, or was it emblazoned on the banners of a mass of demonstrators marching toward the national capital? These two types of referents and separate levels of analysis have very different analytical implications. In similar fashion, you should always decide where you stand in relation to any source and should signal your stance to the reader. This holds whether the source is a pivotal block quotation or merely a passing citation. Vagueness about your attitude toward any source is a step toward losing your way intellectually, and clarifying your stance can usually be done with only one or two cue words (if you know what your stance is). For instance, the phrase “source A demonstrates” and the phrase “source A states” subtly convey different messages about your attitude toward source A. As you revise your draft, keep your eyes peeled for ambiguous referents and imprecise treatment of sources, and weed them out scrupulously. Once you’ve made these compositional practices habitual, not only will your writing become clearer; your thinking will too. Finally, a word about the physical mechanics of revising. That process can be extremely vexing, but here, too, your software can provide substantial help. Earlier I mentioned the utility of creating of a table of contents in the form of a word-­processing master document with hyperlinks that allow you to move smoothly from one draft chapter to another. When you begin your final round of revisions, add a new hyperlink to the table of contents that connects to a single list of editing tasks. Under each chapter title in this list you can itemize all the tasks that must be done to revise the corresponding chapter. Having these tasks itemized for every chapter in one accessible place makes coordinating the revision of a multichapter draft much easier. To facilitate moving back and forth, each chapter title in the edits list can be linked to the corresponding chapter. It also helps to include a link back to the edits list in the footers of your draft chapters. That’s the procedure I followed when revising the text of this book. It allowed me to see at a glance what remained to be done, and it reduced the chances of overlooking specific changes I’d intended to make.

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Applied conscientiously, these devices will make your revised dissertation more appealing to your audience and easier to understand. Incorporating these techniques into your intellectual armory is an important part of learning how to do top-­flight research. And using them will produce a handsome payoff by sweetening your examiners’ expectations well before you walk into your dissertation defense.

XVI

 | Getting to Go Defending and Passing The road to the general, to the revelatory simplicities of science, lies through a concern with the particular, the circumstantial, the concrete. . . . That is to say, the road lies, like any genuine Quest, through a terrifying complexity. —­Clifford Geertz Science is a conversation between rigor and imagination. What one proposes, the other evaluates. —­Andrew Abbott

The idea of defending your dissertation may seem frightening, but the experience needn’t be. To get a feel for what to expect, sit in on the defenses of some fellow doctoral candidates. Approach your own defense as an opportunity to exchange scholarly opinions, not a trial. Prepare an opening statement that lists the dissertation’s main points, and practice delivering it several times beforehand. Expect to get broad questions about the significance of the thesis as well as narrower ones about its methods and evidence. In the discussion, don’t hesitate to disagree respectfully with an examiner who questions your analysis; by the same token, don’t be afraid to acknowledge that particularly cogent criticisms have merit.

M

ost likely your department will require you to present the dissertation to a committee of examiners and answer their questions satisfactorily (a few departments omit this stage, and simply require readers to sign off individually on the thesis.) Occasionally the formal defense turns out to be a fraught experience. One of my Columbia University classmates finished answering the examiners’ questions and then sat outside the seminar room for at least half an hour while they argued loudly with one another before deciding to pass him! But this was an extreme case; most defenses are far less trying. Generally, your advisor won’t agree to schedule the defense unless your dissertation is in reasonably good shape. This is because your advisor doesn’t want you to suffer unnecessarily, and also because he or she will look bad if you fail the defense.

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GETTING TO GO—DEFENDING AND PASSING 199

FIGURING OUT WHAT TO EXPECT

Although you’ll experience some unavoidable stress in the weeks before your defense, it can be a stimulating and satisfying experience. Before defending my thesis, I nervously bombarded my supervisor with phone calls asking what to expect, but despite this attack of nerves I did pass. My wife’s experience defending her dissertation was similar but on balance more positive. On the eve of the defense, she anxiously reviewed the hundreds of details the examiners might question her about; but when she emerged from the defense, she exclaimed, “That was fun!” It was fun because she had written a good dissertation and because the defense turned out to be a lively exchange of opinion among equals, not a torture session. Indeed, she knew far more about the specifics of her subject than any of her examiners did.1 But she didn’t recognize this fact until the defense was under way. While dissertation defenses in most social ­science disciplines follow a fairly standard format, it’s a good idea to attend some in your department ahead of your own to get a firsthand sense of how they work. Being an observer will let you notice things you won’t have time to pick up when you’re in the hot seat yourself, and you can make mental notes about things to do and not to do at your own defense. Pay special attention to how the dissertation author handles the initial presentation and the ensuing discussion. Note, too, the kind of questions the examiners ask, especially if any of them are slated to participate in your own defense. Your thesis defense will be more than an examination in the conventional sense; it will also be an auspicious occasion for the serious exchange of ideas. You’ve already set the scene for that exchange by working diligently on the dissertation and meeting your supervisor’s basic expectations about what it should contain. For the examiners, the defense is an opportunity to think about the important intellectual issues you’ve raised and to discuss those issues not only with you but, secondarily, with the other examiners. It also affords them a chance to augment their knowledge and reflect on their own settled views. In other words, if you’ve written a solid dissertation, your committee members stand to benefit from taking part in the defense. When I served as an examiner, that was often my experience. Being a committee member gave me a chance to think about interesting issues that weren’t covered directly in my own research, and sometimes they caused me to see some aspect of my research in a different light. This scholarly dynamic usually made the defenses lively affairs. They were, in a real

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sense, intellectually broadening for me, even when I thought the dissertation writer had neglected some important facet of the subject.

MAKING YOUR OPENING STATEMENT

Defenses usually begin with a statement by the candidate about the dissertation’s scholarly significance and key findings. This statement is your opportunity to set the tone for the proceedings. Outline it at least a week in advance, and practice delivering it aloud several times. Most likely you will feel nervous on the day of the defense, so you shouldn’t count on delivering a coherent statement extemporaneously. Naturally, you will know the details of your subject much more intimately than any of the examiners, but that could actually be a problem; extensive knowledge can impede delivering an effective statement within the allotted time. Precisely because you’ve unearthed so much information, you must nail down the statement’s main points beforehand; otherwise you are likely to ramble and may founder. Don’t think that you must recapitulate the contents of the thesis; your examiners will have read it. Your statement should last no longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. Its purpose is to get the ball rolling.

HANDLING QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

The tone of your oral remarks in the defense will affect how the examiners perceive them. In your statement and the discussion that follows, aim to strike a collegial tone. That is, present your ideas, consider your examiners’ views, and thoughtfully express your agreement or disagreement with them. After living for years in intellectual purgatory, you may not find it easy to be upbeat, but that’s the tone you should strive for. Remember, the defense is not an examination in the usual sense. It’s an exchange of ideas meant to verify your standing as an independent researcher. And you’re almost free! Here are a few specific suggestions to help smooth your path. First, don’t read your initial statement, especially from your laptop, and if you use your laptop at all, make sure to maintain eye contact with your audience. As anyone who watches police procedurals knows, a suspect who avoids eye contact is often guilty, which isn’t the impression you want to convey during the defense. Avoidance of eye contact is also an open invitation for your listeners to think about fleeting ideas that have nothing to

GETTING TO GO—DEFENDING AND PASSING 201

do with what you’re saying. This sort of disconnect increases the risk that miscommunication will lead them to make unfounded criticisms of your findings. In interacting with the examiners, try to be methodical when you answer their questions. If an examiner makes a long comment, jot down a few notes to help ensure you understand the comment and can match your response to what’s been said. If you’re still not sure about what the comment means after the examiner stops, don’t be afraid to ask for clarification using the “believing game” device discussed in an earlier chapter. The device is effective because it shows that you respect the questioner and that you’re considering the comment carefully. It helps you think on your feet and, at a minimum, it lets you gain some time without seeming to be frozen in the oncoming headlights. Remember that you know more about your subject than any member of the committee does, or at least more than most of them know. This is a distinct tactical advantage for you, so long as you don’t overplay your hand. If an examiner presses you on a point you’ve already addressed in the thesis, don’t accuse the examiner of careless reading (or worse!) Simply say that you tried to deal with the issue in the dissertation, repeat the relevant part of your analysis, and ask the examiner whether you’ve answered the question adequately. In your presentation and comments, it’s a good idea to look forward as well as backward, rhetorically speaking. In your dissertation and your presentation, you’ll already have said a good deal about past scholarship and what you’ve contributed that’s new. In your presentation and comments, recognize that your work may be the latest word, but not the final one. Your research will raise further questions, and it’s legitimate to say that some of those questions require further research, either by you or by the scholars who come after you. Spelling this out is a way of connecting yourself with the collaborative tradition of scholarship. It’s also a way of showing your examiners that getting past the exam isn’t the only thing on your mind. Rhetorically, it links you with them in a common endeavor. In the discussion following your opening statement, don’t rush. Take your time in answering probing questions. Don’t be afraid to allow a few moments of silence before you respond to critical remarks. Graduate students and young professors tend to fear silence in conversations, but often silence is required for creative thought to occur. This is, of course, much easier said than done, especially in an exam. It took me about two decades of teaching to really learn how to do this, long after my doctoral exams were past. But it’s worth remembering as something to strive for.

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Finally, show some flexibility; don’t be stubborn or rigid. I’ve been part of only a handful of defenses which decided to require that the writer make major revisions. These were the cases in which the dissertation writers tended to be the most adamant in defending the correctness of their ideas all the way down the line, and therefore seemed unresponsive to the comments from the examiners.2

REVISING IF NECESSARY

Departmental procedures about rating candidates and revising dissertations vary. At SAIS, PhD candidates can earn a mark of pass with distinction, pass (often with minor corrections), conditional pass (requiring formal approval of the revised text), or fail. Most of the committees I’ve been part of have awarded the dissertation a straight pass. In a few cases it has been awarded a pass with distinction, and a few others a conditional pass. None of the committees I’ve been on has failed the dissertation outright. If the committee decides that you must make major revisions before the dissertation can be accepted, be sure to clarify what the committee wants.3 Under these conditions, the dissertation writer sometimes receives a memorandum that lays out what’s needed, but committee members may not agree completely on how many changes are required, or on exactly what they should be. If your supervisor or committee chair doesn’t give you a written explanation of the changes the committee requires, make a list of changes yourself and ask the relevant committee members to sign off on it. If you are required to make major revisions, don’t be downcast. Had the defense been a genuine catastrophe, you wouldn’t have been given a chance to make revisions. You’ll survive. And don’t forget how much you learned in the process of researching and writing the dissertation—­more, probably, than you recognize at this point. I recall that one of my faculty colleagues at SAIS had a son who struggled in medical school and finished very near the bottom of his class. “Do you know,” my colleague asked dramatically, “what they call someone who finishes last in his medical school class? . . . Doctor!” In the end, you, too, will almost certainly finish your degree successfully as a certified scholar. You won’t be prepared to perform surgery, but that is probably just as well, and you’ll have achieved your own educational objective nonetheless. You will also have completed a remarkable feat.

XVII

 | Your Choices and Your Futures

The implicit model for scientific progress is not solving a puzzle once and for all, but the evolving emergence of tolerable solutions from which better problems will become available for future work. —­Gerald Holton Systematic knowledge often fails, but it fails less often than common sense or conventional wisdom. —­Charles Tilly The critical challenge for political science . . . is not how to make political science matter—­it does, profoundly—­but how to assist political scientists to develop sophistication about our knowledge production, heightened awareness of ideological bias, normative presuppositions, and the political consequences of own research. —­Mary Hawkesworth It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy . . . knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists. —­Ronald Coase

The effort to complete your dissertation is a deeply personal pursuit that may sometimes seem like a struggle to the death. It vividly exemplifies the interplay between personal effort and contingent circumstance in the quest for excellence. Naturally, finishing the thesis and finding a job must be your top concerns. But your quest also has a larger social meaning. You are part of humankind’s age-­old struggle to understand the complexities of the human condition and shape the future of human life. That is the ultimate importance of modern scholarship. Whatever personal hardships your quest imposes, it is a worthy undertaking for a noble end.

W

hat is the right way to end a book like this? Ideally you will finish the book around the time you begin your career as a PhD-­certified social scientist. In any case, you probably recall the cautionary note sounded in the introduction. Your scholarly path will pose many difficult professional

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choices, and there are no neat formulas for deciding among the tradeoffs those choices entail. After all, it is your career, in pursuit of your own goals, in a new academic era quite different from the one in which I came of age. For up-­do-­date advice about your choices and the options you will face, you should turn to sources with fresher knowledge than mine. The companion website to this guide lists a few books and articles that are worth examining as you contemplate the next steps in your professional life. Nevertheless, I will venture a couple of general observations that may be useful as you chart your course. One is that you should strive to view the academic world from a perspective that makes you both realistic and resilient. Today the professional environment for newly minted scholars is extremely competitive. It offers opportunities to test your wings, but also entails a serious risk that you may not manage to soar as high or as far as you want. This is because the US academic market supplies too few jobs for qualified young scholars, and because it is not entirely meritocratic. The initial chapters of this book described some of the obstacles to fully meritocratic procedures in scholarly assessments and hiring decisions. Although several of those obstacles have diminished over time, they have not disappeared, and in the past two decades the mounting economic pressures on young scholars have eroded what has been achieved. Moreover, even if the American higher educational system were miraculously cleansed of all such defects, sheer chance would play some role—­perhaps a large role—­in determining your career trajectory. That is where the need for resilience comes in. What you require is personal intellectual ambition tempered with professional modesty and perseverance. The experience of Robert Frank, a distinguished economist, illustrates these points. The title of one of his books is Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Frank’s argument is not that merit is irrelevant to personal success, but that in a highly competitive world, tiny differences at the margin can set winners apart from losers and can thereby decisively affect who comes out on top. This can be a consoling thought when you fail in a serious professional endeavor. It is also worth remembering when fortune smiles and you succeed. It will make you magnanimous and empathetic in moments of professional success. What’s more, life circumstances can have consequences that are far more powerful than marginal differences in professional resumes. Frank’s thinking about these matters was crystallized by an unforgettable experience: while playing tennis, he suffered a heart attack that would have killed him had an ambulance not accidentally been driving through his neighborhood. Therefore, quite apart from his personal effort and impressive aca-

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demic accomplishments, luck played a crucial role in his long-­term professional success, to put it mildly.1 In my own career, small inflections and lucky turns of events have been highly consequential. While finishing my dissertation, I learned of a new teaching position at SAIS only because one of my friends asked me whether I intended to apply for the job. Until that moment, I had not known that the opening existed.2 If my friend hadn’t mentioned it, I would probably have ended up in Australia on a postdoctoral fellowship, almost literally a world away from the US academic job market. And once I applied for the SAIS position, it was offered to me only because the leading candidate chose to take a position at the University of Toronto, where the availability of a tenure-­track slot made the future job prospects much better.3 Other life circumstances have been equally consequential for my career. One of these was the unexpected retirement of my wonderful senior colleague at SAIS, Herbert Dinerstein. At the moment when SAIS’s fixed ceiling on tenured appointments would have forced me to look for another job, Herb was incapacitated by a near-­fatal auto accident that compelled him to retire. I benefited from the timing of his accident by being in a position to compete for the tenure slot opened up by his withdrawal from teaching. The misfortune of someone I admired and loved opened a door, and I walked through it. In the following years I experienced other lucky turns, especially in connection with several spells of depression that befell me. Only SAIS’s generous treatment of me during these difficult episodes of illness allowed me to continue and complete my career at Hopkins. Otherwise my life would have been dramatically different. In that respect, I was just as lucky as Robert Frank. These episodes in my personal history affected me and my family profoundly. At the start of this book, I remarked that you as a social scientist are both a product of history and, potentially, a maker of history. Historical context matters a great deal. During the past century or so, US academic institutions have flourished, generating many praiseworthy intellectual breakthroughs and boosting the educational level of the American population. But there has also been a countercurrent of anti-­intellectualism, which has reached a high pitch in recent years, as public respect for the professoriate has declined and other professions have likewise lost social prestige.4 Strong tides of political controversy, sometimes tagged as battles over “political correctness,” have swirled around US colleges and universities, and they have undermined public confidence in the social legitimacy of higher education and scholarly research. Maybe you have experienced

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these controversies firsthand at your university; perhaps they have even weakened your determination to complete your personal academic quest. In any case, this is the national backdrop against which you must struggle to write your dissertation and pursue your career. Under these circumstances, it is vital to remember and reaffirm that scholarship is a high calling. At its best, it is a vocation, in the religious sense of the term. Your quest makes you part of a community of scholars extending across decades and centuries and engaged in the ongoing search for truth.5 Without the vital ingredient of élan, no mutual enterprise of this sort can flourish and endure, so you should give yourself to it wholeheartedly.6 You are part of humankind’s age-­old struggle to understand the complexities of the human condition and shape the future of human life. That is the ultimate importance of modern scholarship, a living human tradition to which you now belong. Whatever personal hardships your quest imposes, it is a worthy undertaking for a noble end.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. According to one observer, these social-­psychological problems are more severe in the social sciences and humanities than in the natural sciences (David Joel Sternberg, How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981], 1). Guides to specific social ­science research methods are itemized on the companion website to this book (https://doi.org/10.3998/ mpub.12275879) under the “Related Readings” listed for each chapter, especially the supplement to chapter 9. For an explanation of the companion website’s organization, see note 7 below or the first section of the website itself. 2. During the past decade or two, the number of books designed to help dissertation writers has grown substantially. Some of them do address topics taken up in this guide, but none of them deals as fully with the nontechnical aspects of the PhD experience. One significant early exception is the Sternberg book cited in the previous note. Another exception is Christine Pearson Casanave, Before the Dissertation: A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students at Early Stages of a Research Project (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). Casanave’s book is close to this one in spirit, but the content is quite different. Among the abundant procedurally oriented guides, perhaps the most useful is Carol M. Roberts, The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending Your Dissertation, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2010). Others include Kjell Erik Rudestam and Rae R. Newton, Surviving Your Dissertation: A Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2015); Raymond L. Calabrese, The Dissertation Desk Reference: The Doctoral Student’s Manual to Writing the Dissertation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2009); Raymond L. Calabrese and Page A. Smith, eds., The Faculty Mentor’s Wisdom: Conceptualizing, Writing, and Defending the Dissertation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2010); Bradley N. Axelrod and James Windell, Dissertation Solutions: A Concise Guide to Planning, Implementing, and Surviving the Dissertation Process (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); Antonina Lukenchuk, ed., Outliving Your Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty (New York: Peter Lang, 2017); and Steven R. Terrell, Writing a Proposal for Your Dissertation: Guidelines and Examples (New York: The Guilford Press, 2016). Two especially valuable books that resemble this guide’s general outlook but are less focused on conducting dissertation research are Jonathon W. Moses

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and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea and Dvora Yanow, eds., Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge, 2012). 3. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992). 4. The differences between the two kinds of decision making are discussed below in chapter 3. 5. A valuable guide to identifying these decisions is Paul N. Edwards, “How to Read a Book, V5.0,” http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread. pdf 6. Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010). 7. See https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12275879. Each section of the companion website corresponds to one chapter of the book and elaborates on points made in that chapter. To facilitate use of the website, I have marked note superscripts and endnotes in the book with an asterisk (*) to indicate that additional discussion or references for the specific topic being treated can be found on the website. These elaborations are organized under topical headings by asterisks and key phrases reproduced in the supplement from the chapter text. As a finding aid, the key phrases are printed in bold italics. Each section of the website ends with a list of readings related to the chapter. 8. For discussion of these terms, see chapters 8–­10. CHAPTER 1

1. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). The second edition, published in 2017, contains a substantial new preface. A more general statement of many of these issues is Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Jervis, How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), chaps. 9–­12. 2. See chapter 2 for a discussion of the “straw man” phenomenon in scholarship. 3. The underlying reality is that our human intuitions about time, space, causality, and much else are culturally conditioned and are therefore variable. Cultural conventions have a powerful impact on the way whole societies conceive of collective space and time, as well as the way they conceive of individuals’ personal space and life rhythms. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–­1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Robert Levine, A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently

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(New York: Basic Books, 1997); Robert David Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). For further discussion, see the companion website. 4. See chapter 8. 5. Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 78. 6. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 7. This includes perceptions of the operation of our own minds. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), especially chaps. 19 and 22, and Martin E. P. Seligman, The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018), 355–­56. Note also that some individuals have distinctive syndromes of physical perception. One of these is synesthesia, the mixing of forms of perception that are usually separated in our minds. Seeing colors whenever one hears music is the most common example. Oliver W. Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 8. On the historical emergence of this cultural convention and its implications for the development of modern science, see Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 9. Figures 2 and 3 are taken from the website of Professor Edward H. Adelson (http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html). I first encountered them in Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010). For other examples, see Adelson’s website and Tim Leng, Optical Illusions: Over 80 of the Most Mind-­Bending, Brain-­Melting Illusions Ever Invented (New York: Ryland Peters & Small, 2015). See also Romana Karla Schuler, Seeing Motion: A History of Visual Perception in Art and Science (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 10. https://elvers.us/perception/simcolcon/. Compare Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut, The Secret Language of Color: Science, Nature, History, Culture, Beauty of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue & Violet (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2013), 206. See also Seligman, The Hope Circuit, 355–­56. 11. See Joe Sugarman, “Your Memory of Colors Isn’t as Good as You Think It Is,” Johns Hopkins Magazine 67, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 17–­20. A similar process of “normalization” keeps us from detecting many small aberrations and mispronunciations from standard speech when we converse with one another. Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 263 and passim. 12. Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2010), 67–­75. 13. Eckstut and Eckstut, The Secret Language of Color, 199, 204.

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14. *Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 58–­59. This holds especially for our non-visual perceptions of the world beyond us.* 15. Robert W. Wiley, Colin Wilson, and Brenda Rapp, “The Effects of Alphabet and Expertise on Letter Perception,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (2016): 1–­19. Their findings are summarized at http://hub.jhu.edu/2016/03/02/recognizing-arabic-letters-expert-novice. See also Sack, Homo Geographicus, and Stephen Jay Gould, “Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons,” in Hidden Histories of Science, ed. Robert B. Silvers (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995), 37–­68. 16. White supremacists have sometimes engaged in similar reasoning about blacks. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 112. 17. For a detailed exposition, see S. M. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (1992). See also Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For further discussion of the significance of changing concepts of gender, see chapter 8. 18. For example, for more than seventy years medical researchers mistakenly assumed that the effects of new drugs could be studied in randomized clinical trials without taking account of the sex of the participants. Only in the past two decades has this assumption been widely challenged and shown to be erroneous. And efforts to adjust scientific research practices to this fundamental reality still lag substantially. Janet A. Kourany, “Science—­for Better or Worse, a Source of Ignorance as Well as Knowledge,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2015), 157–­58. On the interaction of gender stereotypes and scientific research generally, see Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino, eds., Feminism and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992). 19. Philip Kitcher, Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chaps. 3–­4. Our abilities to group and interpret sensory data normally develop gradually along with our bodies. Individuals who lack senses such as sight or hearing from birth, and who later obtain those faculties through medical intervention, often experience severe difficulties in “decoding” the new sensory data. Susan R. Barry, Coming to Our Senses: A Boy Who Learned to See, a Girl Who Learned to Hear, and How We All Discover the World (New York: Basic Books, 2021). 20. One common name for these practices is “metacognition.” In the humanities and social sciences, another term for them is “reflexivity,” or “self-­ reflexivity.” These labels are discussed further in chapter 9. For more on the multiple meanings of “context,” see chapters 2, 3, and 5.

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CHAPTER 2

1. Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, “Introduction: Writing the History of Social Science,” in The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–­2. 2. This was the pattern in research universities, especially in the United States and Germany, but not in the universities of some other advanced countries. For instance, in Great Britain, where Oxford and Cambridge ruled the world of higher education, the distinctive structure of those universities and their focus on the preparation of a social elite slowed disciplinary differentiation dramatically. Brian Barry, “The Study of Politics as a Vocation,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For thumbnail sketches of each of these disciplines, see the entries in James D. Wright, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015). For the historical development of each discipline, see the chapters in Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); specific chapters are included in the “Related Readings” section of the online supplement to this chapter. 3. Important recent explorations of this complex issue are Fritjof Capra and P. L. Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). A leading sociologist has called the social sciences a “superdomain” located uncomfortably between the natural sciences and the humanities. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Culture of Sociology in Disarray: The Impact of 1968 on U.S. Sociologists,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 428. 4. For some of the relevant writings, see the works listed on the supplementary website. 5. “To call the formation of social science disciplines a project is to locate it within the contingencies of history. Disciplines were not a product of the automatic progress of science, nor were they ‘natural’ categories. They had to establish themselves as authoritative purveyors of descriptions of the world.” Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 206. 6. For example, some US academic disciplines were strongly affected by the economic crisis of the 1930s and the cultural-­political crisis of the 1960s, but not in identical fashion. Economics was especially affected in the 1930s, history and English in the 1960s. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, “Introduction,” in American Academic Culture in Transformation. Four Disciplines, Fifty Years, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton: Princeton

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University Press, 1998), 9. According to historian of science Robert N. Proctor, the separation of philosophy from history has produced “a substantial degree of trivialization of both disciplines,” pushing philosophy into tedious formalism and history into antiquarianism. Robert N. Proctor, Value-­Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 12. 7. David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Incidentally, these circumstances shaped my own decision to study Soviet politics and write my dissertation about the USSR’s technological competition with the West. 8. Another international example is China’s dramatic increase in intellectual salience among political scientists during the past quarter century. From 1991 to 1995, the political science journals included in the JSTOR database published 259 articles with “China” in their title. From 1996 to 2000, the number increased to 360. From 2001 to 2005, it rose to 455, and from 2006 to 2010 to 522. Note that at this point, I am skirting the issue of relations between area studies and other types of scholarly analysis; chapter 10 addresses it. 9. From 1995 to 2005, the political science journals indexed in the JSTOR database published a mere three articles with the phrase “economic inequality” in their title. Between 2005 and 2015, the journals published seventeen articles with this title. For economics journals, the corresponding numbers were four and twelve. In 2004, the American Political Science Association established a task force on inequality, which concluded that political scientists knew “astonishingly little” about the cumulative effects of recent economic and political changes on US democracy. (Quoted from Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd ed. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016], 2.) Subsequent works by Bartels and others dramatically expanded the profession’s knowledge. 10. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 97. 11. *Mattei Dogan, “Specialization and Recombination of Specialties in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 23:225–­28.* 12. For a national overview of one aspect of this process in the United States, see Dorothy Ross, “The New and Newer Histories: Social Theory and Historiography in an American Key,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). In Great Britain, separate departments of political studies emerged only in the mid-­twentieth century, much later than in the United States. Robert E. Goodin, “Political Science and Institution Building: Oxford in Comparative Perspective,” in Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective, ed. Christopher Hood, Desmond S. King, and Gillian Peele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 105. Overall, Ross states that disciplinary departments arrived later in Europe than in the United States and never became as important. Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” 205.

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13. The American Political Science Association was founded in 1903. European associations of political science were all founded much later, after World War II. The British Association of Political Studies was founded only in 1950, and efforts to put “science” into its name were voted down (on a motion proposed by a historian). Barry, “The Study of Politics as a Vocation,” 433–­44. For an extended analysis of US-­British differences in conceptualizing the hybrid field of international political economy, see Benjamin J. Cohen, International Political Economy: An Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 14. On average, American and European scholars tend to favor divergent social ontologies. According to one observer, there is a contrast in the social sciences between “the apparent American tendency to perceive social reality as secondary or derivative of the reality of individuals” and “the European predisposition to ascribe primary reality to society, the group, while viewing the individual as secondary or derivative.” Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 171–­72. See also Marion Fourcade’s data on the striking contrasts between US and French economists on policy questions such as government economic regulation, the effect of minimum wages, and flexible exchange rates. Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6. 15. Continuity and constancy are not equivalent, but for the sake of simplicity I treat them here as identical. For more on the treatment of these issues in conceptualizing different types of research, see chapter 10. 16. William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chaps. 3 and 6. 17. Historians are distinguished by their focus on studying documents, but they also study visual materials and artifacts, and they sometimes rely on natural scientific methods like carbon dating. 18. *The distinction between the work of professional historians and other kinds of historical writing has been analyzed by many scholars. See, for example, J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan, 1969), and E. J. Hobsbawm and T. O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). A long-­lasting debate over the relationship between literary narrative and historical analysis was inaugurated in the United States by Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­ Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).* 19. I briefly discuss the significance of the writings of nonhistorians in chapter 4. 20. Ian S. Lustick, “History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (1996). 21. On this score, the views of natural scientists as a group are probably even more naïve than the views of many social scientists, if Stephen Jay Gould is to

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be believed. According to Gould, “Most scientists don’t care a fig about history; my colleagues may not quite follow Henry Ford’s dictum that history is bunk, but they do regard the past as a mere repository of error—­at best a source of moral instruction in pitfalls along paths to progress.” Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), Kindle Locations 298–­300. As Gould would undoubtedly have agreed, however, in some branches of science, history of a certain kind is indispensable to understanding. The cosmology of the Big Bang is an example. 22. *For extensive evidence of this point, see D. R. Woolf, Andrew Feldherr, and Grant Hardy, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5: Historical Writing since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially the chapter on history writing in the United States by Ian Tyrrell. According to another contributor to the same compendium, “Surveying the battleground of definitions of history . . . can lead to only one conclusion. . . . [T]here is not even the slightest appearance of an agreement among historians about the object of their research, about its method, or about its ‘scientific’ credentials vis-­à-­vis the social sciences.” Chris Lorenz, “History and Theory,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5: Historical Writing since 1945, ed. Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19 (emphasis in the original). For an instructive comparison of four broad histories of the twentieth century, see Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 208–­10.* 23. See J. W. Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2008), esp. chap. 26, and James M. Banner Jr., The Ever-­Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). Any effort to integrate entities and processes on these vastly different scales would require simplistic assumptions about ontology and social causality that cannot be justified. 24. Birgitte Possing, “Biography: Historical,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 2:644–­49. Chapters 3 and 7 in this volume explore the question of research priorities. 25. More precisely, it has shattered the limits on the creation of biographies about individuals living during the past two decades. Note, however, that even before the advent of new electronic media, many historians neglected the systematic study of a great deal of information already accumulated by governments and other organizations about non-­elites. In the United States, the surge of interest in social history during the 1960s was partly a response to this skewed distribution of scholarly effort. 26. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (New York: The New Press, 1997). Certain varieties of present-­oriented analysis, such as aggregate survey research, have no obvious connection with history. But even this kind of work has a tacit historical dimension linked with the social categories used and the formulation of the survey questions. James S. House, A Telescope on Society: Survey Research and

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Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 27. William H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986): 1–­10. 28. *For the analytical significance of emphasizing various kinds of context, see Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim.* 29. For a sophisticated discussion of the choice of spatial frames by historians, see Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 30. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Eviatar Zerubavel is a pioneer in the study of the cultural dimensions of historical periodization. He notes that “the way we divide time is evocative of the manner in which we partition space. Just as we cut supposedly discrete chunks like countries and school districts off from ecological continuums, we also carve seemingly insular segments such as ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘adolescence’ out of historical continuums.” Eviatar Zerubavel, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6, and Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 31. The existence of default assumptions of this kind can be grasped by considering one unusual concept: “medieval South Dakota.” Most of us would react to this term by saying that it’s nonsensical because medieval South Dakota never existed. But the territory that we now know as South Dakota did exist during the European period that we now call medieval, and it had human inhabitants. The only sense in which it never existed is that our minds never conceived of it. This example shows that concepts which seem strictly chronological can also be implicitly associated with certain geographical spaces. Geographers have paid special attention to the epistemology of regions. For discussions of the importance of decisions about geographical contexts in framing research, see John Agnew, “Regions on the Mind Does Not Equal Regions of the Mind,” Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 1 (1999), 91–­96; and Rick Fawn, “‘Regions’ and Their Study: Wherefrom, What for and Whereto?,” 5–­34. 32. Lustick, “History, Historiography, and Political Science.” 33. For further discussion of this point, see chapter 10. 34. For further discussion of these resources, see chapter 8. 35. In the words of one penetrating thinker: “The late eighteenth century witnessed the creation of a political project encompassing the whole world and shattering the existing absolutist order. In this process horizons of expectation . . . opened up that were previously unknown. This sense of openness and contingency also served as a forceful impetus to an examination of the structural conditions of the political body and entailed a passage from political and moral philosophy to social science.  .  .  . The transition  .  .  . to a social science entailed a decisive shift from an agential—­some would say voluntaristic—­view of society to one that emphasized structural conditions.” Bjorn Wittrock, “Discipline Formation in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the

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Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2001), 6:486. 36. *The nature and intellectual significance of metaphors have been matters of extensive research and debate among cognitive researchers in recent years. The pervasiveness of metaphorical reasoning—­especially primary metaphors between bodily experiences and intellectual processes—­has become increasingly evident. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). For examples of the ubiquity of metaphors in ordinary language, see James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2011). “Fields” and “building blocks” are primary, or physical, metaphors; “disciplines” is a secondary, or nonphysical, metaphor. For a discussion of the role of metaphors in social ­science analysis, see chapters 8 and 10.* 37. For example, observers sometimes speak of the “flow” of history, the “tides” of history, or the “locomotive” of history. These expressions hint at the separate ontological assumptions embodied in metaphors. Is history a river, or an ocean, or a machine? The dynamics of the three are very different. 38. Chapter 3 briefly discusses intellectual decision making in universities and university departments. The challenge of resolving intellectual disagreements through formal procedures also exists in other knowledge-­based institutions, such as Wikipedia. See Joseph Michael Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Dariusz Jemielniak, Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Thomas M. Leitch, Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 39. Strikingly, two recent overviews of American political science by distinguished scholars completely omit any discussion of international politics and foreign affairs. See Garry King, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Norman Nie, eds., The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009), and J. Gunnell, “Pluralism and the Fate of Perestroika: A Historical Reflection,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 2 (2015), plus the comment by Robert Keohane. See also chapter 5. 40. Tony Becher and Paul Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2001). 41. On the use of this image by American historians in the first half of the twentieth century, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); see also David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). The image is used, in a more sophisticated way, by Robert E. Goodin, “Introduction: The State of the Discipline, the Discipline of the State,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Kindle location 487. Closely related physical metaphors for knowledge remain popular. Scholars still refer to the “depth” and “breadth” of knowledge, and they often single out “gaps” in existing knowledge.

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42. Philip Kitcher, Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Harold Kincaid, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 43. For further explanation, see chapters 5 and 8. 44. This language resembles that used by the historian Dorothy Ross to describe the “contours” of the social sciences. Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” 205–­37. 45. The phrase belongs to Raymond Williams, quoted in Tony Bennett et al., New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 235. 46. Here the term “idea” is important, because it includes ideas that call for current circumstances to be changed. Historically, for example, the abstract idea of “natural rights” has sometimes been used to attack established political arrangements that are claimed to violate such rights. Lorraine Daston, “Enlightenment Fears, Fears of Enlightenment,” in What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 128. 47. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, “Introduction,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 3; Stephen Jay Gould, “Taxonomy as Politics: The Harm of False Classification,” Dissent (Winter 1990): 73–­78. 48. James Bernard Murphy, “The Kinds of Order in Society,” in Natural Images in Economic Thought: “Markets Read in Tooth and Claw,” ed. Philip Mirowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 536–­82; Capra and Luisi, The Systems View of Life, introduction, chaps. 2–­6. See also Gould, “Taxonomy as Politics,” 73–­78. In other words, they are “fuzzy” concepts. They also raise basic ontological issues. See chapters 8 and 11 for further discussion of these points. 49. See, for example, D. Luban, “What Is Spontaneous Order?,” American Political Science Review 114, no. 1 (2020): 68–­80. 50. Michael Polanyi and Mary Jo Nye, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-­ Critical Philosophy, Enlarged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015 [1958]); Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). For more on this issue, see the following chapter. CHAPTER 3

1. *This category includes not only universities and other research institutions, but also scholarly journals and associations. For a rigorous exploration of the relationship between scientific ideas and the contexts in which they emerge, see Helen E. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially chaps. 4–­6. For a discussion of politics within such institutions, and the tendency of American academics not to formally acknowledge

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the political dimensions of producing scholarly work, see John S. Nelson, “Stories of Science and Politics: Some Rhetorics of Political Research,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 198–­220. For more discussion of context, see chapter 4 and the companion website.* 2. Julia Miller Vick, The Academic Job Search Handbook, ed. Jennifer S. Furlong and Rosanne Lurie, 5th ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 3. An emphasis on empirical investigation is equally important, but modern empirical research depends, inescapably, on specialization. Considered more generally, specialization is arguably the most important human social response to the manifold limits on the capacities of human individuals. For a useful overview of institutional specialization in the intellectual realm, see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 4. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 5. Sheldon Rothblatt, “Social Science and Universities,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 22:592–­93. The correspondence between disciplines and departments is not absolute. At the college level, adjacent disciplines may be combined under one department—­for example, anthropology with sociology, or biochemistry with chemistry. W. S. Bainbridge, “The Future in the Social Sciences,” Futures 35 (2003): 639. Disciplinary departments appeared about a half-­century later in European universities, due largely to institutional differences between US and European systems of higher education. Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 123–­28. 6. For elaboration, see chapter 11. 7. The reality of such disagreements is reflected in panel reviews of interdisciplinary applications for research grants. Review panels must develop procedures for handling the decision-­making process and the conflicts among disciplinary perspectives that inevitably arise. Beyond an express commitment to general academic principles of originality, rigor, and feasibility, the informal rules require “respecting the sovereignty of other disciplines and deferring to the expertise of colleagues” (Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6). Hence these reviews necessarily include much more give-­and-­take and agreement to disagree than would occur in a single-­discipline review. 8. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, chap. 1. Less provocatively, Howard Gardner has referred to this state of scholarly affairs as “the shopping mall of the disciplines.” Howard Gardner, The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 154–­58. 9. John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jerry A.

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Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines: Interdisciplinarity and Specialization in the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Peter Galison, “Introduction: The Context of Disunity,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 10. Due partly to the haziness of academic borders, ambitious academic entrepreneurs occasionally advocate incorporating adjacent disciplines into their own, and more radical scholars sometimes advocate abolishing disciplines entirely. See the discussion later in this chapter. 11. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, chap. 1 and passim. 12. Nonetheless, most of the decisions about hiring and promoting faculty remain within the disciplinary departments. 13. Centers for the general study of international affairs were another variety of interdisciplinary unit. MIT and Harvard, for example, set up such centers. Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For more on this trend and its limits, see chapter 10. 14. Stephen H. Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning across Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines; Harvey J. Graff, Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 15. *For a helpful discussion of the different kinds of interactions among disciplines, see Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge, and Jacobs, In Defense of Disciplines, Kindle locations 718–­29. For an empirical study emphasizing the integrative effects of interdisciplinary collaboration, see C. M. Rawlings et al., “Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era,” Social Forces 93, no. 4 (2015): 1687–­1722. It is worth noting that illustrious scientists have likewise differed over the degree to which the branches and sub-­ branches of the natural sciences might become unified. For example, this was a point of contention between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists. See Loren R. Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 65.* 16. Given the growing distrust of science among a substantial part of the citizenry in the United States and other developed countries, this image of scientific unity cannot be lightly put aside. In grant-giving by the National Science Foundation, for example, it has helped protect the quantitative varieties of social science that bear a formal resemblance to the “hard” natural sciences. On the other hand, the notion of scientific unity has long impeded NSF funding of the qualitative and interpretive varieties of social science that strike some administrators and researchers as “soft” or “humanistic.” Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), chaps. 1 and 10. 17. “Scientists will tell you that there is no single method that characterizes all that they do, much less a simple set of steps that binds everything called ‘science’ together. Scientific labor is complex and diverse, brutally difficult and impossible to encapsulate. . . . Scientists and historians do not always agree, but

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they do on this: there is no such thing as the scientific method, and there never was.” Henry M. Cowles, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 1. 18. Dupré, The Disorder of Things; Peter Galison and David J. Stump, eds., The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Philip Kitcher, Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The idea of the unity of science deserves especially careful handling. As contemporary scholars, we tend to assume that the idea has existed from the beginning of modern science. This, however, is untrue. The idea has twentieth-­century origins, and it became entrenched in American culture due largely to the transfer and assimilation of logical positivist ideas through the influence of émigré intellectuals from Germany in the 1930s. John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 193–­95. For more on this theme, see chapters 4 and 11. 19. *Note the important distinction here between the quest for unification within individual disciplines and the achievement of unity for science as a whole. The achievement of greater unification in the understanding of related topics within a discipline is one measure of a proposed theory’s value. James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2001), 370. But there is no convincing reason to think that the quest for unity within disciplines and subdisciplines will ultimately overcome the fissiparous forces of scientific specialization and thereby create an overarching intellectual architecture for all of science.* 20. Why is this so? For one thing, more than one pattern may exist simultaneously within the same intellectual domain, depending on the attitudes and behavior of individual scholars. In addition, contrasting patterns of relations can occur simultaneously among academic groups of different sizes, ranging from individual researchers to groups of practitioners representing subdisciplines or entire disciplines. Finally, the relative frequency of the different patterns probably varies across time from one level to another. At the level of whole disciplines, accommodation and cooperation may be more pronounced than at the level of individual scholars. This, too, makes simple modeling of the interactions among disciplines and subdisciplines virtually impossible. 21. During World War II, the US government made plans to stimulate the growth of area studies as an aid to US foreign policy. One supporting argument for this move from some academic organizers was that it would promote the goal of “many outstanding social scientists . . . [to achieve] a weakening of the rigid compartments that separate the disciplines.” Quoted in Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: Columbia University Committee on Area Studies, 1991), 196–­97. See also chapter 10. 22. There is, however, substantial evidence that scholars in one discipline engage with their specialized counterparts in another discipline much more often than with the members of their own discipline working on a different specialized topic. For example, political scientists studying political socializa-

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tion have much more in common with sociologists working on that topic than with political scientists working on nuclear arms-­control. 23. For example, Brian Barry argues that such an ethos characterized the British study of politics in a preprofessional era that extended up to the mid-­ 1970s. Brian Barry, “The Study of Politics as a Vocation,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 24. That said, it would be a mistake to assume that chemistry and comparative politics are completely unrelated. One could imagine, for example, a research program to analyze and compare the regulation of toxic chemicals in different types of political systems. We appear to be on the verge of a new wave of studies comparing how different political systems have coped with—­or failed to cope with—­the Covid-­19 pandemic, and also with climate change. These studies reflect disciplinary efforts to “bring nature back in” (see chapter 5). 25. Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge. In addition, “inside almost every professor is someone who would like to be a student again,” and interdisciplinarity provides a justification for studying topics that are genuinely new to the researcher. Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 91. 26. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, 131–­34. Abbott calculated that between the 1960s and early 2000s, the level of academic interest in interdisciplinarity remained roughly constant (134). 27. For spirited examples of these debates, see Philip Schmitter and Valerie Bunce, “Comparing East and South,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 3 (1995): 87–­ 100; see also Charles King, “Post-­Postcommunism: Transition, Comparison, and the End of ‘Eastern Europe,’” World Politics 53, no. 1 (2000): 143–­72. 28. As discussed in chapter 2 and chapter 11, there are good epistemological reasons to think that these acts of separation were less successful intellectually than institutionally. 29. Barry R. Weingast and Donald A. Wittman, “The Reach of Political Economy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, ed. Barry R. Weingast and Donald A. Wittman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–­25. 30. Mitchell G. Ash, “Psychology,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 206; John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 6. 31. *Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge.* 32. More precisely, they attempted to model the discipline on Newtonian physics, which working physicists no longer accepted as an adequate approach to physical reality. Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (New York: G. Braziller, 1964). 33. Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 34. For a critical appraisal of this approach, see Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). See also Jeffrey Friedman,

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ed., The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). It should be stipulated that not all economists assume that the economic actors they study are perfectly rational. Behavioral economists have taken exception to this assumption and have mustered considerable evidence to support their view. In 2018, Richard Thaler, a pioneer of behavioral economics, won the Nobel Prize for Economic Science. See also Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, eds., The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 35. *In a provocative assessment of the contemporary research university, Benjamin Ginsberg describes struggles between academic disciplines as resembling “World War I battlefield[s]” but also “the Athenian marketplace . . . the mother of ideas.” Each metaphor is probably apt in some cases. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-­Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 83–­84.* 36. Here a great deal depends on the institutional setting. Robert Goodin argues that personal rivalries are intellectually harmful because they can cause members of a department to restrict their personal research projects to narrow work that is easier to protect against departmental critics. He cites a memorable case of scholarly hostility from Oxford University: One Oxford political philosopher regularly described another scornfully as “Montenegro’s leading political thinker.” Robert E. Goodin, “Political Science and Institution Building: Oxford in Comparative Perspective,” in Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective, ed. Christopher Hood, Desmond S. King, and Gillian Peele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 111. 37. *Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).* 38. I found my job at SAIS through the grapevine. See below for details. 39. David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 40. Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines. 41. *See the supplementary website for details.* 42. After World War II, for instance, academic entrepreneurs at Harvard went against prevailing national trends by establishing a single Department of Social Relations. The leader of this effort was the prominent social theorist Talcott Parsons. The new unit encompassed sociology, social anthropology, and psychology. Within three decades, however, each group withdrew into a conventionally defined department. 43. Published research on academic departments is rare, possibly because social scientists take departments for granted but more likely because such research might reveal too much dirty laundry. One important exception is Andrew Abbott, Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Ironically, the American Journal of Sociology commissioned Abbott’s research on this subject, but then refused to publish his report. Another important exception is Goodin, “Political Science and Institution Building: Oxford in Comparative Perspective,” 104–­20. Hull,

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Science as a Social Process, is an unflinching empirical study of researchers’ professional behavior in a subfield of biology. See also Morton A. Meyers, Prize Fight: The Ruthless Rivalry to Be the First in Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 44. *Two episodes from the past century illustrate the absence of an agreed hierarchy of disciplines; see the supplementary website for details. For a rigorously skeptical analysis of ideas about scientific unity, see Ian Hacking, “The Disunities of the Sciences,” in The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Stump (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); also Stéphanie Ruphy, Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered: A New Approach to the (Dis)Unity of Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). 45. Inside many universities, the scholarly terrain is further complicated by the presence of cognate professional schools whose activities overlap with those of individual departments—­for example, schools of diplomacy or law with political science, schools of business with economics, and schools of social work with sociology. 46. *In research universities, tenure decisions typically require the approval of the president and the board of trustees. Decisions to override departmental recommendations, however, are generally rare in these institutions. On the other hand, departments have only limited influence over administrative decisions that affect the share of faculty posts and economic resources each department receives. This is a realm in which institutional politics plays a central role. For a polemical analysis of the rising power of administrators in the life of US universities, see Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty. For a more nuanced discussion of one case, see Abbott, Department and Discipline. See also Jonathan R. Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must Be Protected (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), on the relative institutional decline of the humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences), due in part to the ascendancy of biomedical research.* 47. Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1995). This view enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. It now appears to be in retreat. 48. *Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality. Stanley Fish later revised his views of academic politics and authority. See Fish, Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Incidentally, there seem to be remarkably few scholarly studies of the internal workings of universities, far fewer, say, than there are of business corporations. One exception is Ronald G. Ehrenberg, ed., Governing Academia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), especially the chapters by Hammond and Kaplan.* 49. Hull, Science as a Process, 15. 50. In the USSR this sort of blatant politicization was far more prevalent in the humanities and the social sciences than in the natural sciences, but it did affect some scientific fields, especially biology. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Joravsky, “The Stalinist Mentality and the Higher Learning,” Slavic Review 42, no. 4 (1983): 575–­600. Historian Theodore Porter summarizes the political dynamics of US social sci-

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ence during this period as follows: “Although anti-­Communist witch hunts destroyed some academic careers, McCarthyism did not, on the whole, politicize the academy in a direct way. In the case of social science, it tended rather to depoliticize it, adding one more incentive for scholars and university administrators to emphasize technical tools of science and to insist on its independence and detachment. Yet this preoccupation with neutral objectivity can itself be seen as a form of politicization by virtue of its very claim to stand outside the value-­laden character of the processes and interests that shaped the production and uses of social knowledge.” Theodore Porter, “Foreword: Positioning Social Science in Cold War America,” in Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Kindle location 68. R. C. Lewontin, “The Cold War and the Transformation of the Academy,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky et al. (New York: Columbia University, Committee on Area Studies, 1991), 18, offers a similar depiction of federal policies toward the natural sciences in this period. See also Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Lionel Lewis, The Cold War and Academic Governance: The Lattimore Case at Johns Hopkins (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993). 51. That said, there have been efforts to circumscribe the public roles of scholars at some universities, especially state universities, which are usually more susceptible to political pressure than are private institutions. On the pretext of enforcing conflict-­of-­interest regulations, University of Florida administrators recently attempted to limit the professional testimony of senior faculty members in legal suits with potentially adverse consequences for the state government. This was an attack not just on the individual scholars, but on the social role of the university in general. Lindsay Ellis and Emma Pettit, “‘I’m Speechless’: How the University Barred Professors from Speaking against the State,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2021, 15–­19. 52. Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 414–­17. This practice also extended to the natural sciences, especially those with a bearing on theories of evolution. 53. Larry G. Gerber, The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014). 54. Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee, The Academic Marketplace (New York: Basic Books, 1958). 55. *Dolores L. Burke, A New Academic Marketplace (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988); Theodore Caplow, The Academic Marketplace (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1975] 2001), Introduction to the 2001 edition; Lionel S. Lewis, Scaling the Ivory Tower: Merit & Its Limits in Academic Careers (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 1998 [1975; with a new introduction by the author]).* 56. In the 1970s, I obtained my first teaching job partly on the basis of my

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dissertation advisor’s personal connections with Herbert Dinerstein, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins. The job was advertised, but only two candidates were interviewed. Fortunately for me, the other candidate turned down the job, which was then offered to me. 57. “In 1969, 78 percent of US faculty nationally were tenured or tenure-­ eligible and treated as permanent hires. By 1975, this figure had slipped to 75 percent. . . . As we approach 2020, it is barely 25 percent, with the majority of faculty being ‘temporary,’ though many such temporary faculty teach in that category for their whole working lives.” Cary Nelson, “Contingency,” in The Academic’s Handbook, ed. Lori A. Flores and Jocelyn Olcott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 367; see also Bryan Pitts, “Scholarship and Life Off the Tenure Track,” the same volume. For a bleak analysis of the rapid growth of contingent employment, see Herb Childress, The Adjunct Underclass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 58. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge, chaps. 5–­7. For further discussion of this issue in political science, see chapter 5. 59. The most dramatic recent example concerns the “1619 Project,” a large collection of essays on slavery and race in America published by the New York Times in August 2019. Partly because the collection was designed to be used in precollege school curricula, the project generated intense public controversy, including criticism from some established American historians who judged parts of it to be misleading. The journalist who headed the project, Nicole Hannah-­Jones, was subsequently offered tenure by the journalism school and trustees of the University of North Carolina, but the controversial appointment was blocked by the state overseers of higher education. Ultimately Hannah-­Jones was offered tenure, but she chose to accept a tenured post at Howard University instead. 60. Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996). For more on this topic, see chapter 7. 61. Everett Carll Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset, The Divided Academy: Professors and Politics (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1975); Neil Gross, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). At the same time, it must be acknowledged that most empirical research has focused on admissions to undergraduate rather than graduate programs. Julie R. Posselt, Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 7. 62. Gross, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, chaps. 1–­4, conclusion. 63. In a word, liberal thought and social science tend to share a belief that social factors frame and limit the autonomy of individuals. By contrast, conservative thought tends to posit that individuals are entirely responsible for charting their own paths and achieving their own goals. Politically conservative students are therefore unlikely to be drawn to the study of social science or to find it intellectually congenial. By contrast, the concentrations of conservative students in some applied disciplines like engineering are very high. John F. Zipp

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and Rudy Fenwick, “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors,” Public Opinion Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2006): table 2. 64. Zipp and Fenwick, “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,” 318. 65. There is, for instance, a worrying trend for faculty members of all political persuasions to assign increased significance to preparing students for careers and diminished weight to teaching students how to think creatively. Zipp and Fenwick, “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,” 321 and passim. 66. *Derek C. Bok, Higher Education in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2013), 369–­76.* 67. Ruben Martinez, “The Politics of Ethnicity in Social Science,” in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and David K. Van Keuren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 68. Studies show that women now earn about 40 percent of new PhDs in American political science and make up approximately the same proportion of assistant professors in top university departments. This is a substantial increase from the mid-­1990s, when they made up about 30 percent of the total. But they still face disproportionate obstacles to career advancement, including obstacles to the publication of their work in leading professional journals. Bainbridge, “The Future in the Social Sciences,” 636; S. L. Shames and T. Wise, “Gender, Diversity, and Methods in Political Science: A Theory of Selection and Survival Biases,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50, no. 3 (2017), 811–­23. See also K. Brad Wray, “Evaluating Scientists: Examining the Effects of Sexism and Nepotism,” in Value-­Free Science? Ideals and Illusions, ed. Harold Kincaid, John Dupré, and Alison Wylie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87–­106. The underrepresentation of ethnic and racial minorities is a more intractable problem, partly because weaknesses in many of the high schools and colleges where these individuals are educated has limited the pool of qualified minority applicants for PhD programs. 69. For more on this point, see chapter 7. 70. I say this for two reasons. First, senior scholars generally have had more time to develop outlooks which embody distinctive political values that have become widely known. Second, offering an incoming senior scholar tenure is a decision with large long-­term consequences; senior professors may have to live with the new person for the rest of their careers. As noted earlier, however, contingent faculty members hired through nontenure-­track procedures are far more susceptible to employer bias. 71. Henry Reichman, The Future of Academic Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), chap. 5. 72. Andrew Abbott has argued that this pattern has become embedded in the refereeing of papers submitted to sociological journals (and possibly to journals in the other social sciences). For insights into the publishing and citation practices that have contributed to this tendency, see Jerry Z. Muller, The

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Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), chap. 7. See also Andrew Moravcsik, “Active Citation: A Precondition for Replicable Qualitative Research,” PS: Political Science and Politics 43, no. 1 (2010). CHAPTER 4

1. *Robert A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Bruce G. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998).* 2. A major philosophical difficulty is that simple notions of progress rest on the assumed unity of human beings’ fate. But the unavoidability of death for all humans, together with many contingent natural and historical circumstances, guarantees that life never gets steadily better for everyone. At best, individual human lives are cyclical, as, indeed, are the lives of many societal groups. 3. Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Dirk Philipsen, The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 4. For background, see John L. Campbell and Ove Kaj Pedersen, The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 5. Bruce Parrott, “The American Mega-­Crisis: Covid-­19 and Beyond,” Challenge 63, no. 5 (2020): 245–63. 6. In recent decades, some influential philosophers have underscored the limits on our capacity to comprehend external reality, not simply political reality, but reality of any kind. See, for example, Philip Kitcher, Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). See also Daniel Little, New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). 7. David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985); James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); David Easton, John G. Gunnell, and Michael B. Stein, eds., Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the Development of Political Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Roger Backhouse, Truth and Progress in Economic Knowledge (Lyme, NH: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997); Robert Skidelsky, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Anthony Giddens, In Defence of Sociology: Essays, Interpretations and Rejoinders (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013); Peter Hedström and Björn Wittrock, eds., Frontiers of Sociology (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 8. *Patricia Albjerg Graham, Schooling America: How the Public Schools Meet the Nation’s Changing Needs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kindle location 2260.*

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9. For a survey, see Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), chaps. 15–­16. 10. In the 1969 the Women’s Caucus for Political Science emerged more or less in tandem with the Caucus for a New Political Science, on the grounds that the latter was paying insufficient attention to the discipline’s failures to analyze the significance of gender in politics and to counter gender bias in academic hiring decisions. Helene Silverberg, “Gender Studies and Political Science: The History of the ‘Behavioralist Compromise,’” in Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, ed. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 368. 11. Clyde W. Barrow, “The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science 39, no. 4 (2017): 437–­72. Significantly, European political science did not experience a parallel outbreak of disciplinary controversy at this time. Catarina Kinnvall, “Not Here, Not Now! The Absence of a European Perestroika Movement,” in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, ed. Kristen R. Monroe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 21–­44. This suggests that the main causes of controversy were inside American political science rather than in the anticommunist political upheaval that transformed Europe. The critics who ignited the Mr. Perestroika debate charged, on the basis of solid evidence, that the APSA’s flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, had published disproportionately small numbers of articles focused on international relations and on historically based case studies (compared with other major journals in the discipline). For details of the controversy, including divergent assessments of the movement’s effects on disciplinary practices, see Kristen R. Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Farr and Seidelman, Discipline and History; James Farr, “The New Science of Politics,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 439–­45; and the retrospective appraisals in PS: ­Political Science & Politics 43, no. 4 (Oct. 2010). For data supporting the critics’ charges about the American Political Science Review on the eve of the controversy, see Andrew Bennett, Aharon Barth, and Kenneth R. Rutherford, “Do We Preach What We Practice? A Survey of Methods in Political Science Journals and Curricula,” PSOnline (2003): 376 and passim. 12. Easton, Gunnell, and Stein, Regime and Discipline; Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino, eds., Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Jeroen van Bouwel, ed., The Social Sciences and Democracy (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Advocates of a third, overlapping reform movement argue that political science should focus entirely on improving policies and political practices rather than theory formulation. See Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram, eds., Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and J. C. Isaac, “For a More Public Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 2 (2015): 273–­79.

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13. *Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Richard M. Bookstaber, The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019).* 14. Doug McAdam, “From Relevance to Irrelevance: The Curious Impact of the Sixties on Public Sociology,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Adam Kuper, “Social Anthropology,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 151–­52. 15. Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 208; Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), chap. 9; Roger Backhouse, The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7–­10. 16. These two views can sometimes overlap. For example, one could conclude that the US government does little to promote equal opportunity for disadvantaged citizens, while also proposing ways to make government programs for these citizens more effective. A third view is that the discipline should focus on analyzing current political realities without any programmatic aims. See chapter 7 for further discussion. 17. For such disagreements in sociology and anthropology, see Mitch Duneier, “Sociology: Overview,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 22:996–­1000; Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2013), chap. 7. 18. On the origins of philosophical pragmatism in America, see Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001). 19. The persistence of such microideologies within societies—­and arguably within higher education—­is due partly to the influence of vested interests committed to perpetuating specific varieties of ignorance among certain groups. Two important treatments of this complex question are Michael J. Smithson, “Social Theories of Ignorance,” in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), and Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2015). 20. This argument is forcefully presented by Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). On the other hand, some observers have blamed economists themselves for tacitly or explicitly supporting misguided prescriptions for austerity. The one safe conclusion is that nearly all the participants in this controversy have oversimplified the range of views within the economics profession. See Alan Blinder’s review of

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Jeff Madrick, Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World in the New York Review of Books, December 18, 2014, and Arnold Packer and Jeff Madrick, “‘What’s the Matter with Economics?’ An Exchange, Reply by Alan S. Blinder,” New York Review of Books 62, no. 1 (2015). For a penetrating discussion of the epistemological questions underlying this debate, see Oliver Kessler, “Ignorance and the Sociology of Economics,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2015), 338–­48. Considered more generally, American market fundamentalism has unambiguously fueled ideological campaigns against valid scientific findings that support the case for enlarged government regulation of the economy. See Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), especially 162 and 249–­51. 21. The realms of abstract ideas and politics overlap in practice but are analytically distinct in principle. In the USSR, there was a high measure of overlap between the two. In democratic societies, there is substantially less overlap, but it can still be significant. This was the case, for example, during the Progressive era in the United States. See Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 22. One dissenting scholar has voiced skepticism that the social sciences have made any progress at all. Heavily emphasizing the intellectual “impairment” of social scientists, Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) implies that the social sciences have made no tangible contributions to societal welfare (chaps. 12–­13, and passim). But this judgment overlooks many genuine contributions. For example, appointing a layperson with no knowledge of economics to head the US Federal Reserve Bank would quickly reveal the benefits of economic scholarship, the errors of individual Fed chairmen notwithstanding. In the early 1990s, Russia conducted a “natural experiment” of this kind, with disastrous economic consequences that made successful reform much more difficult to achieve. See also Peter Wagner, “The Uses of the Social Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 537–­52. 23. During the first half of the twentieth century anthropology pioneered this expansion of geographical coverage, followed after the outbreak of the Cold War by political science and development economics. In subsequent decades, Western anthropology “came home,” in the sense of widening its analytical attention to encompass technically advanced societies. See the discussion of comparative studies in chapter 10. 24. Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–­1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Helmut K. Anheier and Nikolas Scherer, “Survey Research Centers and Companies,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 23:747–­51. 25. Robert E. Goodin and Hans-­Dieter Klingemann, “Political Science: The

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Discipline,” in A New Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Hans-­Dieter Klingemann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19. 26. Richard Snyder, “The Human Dimension of Comparative Research,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 4. 27. Ellen F. Fitzpatrick, History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–­1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), epilogue. A leading US historian has likewise warned against this tendency among her fellow scholars. It reflects, she says, “the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline.” Lynn Avery Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 82–­86. 28. *Farr, “The New Science of Politics,” 439–­46; Gerardo L. Munck, “The Past and Present of Comparative Politics,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). In this sense, Thomas Kuhn’s famous distinction between revolutionary science and normal science has probably had the negative effect of reinforcing a pre-­existing tendency of scholarly rhetoric (reflected, for example, in earlier talk about the “behavioral revolution.”) Most of us aspire to be more than normal, and using the rhetoric of revolutionary science is an easy way to foster that impression.* 29. According to a survey by James Farr and Raymond Seidelman in the early 1990s, American political scientists in the first half of the twentieth century knew more about the discipline’s history than political scientists during the second half. After about 1980 Farr, Seidelman, and other scholars launched careful historical studies of the discipline, but their findings were not generally assimilated by other members of the profession. For nuanced accounts, see John G. Gunnell, “The Historiography of American Political Science,” in The Development of Political Science: A Comparative Survey, ed. David Easton, John G. Gunnell, and Luigi Graziano (London: Routledge, 1991), 13–­33, and James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, “General Introduction,” in Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, ed. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 1–­11. 30. A survey of syllabi and reading lists for comprehensive examinations found “no items on the history of comparative politics among the canonical works of the field (i.e., works assigned by more than one-­third of the thirty-­two departments in the sample.)” Snyder, “The Human Dimension of Comparative Research,” 27. To say this is not to gainsay the valuable studies on the history of political science that have been produced since the 1970s. Without them, I could not have written this chapter. See the entries in the list of readings on the companion website for a sampling of the most important books and articles. 31. *Loren R. Graham, Wolf Lepenies, and Peter Weingart, eds., Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (Dordrecht: D. Reidel and Kluwer Academic, 1983); Philip Mirowski, Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988); Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, eds., The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Richard P. F. Holt and Ste-

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ven Pressman, eds., Economics and Its Discontents: Twentieth Century Dissenting Economists (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Pub., 1998). According to one overview, “What had been sophisticated historical introductions in [economics] classes and publications were gradually replaced by ‘literature reviews’ of current material. What came to pass for history in the higher reaches of the discipline . . . was often little more than hagiographic celebration of prominent figures of the past and present.” Craufurd Goodwin, “Economics, History Of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. (Amsteram: Elsevier, 2015), 93.* 32. Graham, Lepenies, and Weingart, Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, especially the chapters on sociology and psychology. 33. First published in 1948, the book went through seven editions, several published posthumously under the editorship of Kenneth W. Thompson; the last appeared in 2006. 34. My discussion here follows Robert Jervis, “Hans Morgenthau, Realism, and the Study of International Politics,” Social Research 61, no. 4 (1994): 853–­76. To understand Morgenthau’s intellectual creativity, it should be noted that he wrote Politics among Nations at the end of World War II partly as a critique of prevailing US academic views of international relations, and that he encountered serious pressure from his publisher to tone down his ideas but refused to do so. See Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 192–­ 200. In the opinion of Richard Ned Lebow, Kenneth Waltz and Waltz’s disciples later “purged [Morgenthau’s] approach of its tensions and nuance in a misguided effort to construct a more scientific theory.” Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 217. 35. A more disturbing possibility is that some may not have read it at all. See the discussion of “decorative footnotes” in chapter 14. 36. *Ole Wæver, “Figures of International Thought: Introducing Persons Instead of Paradigms,” in The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making?, ed. Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).* 37. They have, for example, greatly exaggerated his belief in “the invisible hand,” and they have ignored his concern about non-­economic, moral values. See Thaler, Misbehaving, 7, 51, and Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 38. For one means of reducing it, see chapter 9. 39. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution; Snyder, “The Human Dimension of Comparative Research,” 28–­29. 40. Moreover, “reinvention” of this kind can usually be avoided through the simple expedient of regularly consulting the relevant entries in various specialized encyclopedias, as explained in chapter 13. 41. *Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), 36; Allan Megill, Steven Shepard, and Phillip Honenberger, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, 2nd ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012).* 42. Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, eds., The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7: The Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 43. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Usable Theory: Analytic Tools for Social and Political Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Charles Lindblom’s perspective is distinctly downbeat: “[I]dentifiable articulated tested scientific propositions about the social world remain relatively infrequent, and a person’s empirical understanding of the social world emerges not in the form of articulated tested facts or theories but in the capacity of that person to appraise judiciously, to form and express shifting judgments about, the confronted confusing social world.” Lindblom, Inquiry and Change, 170. On the shifting meaning of “theory” in US political science, from a reflexive “ideas and institutions” approach to a positivist approach purged of normative concerns, see Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, “Political Science,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 85–­89. The schism between normative and empirical theory became especially pronounced during the 1960s. This was true in the United States, but not in Great Britain (Adcock and Bevir, “Political Science,” 89). For discussion of the various meanings assigned to the word “theory,” see chapter 9. 44. In political science, this is exemplified by trends in the study of comparative politics. When I was a doctoral student, any piece of research about a non-­Western country was regarded as “comparative” by definition. In the intervening decades, the understanding of comparative politics has gradually been restricted to genuine comparisons involving different countries, including Western ones. For more on comparison generally, see chapter 10. 45. One signal failure was the Western vogue for modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. On its rise and fall, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); see also Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). In sociology, Talcott Parsons made a bid for a similar level of generality during the 1950s and 1960s. In economics, a similar role was envisioned by advocates the neoclassical model. Today, however, “There are very few general theories accepted by the majority of scholars in any discipline; the best known theories are specialized theories: they are what Robert Merton calls middle-­range theories, which do not encompass an entire discipline, but only a part of it.” Mattei Dogan, “Specialization and Recombination of Specialties in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 22:227. 46. John S. Dryzek, “The Progress of Political Science,” Journal of Politics 48, no. 2 (1986). 47. Goodin and Klingemann, “Political Science: The Discipline,” 3–­4, adopt an optimistic stance; compare Brian Barry, “The Study of Politics as a Voca-

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tion,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 450. Goodin’s editorial introduction to another handbook of political science, published about a decade later, does not strike such an optimistic note. Robert E. Goodin, “Introduction: The State of the Discipline, the Discipline of the State,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6, 10–­12, and passim. 48. See in particular John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Helen E. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Stephen H. Kellert, Helen E. Longino, and C. Kenneth Waters, eds., Scientific Pluralism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 1, 4–­9. William James, the nineteenth-­century American thinker who introduced the term “pluralism” to English-­language philosophy, believed that external reality should be regarded as a “pluriverse,” not a universe. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 88, 143. 49. Flyvbjerg, Landman, and Schram, Real Social Science. In my opinion, researchers who assume the metaphysical unity of knowledge are one piece of evidence for Stephen Jay Gould’s sarcastic assertion that homo sapiens is “nature’s most arrogant species.” Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), Kindle location 5703. 50. Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Dubois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); Howard Winant, “The Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 535–­71. See also chapter 6. 51. We will return to the issue of tacit value assumptions and disciplinary perspectives in chapters 7 and 10. 52. Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chap. 4. They also can be categorized according to the degree of attention they give to spatial factors. 53. Mark Blyth, “Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science,” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 493–­98. 54. The etymology of the word “statistics” is revealing in this respect. The word is derived from the word “state,” reflecting the long-­standing desire of governments to obtain accurate information about the human and other resources they formally control. Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 71. 55. Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, chaps. 4, 11. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), emphasizes this liability of government data gathering. But it can also affect the information gathered by nongovernmental analysts, including academic social scientists. For a historical perspective on this problem, see Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit

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of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For contemporary examples, see Deborah Stone, Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020). 56. Lisa Gitelman, ed., “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 57. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-­Paul Fitoussi, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010). More recently, the application of artificial intelligence algorithms to databases containing skewed information has been revealed to generate administrative decisions biased against certain classes of people, such as African Americans. 58. James S. House, A Telescope on Society: Survey Research and Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 59. Andrew D. Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chaps. 1, 7, 8. 60. Richard R. Nelson, “Recent Evolutionary Theorizing About Economic Change,” Journal of Economic Literature 33, no. 1 (1995); Jan Fagerberg, David C. Mowery, and Richard R. Nelson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 61. In this respect it has something in common with narrowly circumscribed “case” research designed to generate new hypotheses. If the phenomenon being investigated is genuinely novel, however, it cannot be accurately described as a case, unless previously undetected cases are thought to be concealed in the historical record. (For more on hypotheses and cases, see chapters 10–­11.) 62. For one attempt to apply this approach in the field of International Relations, see Bruce Parrott, “Lessons of the Cold War: Getting It Wrong,” Journal of Cold War Studies 24 (1), no. 1 (2022): 219–­49. 63. For the sake of fairness, I should explain that although Moore discusses the German case, it is not one of the six detailed case studies considered in the book. Whether Moore intuitively omitted Germany because of its poor fit with his analytical framework is an intriguing—­albeit unanswerable—­question. In any case, Moore does treat the rise of fascism in Japan, where the establishment of liberal democracy under American occupation raises the same explanatory problem. Moses and Knutsen argue that Moore’s seminal book has been widely misconstrued. Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, 227–­29. 64. Moore does not claim explicitly that his analytical framework is historically comprehensive. But it seems clear that this is his ambition, and he makes no serious effort to examine whether the dynamics of modernization in the future may differ substantially from the dynamics he finds in the past. 65. This generalization holds even though Moore acknowledges, in passing, that political actors in some of his cases may have “learned” from the previous experiences of other countries. 66. The USSR, of course, rebuilt the East German political system according to its own communist template. 67. Moore’s chapter on Japan does not discuss this outcome.

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68. They may also help explain Moore’s frustration that several cycles of revision failed to satisfy his intellectual aims for the book. See the preface of Social Origins, xvii. 69. For a thoughtful survey of various scholarly responses to Moore’s influential study, see Jonathan Wiener, “Review of Reviews: The Barrington Moore Thesis and Its Critics,” History and Theory 15 (1976): 146–­75; see also Michael Bernhard, “The Moore Thesis: What’s Left after 1989?,” Democratization 23, no. 1 (2016): 118–­40. 70. In Samuel Huntington’s shrewd appraisal, “the modernization theory of the 1950s and 1960s had little or nothing to say about the future of modern societies; the advanced countries of the West, it was assumed, had ‘arrived’; their past was of interest not for what it would show about their future but for what it showed about the future of those other societies which still struggled through the transition between tradition and modernity. The extraordinary acceptance of modernization theory in both Western and non-­Western societies in the 1950s derived in part from the fact that it justified complacency in one and hope in the other. The theory . . . thus rationalized change abroad and the status quo at home. It left blank the future of modernity.” Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 3 (1971): 292–­93. Chapter 8 discusses ambiguous concepts which obscure the distinction between processes and end-­states. 71. To be fair, Fukuyama subsequently acknowledged this omission and carefully analyzed the political implications of advances in biotechnology. See Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2002). 72. Fukuyama’s later books are much more sophisticated in this respect. See, for example, his Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 73. Philip Kitcher, Science in a Democratic Society (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), chap. 19. This is one of the arguments for research lacking any evident connection to national welfare. In foreign affairs, for example, the Yemen region of the Arabian peninsula long seemed of marginal interest to most of the Western powers. Recently, however, Yemen has become an important locus of international terrorism, due in part to a raging civil war intensified by the involvement of Saudi Arabia and Iran, each seeking regional hegemony. 74. Such divergent objectives are characteristic of sociologists, as well as of political scientists and economists. See, for example, Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpe, “Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Hierarchy: ‘Mainstream’ Sociology and Its Challengers,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 367–­410. For more on this theme, see chapter 7. 75. In France during the Enlightenment, some thinkers “hoped that science might be used to reform or even revolutionize the moral order. Several mathematicians, from the Bernoullis to Condorcet, tried to use probability theory to rationalize political, legal, and economic decision making. In many ways, they

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were the founders of social science.” Loren R. Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 22. “Possibilism” is a term coined by the social scientist Albert Hirschman. See Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 3. 76. Early US proponents of social science aspired, among other things, to improve the American political class. “When the Graduate School at Columbia was established in 1881, it was intended to train men in ‘the mental culture’ (hardly the language of later social science expertise) that would prepare them for careers in the ‘civil service’ or as ‘public journalists’ or for the ‘duties of public life’ generally.” Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 51. 77. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), chap. 1. 78. Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–­2000 (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2001), is a valuable work, but its title is inaccurate; precedence in pioneering social measurement belongs to the nineteenth century, as Osterhammel shows. 79. On the basis of extensive research, Steven Pinker has argued that there is a long-­term trend in modern societies toward less human violence on a per capita basis. (Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). Still, by comparison with other periods since the Napoleonic Wars, the first half of the twentieth century was indeed catastrophic. 80. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–­1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil’s Pact (New York: Viking, 2003); Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–­1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 81. John M. Owen, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–­2010 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Richard Bellamy, “The Advent of the Masses and the Making of the Modern Theory of Democracy,” in The Cambridge History of 20th Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 82. Two entirely novel problems for governments are climate change and cyber conflict. (It goes without saying that many perennial problems have not been mastered.) 83. Communism pushes this technocratic possibility to an extreme. Communist regimes have long claimed that Marxism-­Leninism is the essence of social science, and this ideological claim has made them profoundly unwilling to recognize their own failures and crimes, including the massive deaths they

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inflicted on their own citizens. Instead they have suppressed genuine social research of most kinds on the grounds that the party already knows the essential truths about societal development. 84. For more on this subject, see chapter 7. 85. Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010), 185–­86, 224–­26. See also Veronica O’Keane, A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021). In the past several decades, historians have given a great deal of attention to tracking nations’ changing recollections of past events. 86. J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan, 1969). 87. Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Rogers M. Smith, Political Peoplehood: The Roles of Values, Interests, and Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). A collection of individuals living side by side without shared memories is a sure formula for anarchy. 88. Ernest R. May, ‘Lessons’ of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-­ Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986). 89. Smith, Political Peoplehood. CHAPTER 5

1. Nonetheless, despite these caveats, I will frequently use the word “discipline” for want of a better summary term. 2. Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 3. Many political scientists are in the habit of using “international politics” and “international relations” interchangeably. In my view, this usage is unfortunate; international relations should be understood to include both international political relations and international economic relations, as well as international societal relations. 4. This remains true of some universities, including Columbia, where I earned my PhD. 5. This is still true of a substantial number of Americanists, but some now approach US politics from a comparative angle. The problem of American ethnocentrism also affects other subfields of political science. See, for example, Ole Wæver, “The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 687–­727. For several decades, SAIS, the Johns Hopkins graduate school where I taught for many years, offered graduate concentrations in European Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, and so on, but the only concentration focused on the United States was American Foreign Policy. The implicit assumption was that the United States was an exceptional nation whose internal historical and cultural dynamics were a paradigm of modern-

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ization that did not require academic scrutiny. A few members of the faculty tried to expand SAIS’s coverage of the United States, but only after the shock of the Trump presidency were we able to modify this part of the curriculum, and then only marginally. On the relative neglect of the United States in comparative studies generally, see chapter 10. 6. *This conclusion is based on a comparison of Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1983); Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline II (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1993); Robert E. Goodin and Hans-­Dieter Klingemann, eds., A New Handbook of Political Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (APSA and W. W. Norton, 2002); and Robert E. Goodin, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). In very general terms, the long-­term trend in these surveys is away from subdivisions highlighting American politics and toward the increasingly detailed elaboration of subfields. Within this broad trend, however, considerable variation is evident. See the companion website for more details.* 7. It is worth noting that “Public Administration” was once at the center of the political ­science discipline, not coincidentally, during the Progressive era and FDR’s presidencies. In my opinion, the subfield was later downgraded due to a long-­term negative shift in public attitudes toward the role of government, combined with a disciplinary taste for topics that seemed more glamorous. 8. This is the same kind of problem that relational databases are designed to deal with. Note, however, that they don’t “solve” the problem in a definitive sense. Before such databases can be used, someone (like an expert cataloguer) must define the parameters of the fields to be used. Chapter 13 briefly discusses how to use personalized bibliographic tags to categorize your bibliographic entries. 9. It may also be that the repeated reorganizations of my bookshelves serve a positive intellectual function, as a physical expression of my subconscious ruminations. Cognitive science has revealed close connections between thought processes and bodily sensations and emotions. See Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). 10. According to one survey of the relationship between the political ­science subdisciplines that treat processes inside states and processes among them, the relationship “turns out to be highly complex, fraught and problematic,” and often has “degenerated into a dialogue of the deaf.” John M. Hobson, “Comparative Politics and International Relations,” in Sage Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Todd Landman and Neil Robinson (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 175–­ 76. The relationship between the two subdisciplines is often thought of in terms of different “levels of analysis.” Note, however, that the levels in question are metaphorical, not literal. The US president and a foreign terrorist in downtown Washington, DC, exist on the same physical level. 11. For example, Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberal-

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ism, and Socialism (New York: Norton, 1997), and Edward D. Mansfield and Jack L. Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 12. Peter B. Evans, Harold Karan Jacobson, and Robert D. Putnam, eds., Double-­Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sidney G. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John M. Owen, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510–­ 2010 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Sidney Tarrow, War, States, and Contention: A Comparative Historical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 13. The study of international political economy, which includes not only states but also international actors such as banks and multinational corporations, reflects a similar ambiguity. Is IPE part of IR, or isn’t it? 14. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, “Overview of Political Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Russell Hardin, “Normative Methodology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 15. John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 2001); William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 6; Robert Levine, Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 16. See chapter 7 for further discussion. 17. Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). 18. For a demonstration of this point with respect to contemporary International Relations scholarship, see Christian Reus-­Smit and Duncan Snidal, “Overview of International Relations: Between Utopia and Reality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 673–­709. 19. Eviatar Zerubavel, Generally Speaking: An Invitation to Concept-­ Driven Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chap. 1. 20. See chapter 7 on the connections between values and research. 21. For example, white American and European attitudes toward race powerfully affected the study of international relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

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sity Press, 2008). See also chapter 7 and the chapter 7 supplement on the treatment of race in studies of US domestic politics. 22. Renee Jeffery, “Tradition as Invention: The ‘Traditions Tradition’ and the History of Ideas in International Relations,” Millennium 34, no. 1 (2005): 57–­84. 23. Literary and historical scholars have devoted much closer attention to the formation of cultural traditions—­known in their prescriptive form as canons—­than political scientists have. 24. For related tips on how to manage the bibliographic search process to shape your project as you write, see chapters 12 and 13. 25. Yet another could be “concepts of tradition.” On the malleability of methodological concepts, see chapters 8 and 10. 26. Jeffery, “Tradition as Invention.” Note that using different criteria could produce alternative traditions, but not traditions that are diametrically opposed to one another. This is true, at least, if the observer is conscientious and historically informed. In current circumstances, dramatically inaccurate readings of the social sciences’ disciplinary histories are quite common. For political science, see the illuminating analysis by John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), introduction, chaps. 6–­9. 27. This term refers to the sociopolitical process through which a particular definition of a national community is established by selecting certain social markers of individuals and ignoring other markers that would delimit the community differently. 28. Epistemologically, the assumption that every scholarly work falls within only one tradition resembles the mental habits of the twentieth-­century scholars who championed modernization theory. The theory assumed that all societal features that were not modern belonged to a single residual category called “tradition.” 29. Note that there is vital difference between the invention of scholarly traditions and the invention of national ones. The synthesis of scholarly traditions is limited—­or should be limited—­by prohibitions against the incorporation of outright fictions. The synthesis of national traditions, by contrast, inevitably entails some fictionalization. 30. Loren R. Graham, Wolf Lepenies, and Peter Weingart, eds., Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (Dordrecht: D. Reidel and Kluwer Academic, 1983). Two meticulous historians have criticized what might be called the folk histories of some working political scientists. In their words, “American political science itself has been characterized by warring factions who are inspired by different ideas but who often forget the history of those ideas even as they forge them anew in the heat of a different battle.” Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, “Political Science,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 94. The first incisive critique of the “canned” disciplinary histories taught to scholars-­in-­training came from Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 31. For an especially enlightening analysis of the role of slanted professional

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histories in the struggle between the fields of psychology and psychiatry in the United States, see Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). 32. On the centrality of schemas to human mental processes, see Jerome Kagan, The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 33. David Hollinger, “T.S. Kuhn’s Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” in Paradigms and Revolutions: Appraisals and Applications of Thomas Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980). 34. As sociologists of science have pointed out, these ideals do not reflect the actual behavior of many scholars motivated by self-­interest. 35. Roger Backhouse, “Introduction,” in The History of the Social Sciences since 1945, ed. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. See, for example, the work by two recent Nobel laureates in economics: George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). For a chronicle of the emergence of “behavioral economics” by another Nobel laureate, see Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). In a thoughtful survey of the discipline, economist Dani Rodrik argues that the many different economic models used by economists are sometimes presented and perceived as the comprehensive model rejected by critics. Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), chaps. 1–­4. 36. Traces of these different outlooks are visible in the evolving nomenclature of university departments. Today most universities have a Department of Political Science, but Harvard and a few others still have a Department of Government. When I began my training at Columbia University, the department’s official name was Public Law and Government, reflecting an early tendency to privilege the study of law and constitutions. The department’s name was later changed to Political Science. 37. With the possible exception of psychology, economics has also exerted the broadest cultural influence on the conduct of practical affairs. For a critical account of this influence in the United States, see Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (New York: Little, Brown, 2019). 38. Graham, Lepenies, and Weingart, Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories. See especially Lepenies’s analysis of various histories of psychology. On political science, see John G. Gunnell et al., “Can Political Science History Be Neutral?,” in Regime and Discipline Democracy and the Development of Political Science, ed. David Easton, John G. Gunnell, and Michael B. Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard, eds., Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 39. A work that applies this approach to International Relations is Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making (London: Routledge, 1997).

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40. For example, the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences contains short biographies of many important social thinkers from the eighteenth century onward. Although these entries are not perfect substitutes for full biographies, they can still be very useful. 41. The phrases “intellectual amnesia” and “rhetoric of impersonality” are borrowed from Richard Snyder, “The Human Dimension of Comparative Research,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 2, 28. 42. The best recent example of this approach in political science is Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, eds., Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), which presents long, frank interviews with fifteen leading political scientists about their careers. See especially the interviews with Robert Dahl, Alfred Stepan, David Laitin, and Theda Skocpol. A fascinating biography of a pioneering and unorthodox social scientist is Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Richard Thaler, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017, has published an especially engaging autobiographical account of his long-­term struggle against much of the conventional wisdom in economics; that struggle ultimately helped create a highly innovative new approach to economic analysis. See Thaler, Misbehaving. For further social ­science biographies and biographical literature, see the supplementary website. 43. The unanswered question embedded in this slogan is: Exactly what is turning? Is it several disciplines, one whole discipline, a subfield of the discipline, or a small group of scholars? Another metaphor, more common in literary studies, is the intellectual “move.” See Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 44. This was largely a response to the heavy American emphasis during the 1950s and 1960s on the primacy of the socioeconomic “base” as the principal determinant of individual human behavior and therefore of politics in general. See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). A precursor of the new trend was the publication of Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The theme of the 1981 APSA national convention was “Restoring the State to Political Science.” The book that put this issue squarely on the disciplinary agenda was Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); see also Alfred Stepan, “Democratic Governance and the Craft of Case-­Based Research,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 415–­16. Gabriel Almond, who had led the earlier push to emphasize socioeconomic fundamentals, later acknowledged that the critics had a point, but he charged that they had gone overboard by rejecting the discipline’s professional history and engaging in vague conceptualization. (Gabriel A. Almond, “The Return to the State,” American Political

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Science Review 82, no. 3 [1988]: 853–­74.) Another scholar, examining the matter from a very different angle, later argued that the reform effort had failed and that modernization theory “remains the dominant framework.” (Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 98, 103, 106–­7.) For a renewed application of the new formula, see Vivien A. Schmidt, “Putting the Political Back into Political Economy by Bringing the State Back in Yet Again,” World Politics 61, no. 3 (2009): 518–­46. Ira Katznelson argues that serious efforts to analyze the American state predated the appearance of this formula, but I believe that it does pinpoint a key disciplinary blind spot during the 1950s and 1960s. (Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003], chap. 3.) About this same time, Katznelson coedited a survey of political science that focused on the state (see note 46 below). 45. For more on scholarly rhetoric, see chapters 14 and 15. 46. *In discussing an earlier pioneering comparative study of the role of the state published in the mid-­1970s, Aristide R. Zolberg observes: “It is surely no happenstance that the weighty role of war in state—­and regime—­formation was rediscovered by American sociologists and political scientists in the 1970s, at a time when the United States was involved in the most divisive external conflict in its history, the reverberations of which occasioned widespread upheavals and an institutional crisis at the highest levels of government.” Aristide R. Zolberg, “International Engagement and American Democracy: A Comparative Perspective,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 25–­26. The stagflation of the 1970s had an equally powerful effect on views within the economics profession, although it led some leading economic thinkers to broad conclusions that seem questionable in retrospect.* 47. Katznelson and Milner, Political Science: The State of the Discipline. See also Ira Katznelson and Barry R. Weingast, Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005). Note that disciplinary inattention to the state was primarily a phenomenon in US political science after World War II. British scholars have pointed out that their national branch of the discipline did not follow the same pattern. 48. Daniel Deudney, “Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era,” in Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics, ed. Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 25–­60. See also R. Jervis, “Thinking Systemically About Geopolitics,” Geopolitics 15, no. 1 (2010). 49. Montesquieu, for instance, called climate “the first and most powerful of all empires.” Quoted in Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), Kindle location 1791. 50. Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian

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Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 51. This was true of political science, but less true of economics. See D. Javeline, “The Most Important Topic Political Scientists Are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 2 (2014): 420–­34. (It was also true, incidentally, of America’s civil engineers, who first included climate change in their annual general evaluations of US infrastructure in 2018. Bruce Parrott, “The American Mega-­Crisis: Covid-­19 and Beyond,” Challenge 63, no. 5 (2020): 252–­53; https://2017.infrastructurereportcard.org/making-the-grade/ report-card-history/.) 52. For a systematic attempt to reconceptualize conventional political issues within this broader framework, see John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, The Politics of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 53. To put it differently, they are engaged in unwarranted reductionism. See Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, eds., Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Gillian Barker, Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 54. Joshua P. Howe, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014); Andrew J. Hoffman, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 55. Karen L. Remmer, “Theoretical Decay and Theoretical Development: The Resurgence of Institutional Analysis,” World Politics 50, no. 1 (1997); Karl Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia Gabriela Falleti, and Adam D. Sheingate, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 56. As I see it, such cyclical patterns stem from our inability to formulate theories that encompass all of social reality, combined with our periodic rediscovery of aspects of reality neglected by the reigning theoretical orientation. CHAPTER 6

1. Course work and special comprehensive examinations are not a universal requirement in doctoral programs—­for example, in some British PhD (or DPhil) programs. An informal survey suggests that some leading American PhD programs in political science no longer require comprehensive examinations. That, in my opinion, is a regrettable change from the prevailing US practice. In any case, many of the suggestions in this chapter are applicable as you get ready to enter the dissertation stage. 2. Christine Pearson Casanave, Before the Dissertation: A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students at Early Stages of a Research Project (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), chap. 4. 3. *This depends partly on your personality as well as the personalities of your professors. Miles Taft Bryant, The Portable Dissertation Advisor (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2004); Robert R. and Jane Mayo-­Chamberlain Bargar, “Advisor and Advisee Issues in Doctoral Education,” Journal of

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Higher Education 54, no. 4 (1983). For discussion of harassment issues, see the Web Supplement.* 4. Barbara E. Lovitts, “Making the Implicit Explicit: Faculty’s Performance Expectations for the Dissertation,” in The Assessment of Doctoral Education: Emerging Criteria and New Models for Improving Outcomes, ed. Peggy Maki and Nancy A. Borkowski (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2006); Jeannie Brown Leonard, “Doctoral Students’ Perspectives on the Dissertation,” in The Assessment of Doctoral Education: Emerging Criteria and New Models for Improving Outcomes, ed. Peggy Maki and Nancy A. Borkowski (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2006); Barbara E. Lovitts and Ellen L. Wert, Developing Quality Dissertations in the Social Sciences: A Graduate Student’s Guide to Achieving Excellence (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2009). See also chapter 15. 5. I am indebted to Sara Foose Parrott for teaching me how this game works and how important it is for productive intellectual conversations. For more on this technique, see chapter 15. 6. John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold, The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chap. 3. 7. In that respect, as a supervisor I mimicked my own dissertation supervisor’s overly ambitious advice. See chapter 12 for details. 8. I can testify from personal experience that this stratagem works, albeit sometimes slowly. The finest published exemplar known to me is William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Sewell probes the ideas of other thinkers with both empathy and rigor, thereby generating especially sophisticated ideas of his own. 9. This is something I didn’t understand for a long time after receiving my PhD. I really got the point only when I heard Thomas Mann emphasize it to the students in my PhD seminar. See Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 1. 10. Chapter 12 explains how to find such reviews. 11. For more information on using Current Contents Connect and other bibliographic databases, see chapter 12. 12. For the record, the dates of these scholars are as follows: Max Weber (1854–­1920); Karl Marx (1818–­1883); Robert Putnam (1941–­); Robert Dahl (1915–­ 2014); Robert Gilpin (1930–­2018); Hans Morgenthau (1904–­1980); John Maynard Keynes (1883–­1946); Milton Friedman (1912–­2006). 13. Since the start of this century, one noteworthy trend has been for major publishers to expand their output of reference works summarizing the state of knowledge in individual disciplines and subdisciplines. Among the most active publishers in this realm are Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Sage Publishing, and Wiley-­Blackwell. This trend can help scholars cope with the proliferation of specialized research subjects and monographs. On the other hand, commercial pressures appear to be eroding the median quality of some reference works, especially those issued by less prominent publishers. 14. An efficient way of assimilating articles is to cut and paste the article

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abstract, edit it to incorporate your own ideas or important additional information, and then insert it into the bibliographic record or your notes. You can also get quick glimpses of particular topics by surfing Political Science Abstracts. Don’t apply this tactic for everything, but do it for a few topics or questions that especially interest you. You can get the gist of the authors’ ideas just by reading the abstract. 15. David Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life (New York: Wiley, 1965). Easton was a leading political scientist who became president of the American Political Science Association in the late 1960s. 16. Electronic books that you own are especially useful, because you can, in addition to highlighting and annotating them, do keyword searches for important terms and phrases. (In some of the e-­book formats available from university libraries, you can preserve your personal markings of the text as long as you retain access to the library.) 17. For a fuller explanation, see the excerpt from Gordon Schloming, “On Education,” at the end of this book, and Roy Peter Clark, How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), chap. 6. 18. For a discussion of how to identify and treat your own key judgments in writing the dissertation, see chapter 15. CHAPTER 7

1. Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007). 2. Bjorn Wittrock, “Discipline Formation in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 6:486. This is one strand of a complicated story. For a more nuanced analysis, see Robert N. Proctor, Value-­Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), part 2. 3. “The recognition of novelty in human affairs, for all its hope of earthly emancipation, aroused profound anxiety in cultural groups only lately withdrawn from the assurance of divine purpose in human affairs. The social sciences provided influential models of how that anxiety might be eased through the stabilizing effects of scientific law. John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer showed, in different ways, that modern Western history was propelled along a progressive course of industrial development by laws at work within history that were discoverable by science.” Dorothy Ross, “A Historian’s View of American Social Science,” in Scientific Authority and Twentieth-­Century America, ed. Ronald G. Walters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 35–­36. A broader, neutral definition of scientism concerns the place of science in public culture: “the privilege that is granted to scientific disciplines and their methods and results” in modern societies. F. D’Agostino, “Social Science, the Idea Of,” in International Encyclopedia of the

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Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 14430. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, use of the word in this second sense is uncommon. 4. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–­1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 5. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this outlook was the system of industrial management designed by Frederick W. Taylor, an engineer. See Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), and Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997). 6. *In fact, the writings of political philosophers represent a store of important reflections on political values and political institutions that should be factored into how we think about the subjects we choose to study empirically. Political philosophers have wrestled with problems that you, too, must wrestle with: what issues are worth studying, what dangers and possibilities deserve our attention, and how human beings are likely to respond to difficult situations of various types. Moreover, the line between empirical research and non-­ empirical values has never been as clear as this dichotomy assumes, even in the natural sciences. See Loren R. Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, “Overview of Political Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ronald Beiner, Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012). See also John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chaps. 9–­10; compare David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship, and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Note that Ricci’s book, despite its general title, address only the estate of American political science; he does not ask whether an equivalent separation of this kind befell political studies in other countries. (In Great Britain, at least, it did not.)* 7. *In economics, the strong commitment to social reform that characterized the American Economic Association at its founding was dramatically circumscribed by the subsequent pursuit of ethically neutral professionalism. In sociology, the separation of the academic profession from its origins in social work reflected a similar tendency.* 8. B. Wittrock, “Disciplines, History of, in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), 3723–­24; Ross, “A Historian’s View of American Social Science,” 34. 9. On this process in the field of economics, see Michael A. Bernstein, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-­Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially chaps. 3–­4. 10. Note in this connection that the word “pure” is ambiguous. It can mean

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either (1) consisting of only one substance or (2) without moral flaw. The two meanings are often confused in discourse about research priorities. 11. In the considered view of James Farr, this was the dominant impulse in the discipline between World War I and the Vietnam War. James Farr, “The New Science of Politics,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century Political Thought, ed. Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 434–­39. 12. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science. James Farr concludes that few political scientists shared this attitude, at least as far as the functioning of American democracy was concerned. “Most political scientists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not democrats, even in the United States; or, like [John W.] Burgess, they conflated democracy with the existing nation state without demanding popular participation or an expanded suffrage. Such democratic theorists as existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were regarded by the new [political] scientists as unscientific and unrealistic.” Farr, “The New Science of Politics,” 439. For a critique of practically oriented political research on the grounds that it tacitly accepts social injustices, see Michael J. Shapiro, “The Rhetoric of Social Science: The Responsibilities of the Scholar,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), esp. 373–­76. 13. This holds, incidentally, for Max Weber, a German pioneer of Western social science and champion of the value-­free scholarly ideal. Weber’s stance on these matters has been widely misunderstood. He believed that personal values should not be allowed to color conclusions drawn from empirical evidence; but he himself undertook controversial research on the exploitive conduct of Germany’s entrenched landed artistocracy and other subjects. He also criticized the illiberal politics and annexationist policies of the German government during World War I and participated in the Versailles Peace Conference. (Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), chap. 2.) 14. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). This holds, incidentally, for the natural sciences as well. In each scholarly domain, researchers’ personal values and priorities affect the framing of their research projects. Philip Kitcher points out that the overall research priorities of biomedical researchers in the United States give the diseases prevalent in wealthy societies much higher priority than the diseases prevalent in poor countries, even though the latter generally kill far more people. (Philip Kitcher, Science in a Democratic Society [Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011], 122–­23.) This means that US researchers’ choices are shaped in part by the national values they have internalized. For a searching exploration of the multiple ways that values figure in scientists’ professional activities, see Harold Kincaid, John Dupré, and Alison Wylie, eds., Value-­Free Science? Ideals and Illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 15. The year 1968 marked the apogee of America’s internal crisis. In that year, Martin Luther King, the leader of the US civil rights movement and cham-

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pion of nonviolent protest, was assassinated. In the wake of his death, the urban cores of many US cities exploded in violent protests and riots. A few months later Robert Kennedy, a candidate for president and the leader most likely to force an early US withdrawal from the Vietnam War, was also assassinated. Widespread unrest and closures of college and university campuses ensued. 16. One part of the 1968 tumult was the student uprising that shut down Columbia University, where I was beginning my PhD. This is the only revolutionary situation I have ever experienced firsthand and, as is often the case with middle-­of-­the-­road moderates in such situations, I found it baffling. It probably reinforced my personal tendency to avoid political controversy and seek reassurance by pursuing “pure” scholarship. I might well have left graduate school entirely had that not entailed losing my student deferment and being drafted to fight in Vietnam. For a collection of recollections of the Columbia crisis, mostly from former undergraduates and graduate students, see Paul Cronin, ed., A Time to Stir: Columbia ’68 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 17. *These choices do become easier for established scholars, but sometimes they can still be vexatious, and passion does not necessarily solve them. More about my own experience in this respect can be found on the supplementary website.* 18. Christine Pearson Casanave, Before the Dissertation: A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students at Early Stages of a Research Project (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), chap. 4. Carol M. Roberts, The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending Your Dissertation, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2010), chap. 4, provides a checklist of ways to brainstorm about possible topics. 19. For example, if your specialty is US politics you might consult Thomas E. Cronin, Imagining a Great Republic: Political Novels and the Idea of America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) to track down promising writings on political themes. See also the interview with James C. Scott, who mentions his lifelong habit of reading poetry and novels for an hour or two each day. According to Scott, “if you’re doing political science right, then at least a third of what you’re reading shouldn’t be political science. It should be from somewhere else.” Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, eds., Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 353, 370. 20. See discussion later in this chapter. 21. Gregory J. Kasza, “Unearthing the Roots of Hard Science: A Program for Graduate Students,” in Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method, ed. Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 222–­34. 22. The common theme was how social communities propagate shared beliefs and then adapt them—­or fail to adapt them—­to new circumstances. But it took time for me to see this parallel, and I had some intellectual misadventures with it along the way. See chapter 12 for details. 23. A partial list includes the political socialization of young people, the politics of school curricula, the links between national identity and statehood, varieties of democratic regimes and their origins, political parties and voting behavior, the efforts of modern governments to manage national economies,

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the regulation of financial markets, contemporary challenges to the welfare state, the consequences of the revolution in information technology for personal freedom, sources of stability and instability in authoritarian systems, the emergence and persistence of crony capitalism, the political origins and consequences of economic inequality, the sources of ethnonational solidarity and conflict, the causes of civil war, national origins of grand strategy, recent changes in the incidence and character of interstate war, the political consequences of migration, links between globalization and the spread of international crime, and many more. 24. For more on stress and psychological health, see chapter 14. 25. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941); Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Thomas A. Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015); Bryan Magee, Ultimate Questions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 26. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-­Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 27. Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chap. 6. On the evolution and changing meaning of this term in the natural sciences, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), esp. chaps. 1, 5–­6. 28. I have borrowed the term “probative values” from Kitcher, 37–­38. (Some philosophers use “epistemic values” in a similar sense.) Kitcher differentiates “broad values”—­what I have called existential values—­from cognitive values as well as probative values. In his lexicon, cognitive values represent choices about which subject to study. Probative values represent choices about how to study it. 29. Thomas L. Haskell, “Review: Objectivity: Perspective as Problem and Solution,” History and Theory 43, no. 3 (2004): 341–­59. 30. James S. House, A Telescope on Society: Survey Research and Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Jon A. Krosnick and David L. Vannette, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Survey Research (New York: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017); Mary S. Morgan and Duo Qin, “Econometrics, History Of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 7:8–­11. 31. Initially this distinction was drawn between biologists who favored broad categories for classifying plants and animals and other biologists who favored narrow categories. The historian J. H. Hexter was reportedly the first academic to apply it to scholarship in fields outside the natural sciences. For similar reasons, scholars sometimes differ over the desirability of combining existing specialties into a new synthetic field or keeping them separate. The aesthetic element in scholarly judgment is well captured in an aphorism of Albert Einstein’s: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Quoted in Robert Levine, Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 33. 32. Hofstadter and Sander show that the contrast is an inherent feature of

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using categories at different levels of abstraction. (Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 188–­89.) 33. This is not to say that aesthetic judgments are never consequential. Aesthetic judgment, for example, played a major role in Einstein’s formulation of his key theories. For a detailed demonstration, see Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences. Einstein also took issue with Niels Bohr’s attempts to draw general philosophical conclusions from Bohr’s discovery of complementarity in quantum mechanics. For Bohr, that discovery suggested that the principle of indeterminacy and the limits on causality extended into the rest of the natural world. Einstein, by contrast, rejected this view, preferring to believe that God “does not play dice” with natural laws. 34. Here a gloss on Weber’s term “value freedom” (Wahlfreiheit) is in order. It is usually taken to mean that personal values should not be allowed to distort the framing and interpretation of empirical research. This is in fact one meaning of the term. But it also signifies that as individuals we have a prior freedom—­ the freedom to choose what matters most to us—­and which “gods” (Weber’s word) we will therefore serve. This is indeed a kind of freedom, but its personal and outwardly arbitrary nature can make it hard to exercise. 35. This elasticity is reflected in the various names of the US university departments that study politics. Historically, most of the names contained the word “government” (as in Public Law and Government at Columbia University), and some still do (as at Harvard). A few other departments, such as Prince­ton’s, simply call themselves departments of politics. Today most US departments term themselves departments of political science, but the historical variation in nomenclature reflects underlying divergences over how much attention the field should devote to the institutions of government, versus parties and social organizations, individuals, and nongovernmental entities such as business corporations. 36. According to the editor chosen to head the American Political Science Review in the wake of the Mr. Perestroika controversy, “These days it is harder than ever to find an intellectual center of gravity in our discipline. More and more we are a confederation of narrowly defined and loosely connected, or even disconnected, specializations. Our heightened specialization is further fragmenting our already disjointed discipline, to the extent that most of us have little knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of what our colleagues in other subfields are doing.” Lee Sigelman, “The APSR in the Perestroika Era,” in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, ed. Kristen R. Monroe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 324. See also the similar but less forceful comments by Robert E. Goodin, “Introduction: The State of the Discipline, the Discipline of the State,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11 and passim. 37. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, eds., The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), passim. 38. The “places” in question include countries, but also individual universities and, occasionally, different segments of individual social science departments.

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39. For instance, in 2014 the theme of the annual convention of the American Political Science Association (APSA) was “Politics after the Digital Revolution.” 40. Valuable sources of such information include the Annual Review of Anthropology (1972–­), the Annual Review of Economics (2009–­), the Annual Review of Financial Economics (2009–­), the Annual Review of Law and Social Science (2005–­), the Annual Review of Political Science (1998–­), the Annual Review of Psychology (1950–­), and the Annual Review of Sociology (1975–­). 41. Garry King, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Norman Nie, eds., The Future of Political Science: 100 Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009). 42. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 43. This controversy broke out in 2000–­2001 and became the subject of Kristen R. Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), as well as Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino, eds., Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method (New York: New York University Press, 2006), especially the chapters by David Laitin and Brent Flyvberg. See chapter 3 for a brief discussion of the controversy. 44. However, non-­American scholars were underrepresented. Significantly, almost all the contributors were based at US universities. Yet the book’s title was “the future of political science,” not “the future of American political science.” 45. Without drawing this positive conclusion, one strong critic has asserted that most social scientists “have always been partisan. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of the partisanship of professional social probers [i.e., social scientists] lies in their nationalism.” Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 260. 46. This holds for economics, more so for sociology, and most of all for political science. See Archie Brown, “Political Science in the Soviet Union: A New Stage of Development?,” Soviet Studies 36, no. 3 (1984): 317–­44. 47. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown, eds., The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Christopher Hood, Desmond S. King, and Gillian Peele, eds., Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). National differences likewise exist within the field of International Relations, whether one regards it as part of political science or as a separate discipline. Ole Waever, “The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 687–­727; O. Waever, “Towards a Political Sociology of Security Studies,” Security Dialogue 41, no. 6 (2010): 649–­58. 48. Jack Hayward, “Cultural and Contextual Constraints Upon the Development of Political Science in Great Britain,” in The Development of Political Science: A Comparative Survey, ed. David Easton, John G. Gunnell, and Luigi Graziano (London: Routledge, 1991), 99–­103. In other realms of politics, such as elections,

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political parties, and parliamentary affairs, British researchers have produced a great deal of valuable scholarship, as shown in Hayward, Barry, and Brown, The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century. 49. Similar differences exist between the prevailing patterns of history writing in various countries. See the national chapters in D. R. Woolf, Andrew Feldherr, and Grant Hardy, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5: Historical Writing since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 50. Sandra G. Harding, Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). The need for diversity in the profession is linked to the questions of academic organization and governance touched on in chapter 3. 51. *Archie Brown, “The Study of Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 345.* 52. Franz L. Neumann, ed., The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953). Ira Katznelson renders a harsh verdict on the US academic response to the upheavals of the 1940s. “Total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust literally had made the world precariously unstable and had rendered the world of political thought and ideas dizzying. Curiously, most scholars in the [American] humanities and social sciences turned away, taking refuge in small and manageable questions. It is possible to read the large majority of articles the leading learned journals in sociology, political science, and history published during the decade following the close of the Second World War without discerning that the Devil [supposedly banished by the Enlightenment] had returned.” Ira Katznelson, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 35. Recently one commentator has argued that the concept of totalitarianism was the most important concept developed by US political science after World War II. The concept was, however, developed primarily by scholars with émigré connections to east central Europe, and it played a marginal role in mainline political science. Its most salient role was in US public polemics about the competition between democratic capitalism and communist authoritarianism. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). See also Simon Tormey, Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 53. Heretical as the thought may sound, World War II was beneficial for the United States. It was a “good war” not only in the sense that it was fought against an utterly depraved Nazi regime and a murderous Japanese one, but also in narrower geopolitical terms. Although some 417,000 American soldiers died, American deaths as a share of total population were tiny compared with those of the European and Asian combatants, and the titanic wartime battles never damaged the US mainland. Instead the war revived the American economy, still staggering under the effects of the Great Depression at the outset of the conflict, and it established US global primacy far beyond the position the country had enjoyed in previous eras. 54. *Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).*

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55. Farr, “The New Science of Politics,” 439. 56. *Mary Hawkesworth, “Contesting the Terrain: Flyvbjerg on Facts, Value, Knowledge, and Power,” in Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method, ed. Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino (New York: New York University Press, 2006).* 57. Some other fields of social studies were similarly affected. For the impact of racial attitudes on the study of US history, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Kenneth L. Kusmer, “Historiography” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. Joan Shelley Rubin and Scott E. Casper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1:507–­16. 58. *Charles Gati, “Zbig, Henry, and the New U.S. Foreign Policy Elite,” in Zbig: The Strategy and Statecraft of Zbigniew Brzezinski, ed. Charles Gati (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).* 59. *He elaborates: “Currently, the pool of those who make conjectures is heavily skewed toward white males from upper-­middle-­class backgrounds living in wealthy countries. Future hiring must change the proportions so that a larger number of females, minorities, and others with different biases are included in the group of theorists. In short, affirmative action is needed for the sake of improving the growth of knowledge; pluralism for the sake of epistemology.” James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 187. See also Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 48–­58, and Ruben Martinez, “The Politics of Ethnicity in Social Science,” in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and David K. Van Keuren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), esp. 231–­34. For an extended study showing that racist attitudes influenced the early development of the International Relations field and were contested by a group of black IR scholars based at Howard University, see Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). On the central role played by Ralph Bunche and other major black scholars in the development of African Studies in the United States, see Pearl T. Robinson, “Area Studies in Search of Africa,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 124–­28. See also Jessica Blatt, Race and the Making of American Political Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).* 60. Haskell, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality, 150. CHAPTER 8

1. *Stephen Jay Gould, “Taxonomy as Politics: The Harm of False Classification,” Dissent 37 (Winter 1990): 73.* 2. Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (1970): 1052. 3. For an extended illustration of this point, see Thomas Burger, Max

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Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation: History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987). 4. Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” 40. (I have also borrowed the phrase “data containers” from Sartori.) For a detailed exposition of this essential point, see Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts: A User’s Guide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 5. On the creation of scholarly traditions, see chapter 4. 6. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018). 7. An especially useful source for thinking through the various meanings of important terms is Tony Bennett et al., New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 8. Here I follow Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 2013). For a technical survey of recent research on concepts as mental processes, see Gregory L. Murphy and Aaron B. Hoffman, “Concepts,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science, ed. Keith Frankish and William Ramsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 9. Historians, though, are well aware that these chronological classes can be misleading. That is why they sometimes use terms such as the “long nineteenth century,” which implies that the historical trends prevailing in that century actually persisted until World War I in the twentieth. 10. Eviatar Zerubavel, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) is a revelatory study of the way common classifications simplify (and oversimplify) the fluid complexities of ordinary life. Zerubavel points out that the act of classification usually involves a “complementary process of  .  .  . isolating mental entities from the context in which they are experienced and treating them as if they were totally detached from their surroundings. . . . Separating things from the context in which they are embedded (decontextualization) is the basic model for mental differentiation in general” (6). The omissions of context entailed by the process of classification affect not only researchers but also governments and citizens, often with profound consequences. For some of these effects at the governmental level, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 11. The sense in which I use “classification” here is narrower than Gould’s (cited above) and could cause confusion. Careful reading will show that Gould views classifications as alternative schemas of order based on variable categories, variable categories that this chapter calls “concepts” or “fuzzy concepts.” Fuzzy concepts are discussed below. 12. Each human language, they show, categorizes the same universe of phenomena in a distinctive way. “Every act is unique, and yet there are resemblances between certain acts, and it is precisely these resemblances that give a language the opportunity to describe them all by the same label; and when a language chooses to do so, that fact creates ‘families’ of actions. This is a subtle challenge to which every language reacts in its own fashion, but once this has been done, each group of people who share a common native language accepts

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as completely natural and self-­evident the specific breakdown of concepts handed to them by their language. . . . The tentative and non-­black-­and-­white nature of categorization is inevitable, and yet the act of categorization often feels perfectly definite and absolute to the categorizer, since many of our most familiar categories seem on first glance to have precise and sharp boundaries, and this naïve impression is encouraged by the fact that people’s everyday, run-­of-­the mill use of words is seldom questioned; in fact, every culture constantly, although tacitly, reinforces the impression that words are simply automatic labels that come naturally to mind and that belong intrinsically to things and entities. . . . Categorization thus helps one to draw conclusions and to guess about how a situation is likely to evolve.” Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences, 10–­11, 77. 13. “In short, nonstop categorization is every bit as indispensable to our survival in the world as is the nonstop beating of our hearts. Without the ceaseless pulsating heartbeat of our ‘categorization engine,’ we would understand nothing around us, could not reason in any form whatever, could not communicate with anyone else, and would have no basis on which to take any action.” Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences, 15. Two other authorities put it slightly differently: “We have evolved to categorize; if we hadn’t, we would not have survived. Categorization is, for the most part, not a product of conscious reasoning. We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact act in the world the way we do.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), Kindle locations 237–­38. As explained below, formulating metaphors is a key aspect of analogy making and is therefore central to human existence. “Darwin’s Origin of Species provided the opportunity to replace a view of language as correspondence with reality, with that of a series of tools to support survival. Metaphor in this view is a tool-­ making tool” (David Lambourn, “Metaphor, Role in Social Thought: History of the Concept,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright [Oxford: Elsevier, 2015], 292). 14. Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010), 72–­75 and passim. 15. “A.H.R. Roundtable: Historians and the Questions of ‘Modernity’—­ Introduction,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 631–­37; James M. Banner Jr., The Ever-­Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 16. *Hofstadter and Sander list more than one hundred analogies of this kind employed by computer users. Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences, 396.* 17. For example, Hofstadter and Sander show that most individuals think about the arithmetical procedure of division in physical terms (as in dividing a pie). The physical analogy works for division by whole numbers—­e.g., cutting the pie into six pieces—­but not for division by fractions—­e.g., the number one divided by one-­tenth. See also Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. Lakoff and Johnson likewise point to the common use of spatial metaphors for the passage of time, “moving through time” or “putting the past behind you.”

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18. The key point is that analogy making is the central mental process of analytical thought and that metaphors are analogies. In Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, Hofstadter and Sander present an extremely powerful and persuasive case for this conclusion; further evidence is provided by Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. This cognitive-­science perspective is at odds with the literary studies perspective, which conventionally differentiates metaphors from similes on the basis of the absence or presence of the word “like” between the two things being compared. My wife is a literary scholar, and we have had many sharp exchanges about whether metaphors are or are not analogies. Relying on linguistic markers, literary thinkers equate analogies with similes and contrast them with metaphors. Cognitive science, however, has shown convincingly that all thought rests on comparisons, whether the comparisons are explicit (as shown by the presence of “like” in similes) or implicit (as in metaphors). From the standpoint of cognitive science, literary metaphors and similes are formally distinct embodiments of a single mental process: finding apt analogies that illuminate important similarities between the two things being compared. 19. Hofstadter and Sander present a detailed analysis showing that this is true of physics as well as other fields of expertise. According to another careful study, for Einstein “‘combinatory play’ was the essence of creative thought. It is also the essence of analogy, the process whereby a network of known relations is playfully combined with a network of postulated or newly discovered relations so that the former informs the latter.” (James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World [New York: HarperCollins, 2011], Kindle locations 2853–­2855.) 20. More elaborate sharp-­edged concepts—­trichotomies and so forth—­are based on the same basic principle of classification. 21. For trichotomies, the analogy would be that all colors must be classified as red, green, and blue, without making any allowance for the hues on the light spectrum between these basic colors. The same kind of requirement would apply to classifications containing four or more classes. 22. Note that this act of definition is not a guarantee against conceptual stretching, but it does facilitate the formulation of coherent propositions. (Note also that the term “conceptual stretching” is based on a physical analogy.) 23. Giovanni Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 3, no. 3 (1991): 243–­57. 24. But conceptual stretching is relevant to much more than such mythical animals. One might claim, for example, that applying the sharp-­edged concept of totalitarianism to both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR was an instance of conceptual stretching because it implied that the foreign policy behavior of each regime would be essentially identical. By the same token, some Soviet ideologists engaged in conceptual stretching when they argued that Nazi Germany and the postwar United States were both instances of “imperialism.” 25. For a detailed elaboration of this alternative perspective, see Goertz, Social Science Concepts. 26. The phrase “and more” in this sentence is significant, because of the lim-

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itations of the “white vs. black” metaphor for classifications. Some variables can be quantified across a continuous numerical range (such as the length of light waves, or the height of human beings). Here I am discussing concepts that are defined by multiple variables, some or all of which may be present, thereby qualifying the concept as fuzzy. 27. Sharply defined classification schemes include not only dichotomies but trichotomies and more numerous groupings. 28. Goertz, Social-­Science Concepts, chaps. 1–­5; Charles C. Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chaps. 3–­7. Note that this discussion refers only to visually observable characteristics, not to DNA markers. 29. At first glance this may seem illogical. One either belongs to a family or doesn’t, right? But some cultures define the social boundaries of the family very narrowly, whereas others define them very broadly. Think, too, about the widespread notion of the “family of man.” Usually we think of this phrase as simply a literary figure of speech. Analytically, however, it is a fuzzy concept. 30. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 31. Deborah Stone, Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2020). 32. One rationale for excluding these activities is that they are not quantified through market transactions. But survey research ought to allow for approximate valuations, if the activities’ socioeconomic importance is recognized. In Great Britain, preliminary estimates in 2009 suggested that “unpaid childcare is worth about three times as much as financial services, while household laundering is worth about four-­fifths of financial services’ contribution to the economy.” (Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014], 112.) Note also that many decisions must be made about which quantifiable activities to include or exclude. In an early stage of compiling US economic accounts for GNP, there was an energetic US discussion about whether to include spending on the production of military weaponry. Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, 116. 33. In the past two decades or so, political scientists have tended to identify some political systems as “hybrids”—for example, as combining features ordinarily associated with either democratic or authoritarian polities. (The number of JSTOR political science articles containing “hybrid” in their title increased from 15 in 1990–­1999 to 115 in 2010–­2019.) This tendency is salutary, but I doubt that it reflects a deeper trend to rethink the epistemology of conceptualization. 34. Philosopher of science John Dupré clarifies this issue as follows: “[I]t is important to stress that the claim is not that there are no natural divisions to be found between kinds or organisms. Rather, there are too many. We have to choose which to focus on, and such choice will inevitably and appropriately be constrained by the theoretical ends that our taxonomies are designed to serve. In this respect the situation is parallel to the social case [of social constructivism].” John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49 and passim. For a visual illustration of this

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principle using objects that might be categorized as “cups,” see Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Dutton, 2014), 65. 35. Note that this system of fuzzy categorization is different from a classification based on sharply defined biological relationships such as aunt, uncle, cousin, second cousin, third cousin, and so forth. Under a system of classification based on such biological relationships, the formal extent of the family may be defined narrowly or broadly, but each member slots into a sharp-­edged class defined precisely by that member’s relationship to the other members. 36. Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences, passim. 37. Note, incidentally, that the notion of substantive “distance” between concepts is based on a physical metaphor. 38. This metaphor is drawn from Hofstadter and Sander. 39. For background, see Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective, The International Politics of Eurasia vol. 9 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-­Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 40. My thinking about these issues is indebted to Mark R. Beissinger, “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse,” in Ethnic Politics after Communism, ed. Zoltan D. Barany and Robert G. Moser (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Mark R. Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance,’” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 294–­303. That said, Beissinger applies the notion of family resemblance differently from the way I’ve described it here. 41. This paragraph and the following one rely heavily on Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 5–­41. 42. Smith, Civic Ideals. 43. These skewed perceptions also affected two of Tocqueville’s intellectual descendants: Gunnar Myrdal (paradoxical though this may seem) and Louis Hartz. See Smith, Civic Ideals, 18–­20. Tocqueville, it should be recognized, discussed slavery as a moral problem and a political danger to the survival of the United States, but those considerations did not affect his overall judgments about American democracy. Moreover, he gave no attention to the absence of female suffrage. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 329–­48, 563–­76. 44. This point is related to the distinction made in chapter 2 between research projects that prioritize the study of constancy and those that prioritize the study of change. 45. Note in this connection the recently coined term, “deindustrialization.” That term, which entered common usage in the past few decades, implies that industrialization may be, in a certain sense, reversible. Until recently, the notion that there were conceptual opposites to industrialization as a process and industrialization as an end-­state did not exist. 46. Robert A. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New Brunswick, NJ:

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Transaction, 1994); R. Wolin, “‘Modernity’: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011): 741–­ 51; Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-­Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 47. Dorothy Ross, “American Modernities, Past and Present,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011); C. Symes, “When We Talk About Modernity,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011); L. M. Thomas, “Modernity’s Failings, Political Claims, and Intermediate Concepts,” American Historical Review 116, no. 3 (2011). 48. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Nils Gilman, “Modernization Theory Never Dies,” History of Political Economy 50, no. S1 (2018). 49. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 3 (1971): 283–­322. 50. The most common use of this term is retrospective. It refers to a belief that current concepts and values are essentially timeless and can be applied uncritically to understand the past. For discussion of the many definitions of the “natural,” see chapter 3. 51. Of course, this does not mean that many of the epistemological ideas associated with this term are correct. 52. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 53. It is worth noting that some other scholars criticized Dahl’s introduction of this concept for undercutting the legitimacy of the existing US political system. 54. W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society n.s. 56 (1955–­56). 55. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). 56. Daniel Rodgers formulates the problem in a trenchant phrase: “Manifestly easy to feel, power is notoriously hard to describe and measure.” Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), Kindle Location 1017. See also Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962), and especially the penetrating analysis in Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). I thank Archie Brown for calling this work to my attention. For the broader professional debate around Dahl’s approach, see Clyde W. Barrow, “The Political and Intellectual Origins of New Political Science,” New Political Science 39, no. 4 (2017): 3–­11. 57. One careful anthropological study identified about 160 different meanings of the word “culture” (!) (Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology, 2nd ed. [London: Pluto Press, 2013], 136). Similarly, conservative, reformist, and radical economists studying the “market” tend to view the power dynamics of commercial interactions among human beings from very different moral standpoints.

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58. According to one meticulous intellectual historian, in the wake of the domestic upheavals in the United States during the 1970s, the prevailing American understanding of “the market” shifted sharply. Previously, markets had been regarded as “[v]aried and imperfect, sites of tradeoffs and compromise,” and “had been imagined as indispensable to society, not as a metaphor for society as a whole.” This qualified perspective was now displaced in public discourse by an abstract, idealized notion of “the market” and its benign effects in politics as well as economics. “Most novel about the new market metaphors was their detachment from history and institutions and from questions of power.” (Rodgers, Age of Fracture, Kindle locations 986, 990–­91.) See also Roger Backhouse, The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 136–­38. Some leading economists championed this shift of perspective, although others were critical of it. Perhaps the most prominent critic was Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998. See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999). 59. *Frederic Charles Schaffer, Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2015).* 60. “Totalitarianism” is a more subtle example. It demonstrates, perhaps, how a deep resonance between scholarly and popular usages of a term can feed back into scholarship and generate confusion, roughly in the way suggested by Mario Small in his epigraph to this chapter. See Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 61. Hofstadter and Sander, Surfaces and Essences, 342–­46. 62. Another, of course, is that many of the natural sciences have an extraordinary capacity to manipulate the physical world and, in some cases, make accurate predictions about it. 63. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) chap. 1. 64. In the end, I refrained from using the word, and instead analyzed Soviet pronouncements as “official thought.” Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), chap. 1. Western analysts who paid regular attention to ideological nuances were quicker to detect the depth of Gorbachev’s radical political innovations than those who did not. 65. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1961); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties: With “the Resumption of History in the New Century” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), afterword. 66. P. Bachrach and M. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 (1962): 947–­52. See also the retrospective review of their classic article: Clarence Stone, “Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz. 1962. ‘Two Faces of Power,’” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4 (2006): 670, and John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828–­1996 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Lukes, Power: A Radical View. 67. John Gerring, “What Makes a Concept Good? A Criterial Framework for Understanding Concept Formation in the Social Sciences,” Polity 31, no. 3 (1999): 357–­93.

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68. The biggest sticking point was probably my designation of “charismatic bureaucracy” as a bureaucratic type applicable to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). To the best of my knowledge, this label has never been used in any social ­science publication, for obvious reasons. George Breslauer, however, has analyzed what he calls the CPSU’s “hierocratic” claim to supreme knowledge by comparing the CPSU with the Roman Catholic Church. George W. Breslauer, “Reforming Sacred Institutions, Part II: The Soviet Party-­State and the Roman Catholic Church Compared,” Post-­Soviet Affairs 35, no. 4 (2019): 338–­57. 69. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 70. Bennett et al., New Keywords. New Keywords surveys several hundred common analytical terms; see also Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). According to James Tobin, 1981 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, “‘Market’ is one of the most overworked and imprecise words in economics.” Cited in Rodgers, Age of Fracture, Kindle location 529. 71. Helene Silverberg, “Gender Studies and Political Science: The History of the ‘Behavioralist Compromise,’” in Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, ed. James Farr and Raymond Seidelman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 363–­81; Gary Goertz and Amy Mazur, Politics, Gender, and Concepts: Theory and Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Myra Marx Ferree, Shamus Rahman Khan, and Shauna A. Morimoto, “Assessing the Feminist Revolution: The Presence and Absence of Gender in Theory and Practice,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For a summary of recent research on the complex relationship between biology and gender identity, see Denise Grady, “Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say,” New York Times, October 23, 2018. For a brilliant examination of the evolving meanings of “gender” and related concepts in American culture since the 1960s, see Rodgers, Age of Fracture, chap. 5. 72. Remember my ill-­fated coinage of “charismatic bureaucracy,” described above. 73. *Political scientists’ running debate over the supposed persistence of totalitarianism in the USSR during the 1950s and 1960s is a case in point.* 74. Gerald Holton, The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: With a New Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 236, emphasis in the original. The philosopher Suzanne Langer makes a similar point based on a slightly different image. “[G]enuinely new ideas,” she observes, “usually have to break in upon the mind through some great and bewildering metaphor.” Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 201. 75. Holton, The Advancement of Science, 236, emphasis in the original. The question, of course, is whether any given analogy illuminates or obscures reality. According to one account, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur treated “metaphor as the continuing source for the redescription of the world, but only in a perspective within which philosophy would be concerned to manage the legiti-

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macy of its uses, limiting its influence and restricting any epistemological damage.” (Lambourn, “Metaphor, Role in Social Thought,” 292.) CHAPTER 9

1. As for issues of method, they are no less complicated in the natural sciences than in the social sciences; only some non-­experts believe otherwise. “‘Science’ is not, and has never been, a single practice. Even within the natural and physical sciences, scientific processes and procedures are done differently by botanists and chemists, astronomers and zoologists. Moreover, what it has meant to do science and to be scientific has been changing over time, ever since natural philosophy developed and eventually turned into ‘science.’” Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea and Dvora Yanow, eds., Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 13. 2. Andrew D. Abbott, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); Stephen T. Asma, The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 3. Note that a question with more than one plausible answer can still be slanted. A comical example is, “Have you stopped beating your spouse?” 4. Here it’s worth noting that the words “angle” and “approach,” like many other terms, are also physical metaphors. 5. See especially Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959); Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); and Eviatar Zerubavel, The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 6. *Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 211, issue 4481 (January 1981): 453–­58; R. M. Entman, “Framing—­toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–­58; James N. Druckman, “Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)Relevance of Framing Effects,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (2004): 671–­86; J. N. Druckman and D. Chong, “Framing Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 103–­26; Paul D’Angelo and Jim A. Kuypers, eds., Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); Brian F. Schaffner and Patrick J. Sellers, Winning with Words: The Origins and Impact of Political Framing (New York: Routledge, 2010); Jamie Terence Kelly, Framing Democracy: A Behavioral Approach to Democratic Theory (Princeton: Prince­ton University Press, 2012).* 7. Philip Mirowski, “The Realms of the Natural,” in Natural Images in Economic Thought: “Markets Read in Tooth and Claw,” ed. Philip Mirowski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and James Bernard Murphy, “The Kinds of Order in Society,” in Natural Images in Economic Thought: “Markets Read in Tooth and Claw,” ed. Philip Mirowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also the discussion in chapter 2.

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8. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 10. Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-­Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994). 11. That is not to say that this dynamic always held, only that Garthoff felt that it was the prevailing pattern. This example illustrates how much ontological assumptions matter when we try to explain strategic interactions among political actors. Colloquially put, “Who started it?” In more scholarly terms, where shall we begin our analysis of the historical record? Which parts of that record will we examine, and which parts will we take as given, consigning them to the category of ceteris paribus (“other things being equal”)? 12. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The International Politics of Eurasia, 10 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994–­97). 13. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 14. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017). 15. This example also illustrates the danger of assuming that social phenomena have single causes; often multiple causes are at work. See chapter 10 for further discussion. 16. This is the sense in which James Robert Brown distinguishes between “theories with evidence for their truth” and “theories that seem promising.” James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 91. 17. *Loren R. Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The swing toward behavioralism in the 1950s generated a strong disciplinary impulse to discount political philosophy and to use the term “theory” to describe only empirical research that disavows any normative concerns. A recent study of curricula in fifty-­seven major US doctoral programs in political science found that approximately 65 percent of them (38/57) had a quantitative methods requirement. But only about 18 percent required a political theory course. (Calculated from Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea, “The Graduate Student Experience: ‘Hegemony’ or Balance in Methodological Training?,” in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, ed. Kristen R. Monroe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 389, 393.)* 18. Mattei Dogan, “Specialization and Recombination of Specialties in the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 23:227. 19. In writing the theoretical part of my dissertation, I was unwittingly caught up in this quest for generality. See chapter 14 for details.

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20. Andrew Abbott remarks, “Specialists in knowledge tend to withdraw into pure work because the complexity of the thing known eventually tends to get in the way of the knowledge system itself. So the object of knowledge is gradually disregarded.” Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 22. 21. This outlook is explicitly challenged by the work of Robert Jervis, mentioned at the start of chapter 1. 22. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 23. This is the essential theme of the chapters in Earnest R. May et al., eds., History and Neorealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). It may be that IR scholars’ impulse to formulate a single overarching theory has declined in the past two decades. Critics have charged that economists as a group exhibit the same tendency. Dani Rodrik, however, provides an important qualification. Rodrik agrees that economists tend to posit a single model of the market in their general pronouncements, as well as in undergraduate teaching. But he reports that their scholarly work revolves around a diverse set of discrete models based on highly varied assumptions. Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), introduction, chaps. 1, 5, and 6. 24. Rodrik, Economics Rules, chaps. 5–­6. 25. Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 26. Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science. 27. The basic sources of those tensions were discussed in chapters 2 and 3. 28. In the words of one historian of science, “Reflective accounts about the social and behavioral sciences have often supposed that these fields have short histories, and that the pursuit of quantification means following the path of natural science triumphant. But the rise of a quantitative ethos in natural science can be dated no earlier than the early eighteenth century. . . . From this perspective, it would be difficult to argue that political and economic studies lagged behind natural science in their reliance on numbers. . . . Quantification is as central to social as to natural science.” Theodore M. Porter, “Quantification in the History of the Social Sciences,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 19:705. See also Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). That said, in the years since World War II, the extraordinary achievements of the natural sciences have certainly reinforced desires within the social sciences to apply quantitative techniques. 29. From the beginning, however, anthropologists were heavily involved in collecting statistics on human physical measurements. Note that limited quantification has also occurred in some branches of the professional study of history, where it is known as “cliometrics.” 30. Theodore Porter puts it this way: “[Q]uantification in social science has, for two centuries, been enveloped in a certain mystique, regarded as an indication of rigor or at least of scientific maturity. We should understand it not as the key to all mysteries, but as a powerful set of tools and concepts, to be integrated

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as much as possible with theoretical understanding and with other ways of comprehending social phenomena.” Porter, “Quantification in the History of the Social Sciences,” 705. 31. This assumption is linked with the restrictive interpretation of the “unity of science” discussed in an earlier chapter. 32. This is a central theme of the valuable work by Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Examples from the study of the USSR and the United States make the vital importance of such assumptions clear. Keith Darden and Anna Maria Grzymaa-­Busse, “The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse,” World Politics 59, no. 1 (2006): 83–­115; Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 33. Dvora Yanow, “In the House of ‘Science,’ There Are Many Rooms: Perestroika and the ‘Science Studies’ Turn,” in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, ed. Kristen R. Monroe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 204. 34. In late-­nineteenth-­century America, the nongovernmental quantification of data initially “emerged among social workers, predominantly women who were not academics. It was an explicitly reforming strategy. One might call it objective (in that it strove for accuracy), but it was not neutral. Only when academic men adopted such methods in the late 1920s was it associated with the vision of an objective and neutral social science that had no room and no need for political dialogue.” Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 49–­50. 35. On the latter point, see Henry M. Cowles, The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), chaps. 1–­2, and chapters 2 and 3 in this volume. 36. Notice that I’ve referred above to the status imbalance between quantitative and qualitative methods, not to the methodological balance in published research. The actual ratio between the two bodies of publications is difficult to gauge. According to one authority on International Relations, “Qualitative research dominates political science. In the field of international relations (IR), for example, about 70% of scholars primarily employ qualitative methods, compared to 21% favoring formal or quantitative analysis. Since nearly all of the latter make secondary use of textual and historical methods, overall over 90% of IR scholars employ qualitative analysis, whereas 48% use any statistical and only 12% any formal methods.” Andrew Moravcsik, “Active Citation: A Precondition for Replicable Qualitative Research,” PS: Political Science and Politics 43, no. 1 (2010): 30, citing Richard Jordan, Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney, “One Discipline or Many? TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculty in Ten Countries.” Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Project, Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, the College of William and Mary, 2009, http://irtheoryandpractice.wm.edu/projects/trip/Final_Trip_Report2009.pdf 37. *Cassandra V. Emmons and Andrew M. Moravcsik, “Graduate Qualita-

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tive Methods Training in Political Science: A Disciplinary Crisis,” PS: Political Science & Politics 53, no. 2 (2020); Moravcsik, “Active Citation”; C. Elman and D. Kapiszewski, “The Qualitative Data Repository’s Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) Initiative,” PS: Political Science & Politics 51, no. 1 (2018); D. Kapiszewski and S. Karcher, “Transparency in Practice in Qualitative Research,” PS: Political Science & Politics 54, no. 2 (2021); I. Rohlfing et al., “A Reproduction Analysis of 106 Articles Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, 2016–­2018,” PS: Political Science & Politics 54, no. 2 (2021).* 38. For a strong critique of misapplications of such methods—­but not of their use per se—­see Stephen Thomas Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 39. For a valuable survey, see Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea, eds., Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (New York: Routledge, 2015). 40. For a major study that skillfully blends the two approaches, see Archie Brown, The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age (London: Vintage Paperback, 2018). 41. See, for example, Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), chaps. 3–­6; Bruce Parrott, “Soviet National Security under Gorbachev,” Problems of Communism 37, no. 6 (1988): 1–­36. 42. A. Ahmed and R. Sil, “When Multi-­Method Research Subverts Methodological Pluralism—­or, Why We Still Need Single-­Method Research,” Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 4 (2012): 935–­53. See also Mary Hawkesworth, “Contesting the Terrain: Flyvbjerg on Facts, Value, Knowledge, and Power,” in Making Political Science Matter: Debating Knowledge, Research, and Method, ed. Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 152–­70. 43. Here’s a small example that illustrates the gradations between qualitative and quantitative research. My dissertation was unquestionably qualitative, because it relied on close reading of Kremlin speeches and the narration of political interactions inside the Soviet regime. But it also contained a small yet important quantitative element. The Soviet economic authorities regularly compiled data showing the number of new models of machine tools put into production each year. In the late 1960s this number dropped substantially. That was one indication that the economic reforms introduced in the mid-­1960s had backfired and that technological innovation was becoming an increasingly serious political problem the leadership did not know how to solve. 44. One valuable study of this kind is Robert M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006). As in economic modeling, the assumptions underlying this work are vitally important. Using the assumption of completely self-­interested actors, game theory offers a powerful explanation of the sources of cooperation among actors with such motives who know they will remain engaged with one another over an extended period. This reputational theory, however, does not demonstrate that all actors in the real world are guided by the same motivation, and it does not exclude the argument that similar levels of cooperation can result from actors guided by genuinely altruistic motives. (S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and

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Neoliberal Political Economy [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016]; Chandra Sripada, “Free Will and the Construction of Options,” in Homo Prospectus, ed. Martin E. P. Seligman et al. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], and Roy Baumeister, “Emotions: How the Future Feels (and Could Feel),” in Homo Prospectus, ed. Martin E. P. Seligman et al. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 215–­18.) In other words, cooperative social behavior may be the result of equifinality, with independent causes leading to the same outcome. For more on this matter, see chapter 10. 45. Jerome Kagan, The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 120–­22. 46. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 141. 47. *This is a central theme of the work by Brent Flyvbjerg and like-­minded scholars. See chapter 7 for details.* CHAPTER 10

1. This academic practice is widespread, abetted by the lowly colon that separates titles from subtitles. (The title of my dissertation—­“Technology and the Soviet Polity: The Problem of Industrial Innovation, 1928–­1975”—­provides an example. To completely fulfill the promise of the title would have required, at a minimum, a treatment of Soviet agricultural technology, and arguably Soviet communications technology as well.) 2. To put it differently, “comparison” is a fuzzy concept encompassing a variety of related analytical methods. In 1991 Giovanni Sartori condemned the unreflective nature of most comparative-­politics comparisons. See Giovanni Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 3, no. 3 (1991): 243–­57. 3. Max Weber underscored the comparative aspect of history writing. His point was that the analytical terms used by historians are unavoidably comparative, whether or not historians understand this fact. Chapter 8 showed why this is so: Like all other social observers, historians must use fuzzy concepts that are implicitly based on analogies adapted to include “comparable” observations from other writers. 4. Sam Glucksberg, “How Metaphor Creates Categories—­Quickly!,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 68. Changing the metaphor slightly, Giovanni Sartori observes, “We frequently argue that apples and pears are ‘incomparable’; but how do we know unless we compare them?” Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” 245. To be accurate, the pejorative adage should be “that’s like counting apples and oranges as the same thing,” or “like putting apples and oranges in the same bag.” 5. To put it in terms of the research taxonomy proposed in chapter 4, we may have extended the boundaries of the open-­dynamic category of research and created a new avenue of inquiry.

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6. John Gerring, “The Case Study, What It Is and What It Does,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Carles Boix and Susan Carol Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 98–­99, emphasis in the original. Gerring adds, “An ontology is a vision of the world as it really is, a more or less coherent set of assumptions about how the world works, a Weltanschauung analogous to a Kuhnian paradigm” (109). For more about ontology, see chapter 11. 7. Consider as an example Carroll P. Kakel, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). This comparison probably strikes you as far-­fetched. But accepting the comparison does not mean accepting the analogy that underlies it. Nor does it mean—­without empirical investigation—­that the analogy should be rejected. 8. For a probing exposition of various approaches to comparison and the tradeoffs among them, see John Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (2004): 341–­54. 9. That is, the large-­N approach increases external validity but decreases internal validity. 10. Note that these two continuums are closely related, but not identical. On the relationship between varieties of qualitative and varieties of quantitative research, see chapter 9. 11. One established political scientist reportedly stated that “younger scholars are almost compelled to develop generalizable models, most often imported from American politics or political economy.” (Quoted anonymously in Michael Kennedy, “Area Studies and Academic Disciplines across Universities: A Relational Analysis with Organizational and Public Implications,” in International and Language Education for a Global Future: Fifty Years of U.S. Title VI and Fulbright-­Hays Programs, ed. David Wiley and Robert S. Glew [East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010], 216.) 12. As mentioned previously, my advisor urged me to write a historical “background chapter” for my study of the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s. By saying this, he was in effect advising me to make my dissertation into a study comparing separate periods in the existence of a single entity, the Soviet state. This made the dissertation into a diachronic study, at least in a loose sense. It also made the dissertation more historical, and much longer! 13. “In book titles and course titles, comparative government meant foreign government.” Samuel P. Huntington, “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 3 (1971): 284–­85. 14. Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth Century Intellectual History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), chap. 7. 15. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Some anthropologists challenged this approach (as one might expect.) 16. The underlying ontological question was what kind of political order was “modern” and “natural.” It was part of the highly charged ideological struggle between Washington and Moscow. See Gilman, Mandarins of the

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Future, and David C. Engerman et al., eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). 17. Peter Mair, “Comparative Politics: An Overview,” in A New Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Hans-­Dieter Klingemann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 309–­35. Despite the deficiencies of the substantive ideas connected with the modernization approach, it did provide one rationale for expanding the study of foreign countries as they purportedly underwent the process of modernization. Kennedy, “Area Studies and Academic Disciplines across Universities.” 18. *Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Charles C. Ragin and Claude Rubinson, “Distinctiveness of Comparative Research,” in Sage Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Todd Landman and Neil Robinson (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 13–­34.* 19. Alexander Cooley and Jack L. Snyder, eds., Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 20. Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). The International Studies Association was founded in the United States in 1959. 21. Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 2019). 22. For example, Soviet empirical research on foreign regions was fueled by Moscow’s geopolitical ambitions, including the desire to undercut Western influence in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. (A parallel process now seems to be occurring in China.) The Soviet expansion of area-­studies institutes and programs revealed unusually sharp tensions between empirical research and the official ideology. See Jerry Hough, The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985); Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), chaps. 5–­6; Jeffrey T. Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Such tensions, however, have been significant even in the United States and other democratic systems (as noted in chapter 7). 23. According to one careful observer, there is a “profound disjuncture . . . between the case study’s acknowledged contributions to political science and its maligned status within the discipline.” Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?,” 341. On the other hand, the champions of “phronesis,” discussed in chapter 3, argue that case studies are the essence of social science,

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and that the ambition to formulate firm generalizations from particular cases is misplaced. Sanford Schram, “Phronetic Social Science: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in Real Social Science: Applied Phronesis, ed. Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 24. See chapter 3. 25. Mair, “Comparative Politics: An Overview.” 26. Gerardo L. Munck, “The Past and Present of Comparative Politics,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 59. 27. In IR, the discrepancies are traceable to real variations in publishing patterns. One careful study found that in the late 1990s only 5 percent of the IR articles published in the flagship American Political Science Review included case studies, whereas more than 40 percent of the IR articles published in ten other major journals used case studies. (Andrew Bennett, Aharon Barth, and Kenneth R. Rutherford, “Do We Preach What We Practice? A Survey of Methods in Political Science Journals and Curricula,” PS: Political Science and Politics 36, no. 3 [2003]: 373.) The authors explain that “articles coded as case studies included those with careful case selection and research design as well as those that were less rigorous but . . . involved detailed historical analysis of a few cases.” Bennett et al., “Do We Preach What We Practice?” 374. 28. In 1982, the official in charge of the Ford Foundation’s long-­term program to promote foreign-­area studies stated that the “expansion of international scholarship . . . has been one of the glories of our time. . . . [A]s a result of these efforts . . . the academic world has become a great storehouse of what had been rather scattered pockets of expertise throughout this country, and a great flowering of intellectual effort on [the study of] far places has resulted.” Francis Sutton, quoted in Gabriel A. Almond, “The Political Culture of Foreign Area Research: Methodological Reflections,” in The Political Culture of Foreign Area and International Studies: Essays in Honor of Lucian W. Pye, ed. Richard J. Samuels and Myron Weiner (McLean, VA: Brassey’s (US), 1992), 199. For details, see also McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise. 29. This distinction is not a rigid dichotomy, of course, which is presumably why Michael Kennedy advocates treating “area studies expertise as a continuous rather than categorical variable.” (Michael D. Kennedy, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015], 89.) Sometimes especially flexible and innovative scholars are willing to learn the necessary languages on the fly. The best example I know is David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-­Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Laitin was not trained as a specialist on the USSR, but his pioneering study won the best-­book award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 1999. Incidentally, serious study of a foreign language is an example of path-­ dependency in our professional careers. Rather like the intensive study of quantitative techniques, it enlarges certain research possibilities and limits others. 30. In the early 2000s, a survey of fifty-­seven US doctoral programs in polit-

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ical science showed that only about 15 percent had a foreign language requirement, compared with about 65 percent that had a quantitative methods requirement. (Calculated from the figures in Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea, “The Graduate Student Experience: ‘Hegemony’ or Balance in Methodological Training?,” in Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science, ed. Kristen R. Monroe [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005], 389.) The absence of extensive foreign language proficiency has implications that extend beyond area studies per se; it means that few US PhD graduates in political science are equipped to read the works of foreign researchers on any subject, unless these happen to be published in English. 31. Charles King, “The Decline of International Studies: Why Flying Blind Is Dangerous,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 4 (2015): 88–­98. 32. US newspapers and broadcasters have far fewer reporters permanently stationed abroad than during the Cold War, and reports from flying teams of visiting journalists frequently fail to capture the essential historical and cultural context of foreign events. 33. The two main questions are (1) can scholars from outside the groups understand the subject groups empathetically but still avoid being “captured” by their self-­understandings, and (2) are there certain problems that scholars from the subject group nevertheless will treat more seriously and, therefore, understand better? Ruben Martinez, “The Politics of Ethnicity in Social Science,” in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and David K. Van Keuren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 228–­52. On this issue, see the discussion of minority representation in chapter 7. 34. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Martinez, “The Politics of Ethnicity in Social Science.” 35. King, “The Decline of International Studies,” 88–­98. 36. This was a central issue in the “Mr. Perestroika” controversy, even though it was not always clearly spelled out. See also Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 37. “Many case study researchers feel that to compare societies with vastly different cultures and historical trajectories is meaningless. Yet many cross-­case researchers feel that to restrict one’s analytic focus to a single cultural or geographic region is highly arbitrary, and equally meaningless.” Gerring, “The Case Study, What It Is and What It Does,” 109. See also Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 38. Here it is worth emphasizing once more that “regions” are fuzzy concepts (and that globalization has made them more so). For example, comparing elections in France and Poland would quality as an intraregional (i.e., intra-­ European) comparison. Comparing elections in France and Morocco would presumably quality as interregional, even though the physical distance between these two countries is not significantly larger than the distance between France and Poland and even though Morocco was part of the French Empire for about half a century. Scholars have also differed over the definition of other regions, such as Africa and the Middle East. See Pearl T. Robinson, “Area Studies in

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Search of Africa,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 120, 144; and Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 91–­98. 39. Gerring, “The Case Study, What It Is and What It Does,” 100. 40. “All we can safely conclude is that researchers invariably face a choice between knowing more about less, or less about more. The case study method may be defended, as well as criticized, along these lines.” Gerring, “The Case Study, What It Is and What It Does,” 106–­9. 41. This sample was taken from the electronic Dissertations and Theses database (discussed further in chapter 13). Compiled in 2017, it is based on the abstracts of the ten most recent comparative politics dissertations defended in seven political ­science or government programs: Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, SAIS, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. I thank Beth Smits for assembling this information. 42. John Agnew, “The Devaluation of Place in Social Science,” in The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations, ed. John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); John A. Agnew, David N. Livingstone, and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2011); Rick Fawn, “‘Regions’ and Their Study: Wherefrom, What for and Whereto?,” Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 5–­34; Robert David Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). The role of abstraction in delineating regions is especially evident when we consider three pseudo-­regions created by Washington and Moscow as part of their geopolitical rivalry: the First World, the Second World, and the Third World. See Carl E. Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–­1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 565–­90. Note that as a scholarly specialization, “geography” itself is a fuzzy category. Contemporary geographers are debating among themselves how abstract or place-­specific their discipline should be. 43. Indeed, as an academic term, “studies” acquired its primarily geographical connotation (as in “area studies”) and shed its primarily temporal one (as in “medieval studies”) only during the second half of the twentieth century. Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 77. 44. *See the chapter supplement.* 45. At my university, this change of intellectual orientation produced a low-­ key but earnest academic conflict, as it probably did in many other universities. The question at SAIS was whether teaching about Eastern Europe should be transferred to our European Studies Program (which, practically speaking, had previously focused almost entirely on the study of West Germany and the rest of Western Europe). The SAIS dean at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, was an enthusiastic proponent of such a move. David Calleo, our director of European Studies, was willing to make the switch in formal terms, but was disinclined to substantially change the overall coverage of European Studies. I, as director of the

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newly renamed Russian and Eurasian Studies Program, was unenthusiastic about the idea. In the end we compromised, making it possible for students to pursue the study of Eastern Europe through either program. For wider discussion, see Ellen Comisso and Brad Gutierrez, “Eastern Europe or Central Europe? Exploring a Distinct Regional Identity,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 262–­313. 46. This point was illustrated by a debate in my PhD seminar more than a decade ago. One of the students, a US naval officer, expressed strong views about the political distinctiveness of the West. I didn’t disagree in principle, but I thought his view was ahistorical and therefore too rigid. During the Nazi era, I asked, was Germany part of the West as he conceived it? The need for such a historical perspective is powerfully underscored by Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1998), published at the height of the US public intoxication with idea that the United States and Europe had arrived at a liberal “end of history.” 47. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, ed. Noam Chomsky and others (New York: Columbia University Committee on Area Studies, 1991). 48. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Martin S. Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001); Fred Halliday and Gerd Nonneman, “9/11 and Middle Eastern Studies Past and Future: Revisiting Ivory Towers on Sand,” International Affairs 80, no. 5 (2004): 953–­62; Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States; Andrew J. Rotter, “Saidism without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History,” American Historical Review 105, no. 4 (2000); S. Yaqub, “American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945,” Reviews in American History 31, no. 4 (2003): 619–­25. 49. Engerman, Know Your Enemy; Golfo Alexopoulos, Kiril Tomoff, and Julie Hessler, eds., Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 50. Paul W. Drake and Lisa Hilbink, “Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 34–­73. 51. *Ronald J. Schmidt Jr., “In the Beginning, All the World Was America: American Exceptionalism in New Contexts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). This has been so even though, as noted earlier, apples and oranges can be meaningfully compared. It suggests that mistaken notions about the intellectual features of comparison have been widespread.* 52. Many studies of US politics, for example, have failed to specify clearly

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which of their conclusions apply only to the United States and which to politics in general. Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?,” 345. This ambiguity testifies to the persistence of American exceptionalism (in the sense of the assumed universality of American experience) in this particular branch of political science. Looking at the same ethnocentric tendency from a slightly different angle, Giovanni Sartori acidly remarked that in the United States “a scholar who studies only American presidents is an Americanist, whereas a scholar who studies only French presidents is a comparativist. Do not ask me how this makes sense—­it does not.” Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” 243. 53. Roughly twenty years ago a pioneering collection attempted to put this issue on the scholarly agenda (Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002]). American Political Development scholars, however, have remained focused almost entirely on the internal dynamics of the system. In an era of widespread international terrorism and protracted US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is a striking omission. By contrast, historians have paid more attention to such interactions. 54. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Desmond King et al., eds., Democratization in America: A Comparative-­Historical Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Steven L. Taylor et al., A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-­Country Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Adam Sheingate, “Institutional Dynamics and American Political Development,” Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1 (2014): 461–­77. See especially Richard M. Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert C. Lieberman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also the important comparative study by Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). This new scholarly trend, however, has not encompassed the direct interactions between the international strategic environment and US political development, as called for in Katznelson and Shefter, Shaped by War and Trade. 55. According to two leading comparativists, even studies in the new domain of American Political Development have involved few explicit comparisons with other countries. Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, “Comparative Perspectives on Inequality and the Quality of Democracy in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 4 (2011): 842. CHAPTER 11

1. For a rigorous philosophical argument to this effect, see Helen E. Longino, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chaps. 1, 8–­11. 2. In my opinion, this general description holds true despite the many interdisciplinary forays and exchanges discussed in chapter 2.

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3. “Somewhere in the 1950s, the break with history acquired the force of a generalized paradigm shift in academic culture. One discipline after the other in the human sciences cut its ties to history, strengthened its autonomy with theory and self-­oriented critical analysis, and produced its meanings without that pervasive historical perspective that in the nineteenth century had permeated the self-­understanding of almost every branch of learning. While the social sciences turned to behaviorism and natural-­scientific models, humanistic disciplines developed self-­referential formalistic criticism.” Karl E. Schorske, “History and the Study of Culture,” in History and . . . : Histories within the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 391. The intellectual costs of this broad trend are discussed in chapter 2. 4. For a sampling of disagreements since the late nineteenth century, see Leslie Forster Stevenson and David L. Haberman, eds., Ten Theories of Human Nature, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that scholars have reached any consensus about human nature. Academic debates on this subject persist, especially among the different social ­science disciplines and subdisciplines. Moreover, the broader public debate over the so-­called nature-­nurture question shows no signs of diminishing (although there is increasing recognition among scholars that this dichotomy is the wrong way to frame the issue). What I am proposing is that existing empirical studies provide a solid foundation for serious efforts to understand human nature not as a single essence, but as a vast range of biological and cultural potentials that are then shaped by each individual’s natural and social environment. According to one penetrating thinker, “People are indeed very easily indoctrinated by their societies. That is what makes their nature so much harder to study than that of other species.” Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 36. For a brilliant discussion of this issue, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Among numerous other important studies, see John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 2001); Evelyn Fox Keller, The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013); and Robert Levine, Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 6. This is probably the greatest long-­term discovery from anthropological research. (Marshall David Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008); Christopher J. Berry, “Human Nature,” in Political Concepts: A Reader and Guide, ed. Iain M. Mackenzie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 404–­13). On the biological roots and cultural plasticity of human behavior, see especially Midgley, Beast and Man. It should go without saying that despite the expanded knowledge offered by scholarly disciplines, many choices and decisions by individual humans still cannot be adequately explained in reductionist terms. 7. These generalizations, of course, simplify the complexities of the individ-

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ual disciplines, and also their evolution over time. In one sense, psychology is less susceptible than political science to this critique because psychologists work hard to identify and catalog the variety of human behavior among individuals. Given the American discipline’s focus on laboratory experiments, however, it has paid little attention to behavioral variations across cultures and the cultural causes of those variations. This comparative dimension has traditionally been the domain of anthropology. 8. *This scholarly orientation, however, does not resolve two vital issues: exactly how to understand the dynamics of interpersonal power and how to understand the definition of the political realm. See Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).* 9. Compare Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 14–­43. 10. *The same holds true for the relationships between the study of history and the social sciences, as explained in chapter 2 above.* 11. It is also true, of course, that within each discipline there are disagreements about typical human motives and behavior, as this chapter shows. 12. The concept of political economy was common in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it aptly describes the work of many leading social thinkers in those years. 13. Gordon Tullock, as quoted in Jane J. Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-­Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 12. 14. Robert H. Frank, “The Complex Ethical Consequences of ‘Simple’ Theoretical Choices,” in The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics, ed. George DeMartino and Deirdre N. McCloskey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 219. 15. Jonathan B. Wight, Ethics in Economics: An Introduction to Moral Frameworks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 19. Here it should be noted that pioneering students of decision making, such as Herbert A. Simon, have long challenged the notion that economic actors always optimize their preferences. Many economic actors, according to this view, must be content to “satisfice” because of limitations on available information and on their capacity to calculate. Hunter Heyck, Age of System: Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 83, 134. 16. Wight, Ethics in Economics, 149. 17. See the extended discussion by Charles Lindblom, who opts instead for the nonreductionist notion of “human volitions.” Charles E. Lindblom, Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), chap. 2. 18. This point is argued at length in Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-­First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Gary Saul Morson and Morton Owen Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 19. See Midgley, Beast and Man. 20. The relatively new field of “behavioral economics” seeks to take these discrepancies into account (see chapter 10). Morson and Schapiro, Cents and

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Sensibility, criticize behavioral economics for neglecting the importance of culture, but I believe that this particular criticism is, for the most part, wide of the mark. 21. S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Heyck, Age of System, 1–­2, 49–­52, presents evidence that this trend occurred more or less simultaneously in all the U.S. social science disciplines, and that attributing the trend in political science to the influence of the economics discipline is therefore anachronistic. 22. See the brilliant exposition in Stephen Holmes, “The Secret History of Self-­Interest,” in Beyond Self-­Interest, ed. Jane J. Mansbridge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 267–­86. As Holmes notes, the widespread incidence of these destructive motives in precapitalist society helps explain why some social thinkers greeted the growth of self-­interested commercial human conduct as a factor moderating human behavior. His essay is an object lesson in why the ideas of past political philosophers should be carefully studied. See also Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 23. That said, in some cases laboratory experiments can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of human psychology. For a detailed argument that this is true of many psychological experiments about the place of analogies in human thought, see Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 337–­39. 24. The origins of this label for the subfield contrast interestingly with the label for the emerging branch of economics called “behavioral economics.” Applying the same naming rule symmetrically could potentially have produced several alternative labels: (1) “psychological political science” instead of “political psychology”; (2) “economic political science” instead of “political economy”; and (3) “behavioral political science” instead of “political science.” None of these pairings is normally used. Perhaps the avoidance of (3) can be explained in part by the belief of many American political scientists that the entire field of political science is “behavioral.” 25. For a survey of the field, see David Sears, Robert Jervis, and Leonie Huddy, eds., Handbook of Political Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 26. Former president Trump is a case in point. It is impossible to understand his behavior without recourse to political psychology, and arguably clinical psychology as well. This example serves to show that adequate explanations often require varying “mixes” of different disciplines. 27. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 28. J. David Singer, “The Level-­of-­Analysis Problem in International Relations,” in The International System: Theoretical Essays, ed. Klaus Knorr and Sidney Verba (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). Perhaps the best exposition of this issue in the study of international war is Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the

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State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), republished in 2001 with a new preface. 29. In the words of Colin Hay, “What is the polity made of? What are its constituents and how do they hang together? What kinds of general principles govern its functioning, and its change? Are they causal principles and, if so, what is the nature of political causation? What drives political actors and what mental capacities do they possess?” The answers to such questions have far-­ reaching implications. “[F]or ‘ontological atomists,’ convinced in Hobbesian terms that ‘basic human needs, capacities and motivations arise in each individual without regard to any specific feature of social groups or social interactions’ . . . , there can be no appeal in political explanation to social interactions, processes or structures. For ‘ontological structuralists,’ by contrast, it is the appeal to human needs and capacities that is ruled inadmissible in the court of political analysis. Similarly, for those convinced of a separation of appearance and reality—­such that we cannot trust our senses to reveal to us that which is real as distinct from that which merely presents itself to us as if it were real—­ political analysis is likely to be a rather more complex and methodologically exacting process than for those prepared to accept that reality presents itself to us in a direct and unmediated fashion.” Colin Hay, “Political Ontology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. R. E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 260–­61. Most political scientists and economists bypass ontological questions entirely or deal with them only glancingly. 30. Some political scientists have found it difficult to accept that this is true. Thus, for example, American IR theorists fought for at least two decades over the relative validity of the realist, constructivist, and liberal institutionalist paradigms of international politics. In my view, the assumption underlying the debate was an oversimplification. It would have been better to argue about the light each paradigm sheds on specific historical cases. This is, to a large extent, what most British IR specialists have done, partly because they have not harbored a desire to make their field of study into a science built around a single paradigm. See Alan Ryan, “Paradigms Lost: How Oxford Escaped the Paradigm Wars of the 1960s and 70s,” in Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective, ed. Christopher Hood, Desmond S. King, and Gillian Peele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and Martin Ceadel, “The Academic Normalization of International Relations at Oxford, 1920–­2012: Structures Transcended,” in Forging a Discipline: A Critical Assessment of Oxford’s Development of the Study of Politics and International Relations in Comparative Perspective, ed. Christopher Hood, Desmond S. King, and Gillian Peele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 31. *G. Sharafutdinova and K. Dawisha, “The Escape from Institution-­ Building in a Globalized World: Lessons from Russia,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 2 (2017): 361–­78.* 32. See the report of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists at https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/ 33. Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

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34. See the discussion in chapter 10. 35. Alfred R. Mele, “Causation, Action, and Free Will,” in The Oxford Handbook of Causation, ed. Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Charles Menzies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Nicholas Rescher, Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2009). 36. A similar question arises for reductionist neurologists who believe that human consciousness can be explained entirely by underlying chemical and electrical processes in the brain. If that is true, why doesn’t it explain (and invalidate) their own theory? A rather different outlook is exemplified by Thomas Huxley, a leading nineteenth-­century scientist who ardently championed an evolutionary view of human beginnings and strongly ridiculed religious views of this question (as well as organized religion in general). According to one careful historian, “Huxley rejoiced in the possibility that science explained man’s origin; he recoiled from the possibility that it explained his behavior.” Loren R. Graham, Between Science and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 27. 37. James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 124, 153. A parallel problem dogs some sociologists’ effort to explain the outcomes of scientific research entirely in terms of social determinants. Sociologists in this school have embraced what they call the “strong program” of science studies. The problem is that the school cannot explain why its own theories are not themselves completely determined by sociological factors and therefore lack any plausible claim to scientific validity. 38. That is because “top-­down” explanations are sometimes needed to account for system properties that “bottom-­up” reductionist analyses can’t explain. Properties for which this is true are sometimes called “emergent properties.” For the intellectual background, see Fritjof Capra and P. L. Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 39. *Rogers M. Smith, “Science, Non-­Science, and Politics,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 120.* 40. This disagreement is reflected in the contrasting disciplinary roles played by political philosophy in the two countries. P. J. Kelly, “Contextual and Non-­ Contextul Histories of Political Thought,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 37–­62. 41. Nor can it demonstrate that every one of the traits that have persisted contributed to species survival. John Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chaps. 14 and 16; Gillian Barker, Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Midgley, Beast and Man. 42. *Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science; Jerome Kagan, An Argument for Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Kagan, The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the

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Humanities in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). I develop a fuller analysis of this question in a book I’m currently writing on the interactions between knowledge and power in the United States.* 43. Bruce G. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); Richard John Perry, Killer Apes, Naked Apes, and Just Plain Nasty People: The Misuse and Abuse of Science in Political Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 44. Smith, “Science, Non-­Science, and Politics,” 120–­21; Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chaps. 2, 7–­8. 45. I owe this essential insight to Mark White. 46. This, in turn, is a matter of social ontology. It also raises the question of whether a whole class of similar social phenomena, such as interstate wars, can adequately be explained using a single explanatory schema based on identical ontological assumptions. In my view, equifinality suggests that the answer is no. 47. Bruce Parrott, “Lessons of the Cold War: Getting It Wrong,” Journal of Cold War Studies 24, no. 1 (2022): 219–­49. 48. This is the key criticism of methodological individualism made by skeptics. It is also a reason to avoid the “great-­man” (or “great-­person”) theory of history. 49. Daniel Deudney, “Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era,” in Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics, ed. Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew (SUNY Press, 1999), 28–­60; Vivien A. Schmidt, “Putting the Political Back into Political Economy by Bringing the State Back in Yet Again,” World Politics 61, no. 3 (2009); Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 50. Only the intervention of one of my high school teachers kept me from attending a second-­rate college and then following a career path entirely different from the one I ultimately chose. 51. I entered Columbia University’s political science program without being aware of the university’s Russian Institute, which housed distinguished scholars from several disciplines and ultimately had a decisive effect on my evolution as a scholar. Had I gone to another university I might have followed a different path, perhaps toward studying Indonesia, which figured prominently in the news at the time and which interested me a lot. 52. John Gerring, “The Mechanismic Worldview: Thinking Inside the Box,” British Journal of Political Science 38, no. 1 (2008): 175–­76. Gerring noted that psychology was an exception. 53. See chapter 7. 54. For an uncommonly lucid exposition of these knotty issues, see Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, especially chaps. 2, 7, and 8. 55. William E. Connolly, “Method, Problem, Faith,” in Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics, ed. Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 332–­79; Richard Ned Lebow,

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Reason and Cause: Social Science and the Social World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 56. Mary S. Morgan, The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 1 and passim. 57. This strategic or systems approach grew out of advances in tactically oriented operations research during World War II. Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 19–­23, 34–­36. 58. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, chaps. 2–­4; E. Roy Weintraub, Toward a History of Game Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). For a comprehensive account of the dramatic growth of modeling in the American social sciences between the late 1940s and the end of the 1970s, see Heyck, Age of System. 59. For a discussion of simulations as a source of empirical data, see chapter 13. 60. This is especially true of dynamic modeling. A pioneer in this field was Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978), and Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Other important examples are Robert Axelrod, Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Robert M. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006); and Robert M. Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier (New York: Free Press, 1999). 61. One close analysis, for example, has emphasized that certain models, such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and reiterated Dictator games, overlook crucial conditions that favor cooperation among players. Pascal Boyer, Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 173–­76; Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, 177–­91. One highly critical study of James Buchanan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986, charges that Buchanan intentionally obscured the antidemocratic political objectives underlying his economic theories. See Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017), chaps. 8–­12, conclusion. 62. *See in this connection, Green and Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, chaps. 1–­3, and the commentaries in Jeffrey Friedman, ed., The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Incidentally, economists sometimes use the notion of “stylized facts” to illustrate the value of their theories. In my opinion, this phrase amounts to a polite nod to empirical research without actually conducting the research. To the best of my knowledge, this phrase has not yet entered the vocabulary of political science or the other social sciences. In the realm of economics, Richard Thaler, a pioneer of behavioral economics who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017, has stated the issue this way: “We don’t have to stop inventing abstract models that describe the behavior of imaginary Econs [that is, economic actors assumed to be rational optimizers]. We do, how-

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ever, have to stop assuming that those models are accurate descriptions of behavior, and stop basing policy decisions on such flawed analyses. . . . To this day, the phrase ‘survey evidence’ is rarely heard in economics circles without the necessary adjective ‘mere,’ which rhymes with ‘sneer.’ This disdain is simply unscientific.” Richard H. Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 9, 47. Dani Rodrik’s view of disciplinary practices, though also critical, is less harsh. See Dani Rodrik, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).* 63. Kuklick, Blind Oracles, 164–­67. 64. Neil Roese and James Olson, “Counterfactual Thinking: A Critical Overview,” in What Might Have Been: The Social Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking, ed. Neil Roese and James Olson (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1995); Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Richard Ned Lebow, “What’s So Different About a Counterfactual?,” World Politics 52, no. 4 (2000); G. King and L. C. Zeng, “When Can History Be Our Guide? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference,” International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2007); Stephen L. Morgan and Christopher Winship, Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 65. Here I have in mind especially biology. See John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Hay, “Political Ontology”; and Uskali Mäki, ed., The Economic World View: Studies in the Ontology of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 66. *Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (New York: G. Braziller, 1964); Dupré, The Disorder of Things.* 67. Alternative metaphors of social causality include “waves” and “infections.” These expressions allow more room for the role of ideas in triggering events. See, for example, Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Another causal metaphor is “earthquake,” frequently invoked during the collapse of European communism. 68. According to his analysis, “‘mechanism’ has at least nine distinct meanings as the term is used within contemporary social science.” Gerring, “The Mechanismic Worldview,” 161–­79. See also Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Charles Menzies, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), parts 3 and 7; and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), chap. 11. Lakoff and Johnson argue convincingly that our understanding of causality is based on our bodily experiences of physical movement and exerting physical force. 69. One philosopher of science explains the roots of the deterministic outlook as follows: “Determinism has been so closely linked with the philosophy underlying the rise of modern science that it has come to seem obvious, something to deny which is to call in question the whole scientific project. But in my view

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determinism is a philosophical free rider on the scientific world view, something for which the latter provides no warrant, and something that is, despite the success of the scientific world view, inherently implausible.” Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Kindle Locations 2099–­2102). Indeed, according to another philosopher, “Science today is in fact no longer fully satisfied with the machine-­picture. Physics—­the original source of this model—­has found for some time that it works badly for many purposes, and has moved on to supplement it by other patterns of thought. What follows from this is not some kind of post-­ modern slop, loosening all connexions (sic) of thought so that anything goes. It is something far more interesting, namely, that there is more than one kind of legitimate explanation. Things must be talked about in different terms for different purposes.” Midgley, Beast and Man, 22, emphasis in the original. 70. Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, eds., Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 71. Andrew P. Vayda, Bonnie J. McCay, and Cristina Eghenter, “Concepts of Process in Social Science Explanations,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21, no. 3 (1991): 318–­31. One philosophical pioneer in reasoning along these lines was Alfred North Whitehead. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, an Essay in Cosmology: Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–­28 (New York: Macmillan, 1929). 72. See chapter 3 above. This important point was recognized by Robert Goodin and his fellow editors when they included a volume on contextual factors in their ten-­volume handbook of political science. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). The volume includes multichapter sections on philosophy, psychology, ideas, culture, history, place, population, and technology. The handbook that Goodin coedited a decade earlier did not contain a separate treatment of contextual factors. See Robert E. Goodin and Hans-­Dieter Klingemann, eds., A New Handbook of Political Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Thomas Albert Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 73. This is true of the nonlinear relationships among variables studied by chaos theory. For a lucid explanation, see Robert C. Bishop and Roman Frigg, “From Order to Chaos and Back Again,” in Rethinking Order: After the Laws of Nature, ed. Nancy Cartwright and Keith Ward (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 55–­74. 74. In other words, they involve choices about ontology, that is, the basic features we ascribe to reality. These choices include which entities we believe to be analytically important, and the period over which we assume they have influenced the course of events. That’s why our decisions about where to locate the “origins” of a phenomenon, or how far back or deep to trace its “roots,” have fundamental implications for how we understand the phenomenon. See Hay, “Political Ontology”; and Harold Kincaid, “Causation in the Social Sciences,” in The Oxford Handbook of Causation, ed. Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock, and Peter Charles Menzies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 706–­24.

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75. Theodore J. Lowi, “The State in Political Science: How We Become What We Study,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 1 (1992): 5. (Lowi made this statement in his presidential address to the American Political Science Association.) CHAPTER 12

1. See chapter 13. 2. One published guide has cautioned that dissertation writers sometimes try to formulate their thesis topics by “dreaming in a vacuum.” That’s what I was doing, more or less. 3. The professor was Dankwart Rustow. 4. See especially Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher G. Rea, Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters To You (And The World) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). It contains many valuable pointers and exercises to help you identify your personal intellectual interests. 5. My supervisor was Seweryn Bialer. On the other hand, occasionally some doctoral students have disregarded the warnings of their advisors and have produced outstanding dissertations that launched their careers as distinguished scholars. Alfred Stepan is a good example. See Alfred Stepan, “Democratic Governance and the Craft of Case-­Based Research,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 6. Ukrainian nationalism was an important subject, as the Gorbachev years and the disintegration of the USSR later demonstrated. But I would have been unwise to choose it because (a) I would have had to learn Ukrainian in addition to Russian, and (b) at the time the role of national minorities inside the USSR was not a salient academic issue. Pursuing it would have tied me to a subject of peripheral importance in American academia, however wrong that view was. Kremlin politics and Soviet foreign policy were much higher-­profile issues and therefore more promising professionally. Ultimately, I settled on the Soviet politics of technological progress. This was a fruitful subject, partly because it was closely linked to the USSR’s geopolitical competition with the US and to the formulation of Soviet policy toward military weaponry and arms control. (That said, I didn’t see some of these ramifications until I’d nearly finished the dissertation.) 7. The author of the essay was Zbigniew Brzezinski. 8. For tips on points to consider, see Bradley N. Axelrod and James Windell, Dissertation Solutions: A Concise Guide to Planning, Implementing, and Surviving the Dissertation Process (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 77–­90, and Antonina Lukenchuk, ed., Outliving Your Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 19–­24. 9. https://connect.apsanet.org/apsa2020/apsa-awards/ 10. *Steven R. Terrell, Writing a Proposal for Your Dissertation: Guidelines and Examples (New York: Guilford Press, 2016) provides a checklist for what to include. The UC Berkeley website contains an especially useful page called “Dissertation Proposal Resources” (https://iis.berkeley.edu/node/424).

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11. For more on this technique, see chapters 13 and 14. 12. Strictly speaking, there is a third justification: relevant primary sources, although not yet in existence, can be created by the researcher, e.g., through opinion surveys or interviews. I have elided this justification with the first one. 13. In the first stage of drafting your prospectus, these tentative answers are what the nineteenth-­century American philosopher Charles S. Peirce called “hypotheses on probation.” Wayne C. Booth et al., The Craft of Research, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), Kindle location 1277. 14. *See also the tutorials at SAGE Research Methods Online.* 15. There are three main points of contention: (1) whether protocols developed in medical research can reasonably be applied to social science research without making it unworkable; (2) whether IRB reviews infringe on US researchers’ constitutional right of free speech; and (3) whether “mission creep” is causing some IRBs to intrude into elements of research design having nothing to do with the welfare of the human subjects involved. See Zachary M. Schrag, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–­2009 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). CHAPTER 13

1. Here I want to echo the comment of Michael Ruse, a distinguished philosopher and historian of science: “I am well into the decade past my allotted biblical span of years. I have never, ever, had such an exciting project and if I can infect you with some of my enthusiasm that will be justification enough and more. . . . [F]or having let me live into the age of the Internet, let me give thanks to whatever deity it is that Darwinians worship. Twenty years ago this project would not have been possible. Now within seconds one can track down an obscure poem or interesting reference and keep working as though one had labored all day, as in the past, in the bowels of a great library. Some change really is Progress.” Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us About Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), Kindle locations 98–­101, 138–­41. 2. *To put it differently, research libraries, like the universities of which they are usually a part, are enormously complex social institutions. And thanks to the peculiarities of human attention, the more efficiently they operate, the easier it is to forget this reality. A few years ago, when the SAIS faculty discussed budgetary priorities, I thought we were paying too little attention to the needs of our library. To illustrate my argument, I made a short slide presentation using three visual images: the interior of a warehouse, a 1920s touring car, and a sleek Formula 1 race car. My point was that our library was—­or should be—­like the race car.* 3. See the discussion in Thomas Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 2. 4. That said, you should exercise some discernment in relying on just any librarian who happens to be at the reference desk, especially in a non-­university library. According to a recent survey, many libraries, including those at research universities, are cutting back on trained staff. If a librarian responds to your query by saying “let’s Google it,” excuse yourself and find a real reference librarian.

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5. One useful benefit of Soviet censorship was a centralized system of government bibliographic control that classified all books, journal articles, and newspaper articles under a standardized set of detailed subject headings. When it was introduced under Stalin, this system was arguably more advanced than the Western bibliographic tools covering Western publications at the time. For me, it was an invaluable device (albeit a painfully laborious one) for tracking Soviet crypto-­debates on my dissertation topic. 6. Thomas Mann calls this “the mirror image of footnote chasing” because it leads forward in time, rather than backward. Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, 141. For a survey of tools like these, see Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, chap. 6. 7. In my years as a Sovietologist, I tagged incoming bibliographic items by period and topic, each abbreviated by three letters inserted in the “Keywords” field of the item. Items concerning Stalinist domestic politics, for example, were labeled STAPOL, plus any other relevant field, such as foreign relations under Stalin (STAFOR). For reading on broader themes I used other tags, such as POLSCI, ECONOM, SOCIOL, and ANTHRO. Usually I gave each item several tags, which allowed me to search the database later in a tailored fashion. Once you settle on the structure of your dissertation or book, you can also tag items by chapter (e.g., CH1). 8. Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), chap. 2. 9. *Chandra Sripada, “Imaginative Guidance: A Mind Forever Wandering,” in Homo Prospectus, ed. Martin E. P. Seligman et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 103–­32.* 10. One example is my earlier discussion of experiments in moral decision making, gleaned from Martin E. P. Seligman et al., eds., Homo Prospectus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) and presented in chapter 11. 11. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, eds., Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 370. 12. Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Zunshine, Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 13. The singular Latin form is a “datum,” i.e., one thing that’s given. 14. Bruno was ultimately burned at the stake for propounding this heretical idea. 15. A rare example of the use of this metaphor in a nonstatistical sense is George Breslauer, “Counterfactual Reasoning in Western Studies of Soviet Politics and Foreign Relations,” in Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics, ed. Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 16. This practice, sometimes known as “source criticism,” developed primarily in the nineteenth century. It stemmed originally from an effort to identify the multiple traditions and documents that were ultimately assembled into the Bible during the first millennium.

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17. *Mann, The Oxford Guide to Library Research, is the authoritative introduction to these techniques.* 18. For example, I used James D. Wright, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), to verify and flesh out my descriptions of the individual social ­science fields other than political science. This encyclopedia contains detailed articles on an enormous range of subjects. 19. Andrew Delano Abbott, Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 20. The ideas presented here are derived from writings of experienced scholars who have done large amounts of each kind of field research. Two scholars from whom I’ve learned directly are Mary R. Habeck and Melissa Thomas. Both generously shared their knowledge with me and the members of my PhD seminar over the span of several years. Their books include Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–­1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and Melissa A. Thomas, Govern Like Us: U.S. Expectations of Poor Countries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 21. Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); James N. Druckman et al., eds., Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For example, late in the Gorbachev era, interviews with Soviet foreign policy analysts shed revealing light on the negotiations leading up to the US-­Soviet INF Treaty that banned a major class of nuclear weapons. Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 22. Nicklas Norling, “Myth and Reality: Soviet Politics in Uzbekistan,” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins SAIS, 2014. 23. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines an archive as a “repository for an organized body of records produced or received by a public, semipublic, institutional, or business entity in the transaction of its affairs and preserved by it or its successors.” Other varieties include personal and family collections of unpublished records. For a historical sketch and some details, see “archives,” Encyclopædia Britannica, June 16, 2017. academic.eb.com.proxy1.library.jhu. edu/levels/collegiate/article/archives/9295. Accessed Feb. 20, 2018. 24. Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 34–­35. 25. These include Archive Finder (http://archives.chadwyck.com/home.do), which contains listings from thousands of American and British archives, and ArchiveGrid (http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/), which contains nearly a million collection descriptions from libraries, archives, and museums. The American Historical Association sponsors Archives Wiki (http://archiveswiki. historians.org/index.php/Main_Page), which links to several archives from around the world and provides commentary about them from the perspective of a researcher. You can search the list of archival holdings in the Library of Congress by subject, name of collection, and other tags at http://findingaids.loc.

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gov/browse/collections/a. The LC maintains an online National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. Records of the US federal government are overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which maintains an online Archival Research Catalog covering NARA’s holdings in Washington, DC, in regional repositories, and in presidential libraries. NARA also maintains the online Access to Archival Databases, a list that covers some of its holdings of electronic records. 26. For a concise overview with essential tips, see Laura Schmidt, “Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research,” at https://www2.archivists.org/book/ export/html/14460 27. Layna Mosley, ed., Interview Research in Political Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 28. For historical background, see Eileen Yeo, “Social Surveys in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross and Theodore M. Porter, The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 29. Helmut K. Anheier and Nikolas Scherer, “Survey Research Centers and Companies,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015). 30. For example, Lior Gideon, Handbook of Survey Methodology for the Social Sciences (New York: Springer, 2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3876​ -2 31. For a concise exposition of the features of such experiments, see Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies and Methods in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chap. 3. 32. See chapter 2. Parts of psychology, for example, draw heavily on physiology and neurology, and physical anthropology draws on chemistry and physics, for instance in carbon-­dating archeological artifacts. 33. Decades passed before astronomical observations confirmed the theory empirically. Until that occurred, the theory remained a subject of controversy, especially among nonscientists, but most leading physicists already accepted its validity. 34. Druckman, Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, et al., Part II; R. McDermott, “Experimental Methods in Political Science,” Annual Review of Political Science 5 (2002); Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams, Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality: From Nature to the Lab (Leiden: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 35. James N. Druckman et al., “Experimentation in Political Science,” in Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, ed. James N. Druckman, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 36. In the words of Moses and Knutsen, “this method’s very ability and willingness to manipulate the environment means that the knowledge generated by experiments cannot be easily generalized beyond the controlled environment.” The authors present a four-­fold typology of experiments. Two types

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they label “quasi-­experiments.” The two types of full-­fledged experiments both involve randomization of the subjects tested, but the most rigorous type also includes pre-­and postexperimental measurement of those subjects. Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, 60, 63. 37. Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, 67; Allyson L. Holbrook, “Attitude Change Experiments in Political Science,” in Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, ed. James N. Druckman et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Dustin M. Carnahan, “Media and Politics,” in Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Political Science, ed. James N. Druckman, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 38. These fictitious applicants were not directly identified on the application forms—­which would be illegal—­but by the use of “ethnic” names for some members of the sample. This finding shows, incidentally, the importance of differentiating levels of analysis, such as legal regulation and its practical effects (or apparent non-­effects, in this case). 39. Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, 68. 40. The outcome of this uncontrolled experiment was not as clear in retrospect as many observers thought it was. Here it’s worth noting that both the founders of the US constitutional system and the creators of the Bolshevik system described their novel political arrangements as “experiments” based on science. 41. Of course, many social scientists had strong views about the relative effectiveness of the two systems, and most of these scholars relied on empirical evidence when formulating their views. But this diagnostic process was not experimental. 42. The forerunners were wartime operations research (OR) and especially systems analysis. See Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 1. 43. S. M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), chaps. 1–­4. 44. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason, chap. 12; Moses and Knutsen, Ways of Knowing, 278–­81. 45. This is not to say that nuclear weapons have never been used militarily—­ they were used by the United States against Japan at the end of World War II—­but that no war between two nuclear-­armed adversaries has ever occurred. 46. Andrew D. Abbott, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 34–­35. 47. This is an apt place to point out that “mapping” research materials is more often a metaphor than a literal description. CHAPTER 14

1. For PhD holders writing their first book, the problem is different: grasping the contrast between the dissertation and a book project. My initial effort to turn my dissertation into a book produced a manuscript larded with superfluous block quotations and repetition. Only shock therapy from the MIT Press,

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coupled with wise advice from a former faculty mentor, convinced me to shrink the manuscript and make it readable. 2. The pitcher was Vernon Law. Note that deciding whether term papers and dissertations belong in the same category is an example of concept formation. 3. One guide puts it pithily: “Save the Nobel Prize for Later.” Bradley N. Axelrod and James Windell, Dissertation Solutions: A Concise Guide to Planning, Implementing, and Surviving the Dissertation Process (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), chap. 10. 4. For useful guidance to organizing and scheduling your writing, see Eviatar Zerubavel, The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), especially chap. 2. 5. Social psychologist Robert Levine offers helpful advice on using “structured procrastination” to accomplish secondary tasks when the primary task—­in this case, writing—­seems too hard. He adds this amusing aside: “Victor Hugo  .  .  . once became so frustrated with his lack of willpower that he started writing naked to ensure that he wouldn’t bolt out of his study. For added security, Hugo instructed his valet to hide his clothes and promise not to reveal their whereabouts until he’d finished his day’s work.” Robert Levine, Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 162–­63. 6. The challenge is to create tight links with your research project and avoid a mechanical recitation of titles. See Alfred Stepan, “Democratic Governance and the Craft of Case-­Based Research,” in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, ed. Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 7. The degree-­of-­comprehensiveness problem concerns how generally or completely we seek to analyze a given subject. The level-­of-­analysis problem concerns which type of subject we concentrate our attention on as the most important. 8. *Several writing aids are included in the Web Supplement’s list of related readings.* 9. For the record, the title I settled on was “Technology and the Soviet Polity: The Problem of Industrial Innovation, 1928 to 1973.” After a great deal of revision, the dissertation was published as Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). From time to time I still wish I had found a catchier title for the book. On this general point, see the discussion of scholarly rhetoric in the next chapter. 10. To put it differently, I was a primitive empiricist. I wrote my term papers so that the factual particulars would appear to produce the general conclusions at the end of the paper, and only at the end. Gordon had more intellectual nerve, and he introduced the big ideas at the start of his papers, before mustering the supporting evidence. Needless to say, our professors found his papers more engaging than mine. 11. For tips on forging clear links between successive sentences in a para-

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graph, see Wayne C. Booth et al., The Craft of Research, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), chap. 17. On writing clear sentences, see also Claire Kehrwald Cook, Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), chap. 2. 12. Chapter 15 discusses how to manage feedback. 13. *John McPhee, Draft No. 4: Essays About the Writing Process (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).* 14. Andrew Moravcsik, “Active Citation: A Precondition for Replicable Qualitative Research,” PS: Political Science and Politics 43, no. 1 (2010). This issue is linked with the struggle for more rigorous use of evidence in qualitative research, discussed in chapter 9. 15. Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41. 16. Jon Wiener, “The Footnote Fetish,” Telos 31 (1977), 174–­75, as quoted in Garber, Academic Instincts, 40. 17. Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), chap. 7. 18. These were comparative politics dissertations approved in academic year 2016–­17 at the following institutions: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, SAIS, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. A handful of them consisted of linked essays on a broad theme rather than single monographs. 19. Jiri Valenta, Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968: Anatomy of a Decision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 20. This is plainest in the natural sciences, where sizable and sometimes huge research teams work on a single project, such as establishing the existence of the Higgs boson. The social nature of knowledge creation is a major theme of recent writings on the philosophy of science. The ubiquity and importance of scholarly interaction help account for the disputes that sometimes break out among researchers vying to receive the credit for major discoveries. The same factors help explain researchers’ occasional reluctance to accept that other researchers working separately from them may have made “their” discovery through independent efforts. See Robert King Merton, On Social Structure and Science, ed. Piotr Sztompka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chap. 24. 21. For a historian’s perspective, see Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 22. I owe this suggestion to Sara Foose Parrott, my wife, who used it when writing her dissertation. I wish I’d known about it when I wrote mine. Its frequency and informal character minimize the emotional stakes of discussing uncompleted work. 23. For suggestions about how to organize a group and the ground rules to adopt, see Carol M. Roberts, The Dissertation Journey: A Practical and Comprehensive Guide to Planning, Writing, and Defending Your Dissertation, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2010), chap. 6.

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24. *David Joel Sternberg, How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981). See also Kjell Erik Rudestam and Rae R. Newton, Surviving Your Dissertation: A Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2015); Axelrod and Windell, Dissertation Solutions. In some branches of scholarship this risk of isolation appears to be smaller. In the natural sciences, groups of researchers frequently collaborate closely to make use of industrial-­scale equipment and facilities. In the social sciences, the only obvious parallel is the organization and administration of large-­scale social surveys. See James S. House, A Telescope on Society: Survey Research and Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).* 25. Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010). 26. The incidence of such feelings was considerably higher among PhD candidates than among graduate students working on masters’ degrees. I thank Silvia Merler for calling these sources to my attention. 27. For example, an otherwise excellent article on Weber in the latest edition of a major social ­science encyclopedia allocates just one phrase to Weber’s early mental breakdown after the death of his father. (Stephen P. Turner, “Weber, Max (1864–­1920),” in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 456–­61.) 28. Weber gave his first public lecture six and a half years after the onset of his depression. See Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Knopf, 1970), chap. 9; John P. Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 17–­18, 63–­64, 297–­98. 29. For most of his professional life, Weber worked as a private scholar rather than a university professor. The intellectual historian Fritz Ringer calls him “the most important social thinker of our time.” (Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4.) 30. There are occasional exceptions. See Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International Thought: Major Twentieth-­Century Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making? (London: Routledge, 1997); and especially Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder, eds., Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Some evidence suggests that the old pattern may be changing. But most social scientists still seem to pay much less attention to the personal biographies of the leaders in our fields than historians do in theirs. 31. For a pioneering autobiographical account of manic depression by a distinguished professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, see Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995). See also Kay R. Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (New York: Knopf, 1999).

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CHAPTER 15

1. My knowledge of this stratagem, and of its name, comes from Sara Foose Parrott, my wife, who used it in teaching her students. 2. David Joel Sternberg, How to Complete and Survive a Doctoral Dissertation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), chap. 6. 3. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Joseph S. Nye, The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011). 4. See the discussion in chapter 12. 5. A few memorable defenses I’ve witnessed over the years have shown that it is quite possible for a committee member to form a firm opinion about a dissertation—­usually a negative opinion—­without reading it carefully. That’s one reason the quality of your writing matters so much. 6. *According to one persuasive line of analysis, Western scholars in general have mistakenly discounted rhetoric—­meaning the study of rigorous communication designed to persuade an audience—­as a distraction from the impersonal reporting of scientific findings. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Deirdre N. McCloskey, “Rhetoric of Inquiry,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 15–­16; John S. Nelson, “Stories of Science and Politics: Some Rhetorics of Political Research,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 198–­220.* 7. I say “so-­called” because the question may be rhetorical in form but should not be rhetorical in content. That is, you don’t want your reader to suspect that you first formulated it with a predetermined answer in mind. 8. *John McPhee, Draft No. 4: Essays About the Writing Process (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 24 and passim.* 9. For example, the Google Books N-­Gram Viewer shows a gradual increase in usage of the word “narrative” between the mid-­1940s and late 1970s, then a much faster increase during the 1980s and 1990s, followed by a plateau in the following decade. (These rates are calculated from the incidence of the term in nonfiction books classified as being written in “American English.”) 10. See the discussion of contexts in chapter 2. 11. See chapter 11. 12. On changing explanations of the Civil War by US historians, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 8. See also Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). 13. McPhee, Draft No. 4; Wayne C. Booth et al., The Craft of Research, 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

296 NOTES TO PAGES 193–205

14. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 15. This will be easiest if you have all the draft chapters in a single word-­ processing folder, where you can search all of them at once. 16. William P. Germano, On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 118. 17. *One useful guide explains: “Trim sentences, like trim bodies, usually require far more effort than flabby ones. But though striving toward a lean and graceful style involves hard work, it can also be fun—­like swimming or running.” Claire Kehrwald Cook, Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 17.* 18. *Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. Tenth Anniversary Edition (New York: Little, Brown, 2016); Roy Peter Clark, Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces (New York: Little, Brown, 2011); and Roy Peter Clark, How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times (New York: Little, Brown, 2013). My favorite problem chapters from Help! are “My Middles Sag” and “It Never Ends Well.”* CHAPTER 16

1. Sara Foose Parrott, “Expatriates and Professionals: The Careers in Italy of Nineteenth Century American Women Writers and Artists” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1988). 2. They came across as defensive “hedgehogs” rather than as venturesome “foxes,” to use the terminology coined by Isaiah Berlin and applied at length in Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017 [2005]). 3. You can get some feel for this by skimming Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). CHAPTER 17

1. Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); see also Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). 2. This happened at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where I was living in academic exile and struggling to complete my dissertation for Columbia University. The friend was Professor Archie Brown. 3. The leading candidate was Timothy J. Colton. 4. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-­Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963); Thomas M. Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

NOTES TO PAGE 206 297

5. Anthony Grafton, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For an especially powerful statement of the long view in this respect, see Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), particularly chaps. 21–­23. 6. Jerome R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

On the Meaning of Education A man is marked as educated not by his complicated answers but by his clear, simple questions.

Teachers, being generally knowledgeable, serve as rich sources of useful information. To secure it, however, you must be prepared always to ask questions without the slightest hesitation. In my experience, the quality and excitement of the answer are in direct proportion to the thoughtfulness, simplicity, and daring of the question . . . A few teachers, if you are lucky, will also be for you examples of the inquiring mind at work. . . . But the ordinary teacher can be expected to school you in a subject; if you wish to be truly educated, you must depend on yourself. If you complain that school is uninteresting or irrelevant, or that it teaches conformity and merely trains you to fill a place in society, it is because you let it do so . . . It is an unhappy truth that anyone who depends solely on others for the test of his achievements will end life feeling he has accomplished nothing: there are so many to please and someone is always dissatisfied. So set your own sights and, provided you give your best effort, you can feel free to demand that your teachers teach you what you want to know . . . No matter how skilled your teachers, they will never substitute for sitting down with a book and digging in. As a strategy for reading intelligently, I recommend that you always begin with a question, if no more than to ask what you expect to learn from the book and what is the perspective from which the author presents his ideas. For myself, I always write profusely in the margins. This saves me much exclaiming and swearing aloud (which librarians seem not to care for, no matter the enthusiasm for learning it may display). It also leaves me in the end with not one book, but two. By this means you will discover that every book starts with an idea, an implied question, the quest for a personal answer . . . If you come to books in this manner, you will end up an educated man, no matter how meager your classroom opportunities or how poor the official reports. On the other hand, if your intelligence and industry lead you

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to the heights of academic achievement, you will still retain an essential humility and tolerance for the views of others. If you respect the diversity of possible answers, you will perceive how another, in good faith, can find his way to a conflicting result without being thought a dullard or a nincompoop. Then you can understand that he simply began with a different question than yours, viewed his subject from a different perspective, and consequently sees, in truth, something new. At best, you can appreciate that learning is not a lonely or a competitive enterprise, but an essentially cooperative one. Such cooperation will encourage creative conflict, preserve the dialectic of question and answer, and teach you that Truth is better illuminated by shedding more light on the subject than can come from your own little candle. excerpt from Father to Son: Thoughts To Live By Gordon Clark Schloming (1944–­1994)

Information on the Supplementary Website

The supplementary website can be found at https://doi.org/10.3998/ mpub.12275879. Each section of the website corresponds to one chapter of the book and elaborates on points made in the chapter. To facilitate use of the website, I have marked note superscripts and endnotes in the book with an asterisk (*) to indicate that additional discussion or references for the specific topic being treated can be found on the website. These elaborations are organized under topical headings by asterisks and key phrases reproduced in the supplement from the chapter text. As a finding aid, the key phrases are printed in bold italics. Each section of the website ends with a list of readings related to the chapter.

301

Acknowledgments

Scholarly feedback can take many forms. In an incisive chapter tracing the development of political studies in Great Britain, Brian Barry acknowledges the help of his colleagues with an amusing twist. He states that he has received “immensely valuable” feedback on his draft from many academics, all duly listed by name. He then remarks that a few other readers of the draft, who are not named, offered stringent comments that were “diagnostic rather than constructive.” At least one of these readers, he reveals elsewhere a separate footnote, urged that the chapter not be published at all. This experience, Barry says wryly, “left me with a better appreciation of the advantages to anthropologists of writing about non-­literate societies.”1 Happily, the readers who commented on preliminary drafts of this book gave me abundant feedback of the constructive variety, sparing me any diagnoses of fatal illness. These colleagues include Nate Allen, Lew Bagby, Harley Balzer, George Breslauer, Archie Brown, Valerie Bunce, Steven David, Giovanna Dore, Loren R. Graham, Sabina Henneberg, Kenneth Keller, Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Cameron Lee, Shuxian Luo, Thomas Mann, Silvia Merler, Jonathon W. Moses, Joan Nelson, Camille Pecastaing, Alvin Potter, Colin Powers, Sharon Rivera, Blair Ruble, Peregrine Schwartz-­Shea, Adam Sheingate, and Beth Smits. Their thoughtful responses to drafts have made this book better than it otherwise could have been. They have my heartfelt thanks. I am also grateful for the efficient and conscientious research assistance given by Alexandra Milentey, Beth Smits, and Colin Powers. The availability of such intelligent co-­researchers has been one of the luxuries of my years of teaching at SAIS. In addition, over the years I have received indispensable support from SAIS’s librarians, especially from Steve Sears, Sheila Thalhimer, Susan 1. Brian Barry, “Study of Politics as a Vocation,” in The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jack Hayward, Brian Barry, and Archie Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 426n.

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304 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

High, and Jenny Kusmik. A paradox of the electronic revolution is that many libraries, including some university libraries, are shrinking their staffs out of a mistaken belief that information technology can substitute for skilled staff members. In truth, scholars today need the knowledge and resourcefulness of sophisticated librarians more than ever. In the Internet era, book publishing has become much more complicated for publishers as well as authors. I thank the editors at the University of Michigan Press—­specifically, Elizabeth Demers, Haley Winkle, Kevin Rennells, Drew Bryan, and Heidi Dailey—­for handling the publication of this book with skill and professionalism. I also thank Devon Thomas, who created the index. As explained in the preface, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Sara Foose Parrott, my wife. She lived through this book’s many metamorphoses in good humor, for the most part, and she generously contributed to its substance through a lifetime of energetic conversations about the dramas of teaching and learning. Many of the insights it contains came from her. Finally, my thanks go to the late Gordon Livingston, Laura Renbaum, Bill Ray, and Brenda May. Although they did not read the manuscript, they listened to me talk about it for many hours, and they helped me navigate the emotional storms and cross-­currents that it caused. Without their wise counsel, the book might never have been completed.

Index

Note: Page numbers preceded by an “S” refer to the supplemental chapter material available at https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12275879 Abbott, Andrew: on desk phase, 166; on disciplines, 35, 222n43, S68; on explanation, S61; on footnotes, 181; on journals, 226n72; on methodism, S61; on modeling, S70–­S71; on research, 166; on specialists, 266n20 abstraction: and classification, 53; and lumpers vs. splitters, 252n32; and mental health, 186 abstracts: dissertation, 154–­55, S74; and reading strategy, 79 academic authority, 39–­42, S17–­S18 academic imperialism, 31 advisors: and defense of dissertation, 198; identifying and managing, 72, 73, 74, 153; meeting with, 72–­73; role in topic selection, 4–­5, 149, 153–­54 aesthetic values, 87–­88 affirmative action, 255n59 agency, 54, 137–­40, S69–­S70 American exceptionalism, 129, 276n52 American Political Science Association (APSA): creation of, 90, 213n13; inequality task force, 212n9; information on research topics, 153–­54; and racism, S50–­ S51; sexual harassment task force, S41 American Political Science Review, 228n11, S51 analogies: and concept classification

and formation, 96–­97, 105; vs. metaphors and similes, 257n18. See also metaphors animals, perception in, 21 annotating text, 80 anthropology: assumptions about terms in, 104; and disciplinary agenda, 88, 123, 230n23; explanations of behavior in, 131, 132; internal disagreements in, 47, S27; and quantitative methods, 116, 266n29; relation to other disciplines, S4 anti-­intellectualism, 205–­6 Archive Finder, 289n25 ArchiveGrid, 289n25 archives, using, 166–­68 Archives Wiki, 289n25 area studies, 36, 124, 125, 127, 220n21, 271n22 Arendt, Hannah, S46 artificial intelligence, 235n57 assumptions: awareness of, 7; and causal analysis, 141; and classification, 62; in comparisons, 121; and concept formation, 95, 103–­5; and conventions in perception, 17–­23; creativity and working, 110; and culture, 18, S1; about data, 163; about discipline dimensions, 62–­ 63; in explanation logics, 132–­33; and framing, 112–­14; and methodology, 116; in modeling, 141; and modernization concept, 103; and

305

306 INDEX

assumptions (continued) nature concept, 32; “of other things being equal,” 135–­36; of progress, 45, 48–­49, 55, 57; in realism, S30; of single explanation, 115; in static conditions vs. dynamic process concept formation, 102–­4; about term meanings, 18, 22–­23, 115; about work, 99 authority, academic, 39–­42, S17–­S18 authority of sources, 165 autonomous research centers, 43 autonomy, faculty, 41 Axelrod, Robert M., 268n44 behavior: and explanation, 130–­43, S69–­S72; modeling, 140–­41, S70–­S71; shift to behavioralism, 265n17, S27, S44, S60 behavioral economics, 222n34, 278n20, 279n24, 283n62 believing game, 73, 189, 201 Bialer, Seweryn, 286n5 bias: and artificial intelligence, 235n57; in disciplinary agendas, 89, 90–­92; methodological, 44, 118, S61; national biases, 90–­92; and need for diversity, 92–­93; political, 42–­43, S18; and research question, 111; selection bias and context, 29 bibliographies: and exams, 76, 77–­78; and prospective searches, 161–­62; tools for, 76, 161–­62, S78–­S79, S83 biography, 27–­28, 66, 76–­77 biological microanalysis, 68 Book Citation Index, 161 brainstorming, 149, 173, S80 breadth metaphor, 216n41 “bringing nature back in,” 67–­68, 221n24 “bringing the state back in,” 66–­67 broad values. See existential values Bruno, Giordano, 164, 165 Bryce, James, S49–­S50 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, S46–­S48 Buchanan, James, 283n61 building blocks metaphor, 30, 31, 35

Bunche, Ralph, S51 bureaucracy as conceptual term, 105, 106 Burgess, John, 249n12, S5–­S6, S48, S49 Calleo, David, 274n45 career and employment: concept formation during, 107; and dissertation advisors, 74; and elasticity of disciplines, S11; and networking, 39, 43–­44; and political bias, 42–­43, S18; prospects and challenges, 7, 203–­6; and understanding institutional decision making, 34, 40–­44, 219n12, S11, S17–­S18 cases and case studies, 110, 117, 119–­ 23, 126–­27 Caucus for a New Political Science, 228n10 causal analysis, 141–­43, S71–­S72 causality: causal analysis, 141–­43, S71–­S72; causal mechanisms, 141–­ 42, S71–­S72; as chronological, 76; clarity about in dissertation, 196; and closed dynamic research, 53 ceteris paribus, 135–­36 chapters, dissertation: conclusions, 180, 194; construction strategies, 178–­79, 180; introductions, 179, 180, 194, S82, S86; organizing tools, 196, S84; theory chapter, 176–­77; titles and headings, 178–­79 Checkershadow illusion, 19–­21 chronology: chronological approach and classification, 96; chronological approach and context, 28–­29, 59–­ 60, 152; for exams, 76; and narrative vs. thematic exposition modes, 192–­94, S87–­S88 citation indexes, 161, 181 clarity, revising for, 194–­96 classification: and concepts, 95–­102, S54–­S55; and context of research, 60–­61; and organization of disciplines, 62–­63; and static research, 53; as term, 256n11

INDEX 307

climate change, 67–­68 closed dynamic research, 52, 53, 54 cognition: and classification, 96; cognitive mapping for exam, 78; and framing, 111–­14, S59; and metacognition, 23, 112, 120, 210n20; and perception, 18–­23, S1; and physical body, 239n9; role of analogies and metaphor in, 96–­97, 107–­8, S7, S55–­S56 color, perception of, 20–­21, S2 committees, dissertation, 72, 153–­54, 188, 189, 198–­202 committees and academic authority, 40 comparative context, 233n44 comparison: comparative methods, 119–­29, S63–­S65; and dissertation, 119, 120–­22; as fuzzy concept, 269nn2–­3; rise of comparative studies in political science, 122–­25, S63–­S64; as term, 119, 120 compass-­setting devices, 179–­81, 194–­ 95, S82 comprehensive exams, 71–­72, 75–­82, 125 comprehensiveness problem, degree-­ of-­, 176–­77 computer metaphors, 97, S55 concepts: concept formation, 94–­108, 292n2, S54–­S56; concept operationalism, 107; conceptual stretching, 258n22, 258n24; differentiating from referents in dissertation, 196; importance of, 94–­95; and reader resonance, 95, 106; sharp-­edged (dichotomies), 97–­98, 99, 100–­102, 111; as socially constructed, 99; static conditions vs. dynamic processes, 102–­4; and terms, 94, 95, 102–­8; types of, 95–­102, S54–­S55. See also fuzzy-­set concepts conclusions, chapter, 180, 194 consciousness: creativity and subconscious, S80; in decision making, 5 consistency, revising for, 194–­96 context: and classification, 60–­61; context term, S6–­S7; and develop-

ment of disciplines, 25–­26; and explanation, 138–­39, 142; importance of understanding, 5–­6; and institutional decision making, S11; and research approaches, 28–­29, 59–­60, 152; and selection bias, 29 contingent academic employment, 42 counterevidence, 151 counterfactuals, 141 creativity, 43, 110, 162, 177, S80–­S81 critic, inner, 177 critical race theory, 41 cross-­disciplinary research centers, 36 culture: and assumptions, 18, S1; and behavior, 137, S69–­S70; cultural context and development of disciplines, 25–­26; and perception, 20–­ 23, S1, S2; sociocultural evolution, 137; as term, 104 current events and disciplinary priorities, 66–­67, 128–­29, S35 Dahl, Robert, 104, S27 data: and classification, 53, S31–­S32; as evidence metaphor, 163, 164; increase in amount of, 123; as term, 163 databases: relational, 239n8; using, 158 Dawisha, Karen, 112, 113, S45 decision-­making: conscious, 5; institutional, 34, 40–­44, 219n12, S11, S17–­S18 defending dissertation, 151, 188, 198–­ 202, S86–­S87 defining key terms in exams, 81 degree-­of-­comprehensiveness problem, 176–­77 deindustrialization term, 260n45 democracy: and researcher motivations, 249n12; and role of political science, 92, S48–­S49; and static conditions vs. dynamic process concept, 102, 103–­4; and Tocqueville’s concept of, 101–­3 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 101–­2

308 INDEX

departments: and academic authority, 39–­42, S17–­S18; nomenclature of, 242n36, 252n35; relation to disciplines, 35, 39–­40, S15–­S17 depth metaphor, 216n41 determinism, 137, 284n69, S70 diary, intellectual, 77 dichotomies. See sharp-­edged concepts (dichotomies) dimensions: metaphor, 31, 59–­60; of social sciences, 31, 59–­68 Dinerstein, Herbert, 205, 225n56 disciplines: and academic authority, 39–­42, S17–­S18; and academic imperialism, 31; broadening of, 65; conflicts within, 37–­38, 39, S14–­S15; and context, 25–­26, 59–­60; cooperation between, 38–­39; development of social science, 24–­27; dimensions of, 31, 59–­68, S34–­S35; disciplinary agendas, 66–­68, 83, 88–­93, 124–­25, 128–­29, S35, S46–­S52; discipline as metaphor, 30; and division of labor, 130, 131; hierarchy of, 40, S16–­S17; and isolation, 37; lack of interest in history of disciplines, 49–­50, 58, 65–­66, 186, 241n26, 241n30, S26–­S31; and logics of explanation, 131–­33, 139–­40, S68; mapping, 59; and paradigms, 64–­ 65; prestige of, 37, 124, 134; progress within, 46–­52, 68, 89, 122–­23; regulation of, 30; and relationship of social science to history, 24–­33, 58, 131, S4–­S7; relations to each other, 26, 37–­40, 63, S12–­S17; relation to departments, 35, 39–­40, S15–­S17; schemas, 64; and scholarly secession, 31; scholarship as social process between, 34–­39, 43–­ 44, S11–­S17; subdivisions of, 59–­60, S34–­S35; and territorialism, 30–­31, 37–­38 dissertation: abstract for, 154–­55; building network for, 39, 183–­84; and case studies, 119–­20; clarity and internal consistency in, 194–­96;

committee, 72, 153–­54, 188, 189, 198–­202; compass-­setting devices, 179–­81, 194–­95, S82; and concept formation, 94, 104–­8, S55–­S56; defense, 151, 188, 198–­202, S86–­S87; as different from other research and writing, 148–­49, 172–­74; and emotions, 6, 87, 172–­73, 174, 183, 184–­86, 188–­89; engaging with scholarship in, 63, 175–­76, 192, 201; and exam preparation, 71, 76, 77, 78, 82, 125; feedback on, 180, 183–­ 84, 188–­89; and field research, 166–­ 71; and framing, 111–­14; introduction, 154, 191, S86; as learning experience, 174, 202; length of, 181–­83; literature reviews in, 63, 175–­76, 192; logistics of, 157, 167–­ 68; and methodology, 116–­18, 125–­ 29, 156, 198, S60–­S61; narrative vs. thematic exposition modes, 192–­94, S87–­S88; outline, 157; planning, 147–­57, S74; prospectus, 147, 149, 151–­52, 154–­57, 178, S74; publishing as book, 190, 291n1; rationale, 155–­56, 191; revising, 177–­78, 180, 187–­97, 202, S86–­S90; scale of, 151–­ 52, 182; schedule, 157; standards for, 72; structure of, 176–­77, 178–­81; temporal approaches to, 52–­55; title, 178–­79; and uncertainty, 148, 172–­74, 184, 185; and understanding theories and hypotheses, 109–­ 15, S59–­S61; writing/drafting, 172–­ 86, S80–­S84. See also sources; topic selection “Dissertations and Theses” database, 150, 153 diversity, 43, 91–­93, S18 drafting dissertation, 172–­86, S80–­S84 Dupré, John, 259n34, 284n69 earthquake metaphor, 284n67 Easton, David, 257n15, S27 economics: biographical approach to, 243n42; disciplinary agenda and paradigms, 26, 47, 48, 65, 68, 88,

INDEX 309

242n35, S69; ethics and morality in, 61–­62, 84, 85, S44; evolutionary, 54; and explanations of behavior, 131–­ 36; internal disagreements in, S27, S35; lack of interest in history of discipline, 49–­50, S26, S27, S29–­S30; modeling in, 140, 284n62, S70–­S71; prestige of, 37, 134; progress of, 47, 48, 50, 51, 84; and quantitative methods, 87, 116; relation to other disciplines, 26, 36, 38; research approaches, 28–­29, 60, 85; role in society, 46; specialist encyclopedias on, 77; term assumptions in, 104, 115; US dominance of, 90 editors and academic authority, 40 Edwards, Paul N., 79 efficiency, as research motivation, 85 Einstein, Albert: and play, 258n19; on simplicity, 251n31; split with Bohr, 219n15, 252n33; theory of relativity, 97, 114, 169, S72 elite, as term, 106 emergent properties, 281n38 emotions: and defense, 199; and dissertation, 6, 87, 172–­73, 174, 183, 184–­86, 188–­89; and feedback, 188–­ 89; and mental health, 183, 184–­86, S84; in research, 4 empire concept, 100–­101 empiricism: and connection between philosophy and research, 61–­62; empirical research vs. modeling, 140–­41, S70–­S71; vs. game theory, 170; shift to, 84; and theory term, S60; and utopianism about progress, 48–­49 employment. See career and employment emulation, 38 encyclopedias, specialized, 75, 77–­78, 165–­66 EndNote, S78–­S79, S83 The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama), 54, 55 equality and assumptions about causal factors, 135–­36

equifinality, 55, 269n44 ethics and morality: and concept of progress, 52; and experimentation, 156–­57, 169–­70; and focus on quantitative methods, 117; role of social sciences in, 236n75; in social sciences, 61–­62, 84, 85, 86, 125, 232n37, S44–­S45 Eurobarometer, 168 Europe and European scholarship: differences in development of disciplines from US, 48, 137, 213n14, 218n5, 233n43, 244n47; geographic terms, 127–­28, S64–­S65 evidence: and dissertation, 178, 198; in exams, 82; metaphors for, 162–­ 64; as term, 163 evolutionary economics, 54 examiners, 75, 77–­78 exams, comprehensive, 71–­72, 75–­82, 125 exceptionalism, American, 129, 276n52 existential values, 85–­87 experiments, 156–­57, 169–­70, S7n7 explanation: logics of, 130–­43, S68–­ S72; modeling, 118, 140–­41, S70–­ S71; and ontology, 135–­36, 282n46, 285n74, S69; simulations, 140, 170; single-­factor explanations, 115, 130, 138; tacit, 193; as term, 110 eye contact, 200–­201 faculty: autonomy of, 41; contingent, 42; recruitment, 43. See also scholars Farr, James, 249nn11–­12 favoritism, 41–­42, 44 feedback on dissertation, 180, 183–­84, 188–­89 fellowships and abstracts, 155, S74 field research, 166–­71 fields metaphor, 30–­31 flow metaphor, 216n37 footnotes: constructing, 180–­81; footnote chasing, 165, 288n6 foreign language skills, 124

310 INDEX

framing and frameworks: and research question, 111–­14, S59; as term, 109–­10 Frank, Robert, 204–­5 free will and explanation, 137–­40, S69–­S70 Friedrich, Carl, S46 Fukuyama, Francis, 54, 55, 181 fuzzy-­set concepts: case studies as, 126; comparison as, 269nn2–­3; geography as, 273n38, 274n42, S64–­ S65; using, 98–­102, S54–­S55 games: believing game, 73, 189, 201; game theory, 118, 140–­41, 170, S70–­S71; war-­gaming, 170 Garthoff, Raymond, 112–­13 gender: classification, S54; and sexism in social sciences, 92; and sexual harassment, S41; as term, 106–­ 7; in Tocqueville’s concept of democracy, 101; use of male terms in scholarship, 22–­23 generalization: and case concept, 120; and comparative methods, 123; and fuzzy-­set vs. sharp-­edged concepts, 102; relation of general to particular in dissertation, 178 geography: and broadening of social sciences, 48; and fuzzy-­set concept use, 273n38, 274n42, S64–­S65; marginalization of, 67; questions for comparison formats, 126–­28; relation to other disciplines, 274n42; and spatial approach to research, 28–­29, 59–­60, 152; terms, 127–­28, S64–­S65 Gerring, John, 270n6, 273n37, 275n52, 296n58 globalization, 136, S69 Goodin, Robert E., 222n36, 233n47, 285n72, S17, S55 Gould, Stephen Jay, 213n21, 234n49, 256n11, S2 Gouldner, Alvin, S44–­S45 Graham, Loren R., 237n75, 281n36, S13

grants, 218n7, 219n16 Great Britain: comprehensive exams in, 245n1; differences in development of disciplines from US, 137, 233n43, 244n47; differences in disciplinary agendas from US, 90–­91; specialization in, 211n2, 212n12 “great-­man” theory, 282n48 Gunnell, John G., S27 Hannah-­Jones, Nicole, 225n59 harassment, sexual, S40–­S41 Harriman, Averell, S46–­S47 Harrison, Peter, S12 Haslam, Jonathan, S6 Hexter, J. H., 251n31 history: and bias toward new materials, 49; diversity of discipline, 27; and explanations of behavior, 131; and “great-­man” theory, 282n48; intellectual risks in, S5; lack of interest in history of disciplines, 49–­50, 58, 65–­66, 186, 241n26, 241n30, S26–­S31; progress of discipline, 50–­51, S30–­S31; and quantitative methods, 266n29; relationship to social sciences, 24–­33, 58, 131, S4–­S7; as term, 24, 27, S5; using to frame research, 27–­30 Hofstadter and Sander, 96, 97 Holmes, Stephen, 279n22 How to Read a Book (Edwards), 79 Hugo, Victor, 292n5 human nature, disciplinary differences in concept of, 131 Huntington, Samuel, 236n70, S17 Huxley, Thomas, 281n36 hybrid term, 259n33 hyperlinks, 195, 196, S83 hypotheses: dissertation, 156, 166; as term, 109–­10, 115; understanding, 109–­15, S59–­S61 idea, as analytical term, 217n46 ideology, as conceptual term, 105–­6 imagination, 110, 171 immigration of scholars, 91, S47

INDEX 311

JSTOR, 162 judgments: awareness of assumptions in, 7; and comparison choices, 121; and organizing resources, 63–­ 64; and revising dissertation for clarity, 194–­95; and scholarly maturity, 7; as unavoidable, 4

imperialism, academic, 31 infection metaphor, 284n67 influences, tracing for exams, 76–­77 Institute for Qualitative and Multi-­ Method Research, 117 institutional review boards, 156–­57 institutions: decision making by, 34, 40–­44, 219n12, S11, S17–­S18; scholarship as political process in, 34–­ 35, 39–­44, S11, S14, S15–­S18 instrumental vs. critical stance, 47–­48 intellectual utopianism. See utopianism interdisciplinary research: identifying, 64; role of vs. specialization, 36–­37 international political economy, 240n13 international relations (IR) theory: case studies as format, 272n27; dimensions of discipline, 30, 60, 61, 62–­63; disciplinary agenda, 68, 89, 123, 124; focus on quantitative methods and scientism in, 267n36, S42–­S43; internal disagreements in, 115, 280n30; interpretation of classics in, 50; and racism in political science, S51–­S52; relation to other disciplines, S5; single explanation debate in, 115 international scholarship: developmental differences in, 25, 48, 137, 213n14, 218n5, 233n43, 244n47; differences in disciplinary agendas, 90–­92; and national values in research, 124–­25, 128–­29, 249n14, S65 interpretivists, 117 Inter-­university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 168 interviews, 166–­67, 168 introductions: chapter, 179, 180, 194, S82, S86; dissertation, 154, 191, S86 invention of traditions, 63–­64 isolation, personal, 183, 184–­85

Laitin, David D., 272n29 Lakoff and Johnson, 257nn17–­18 Langer, Suzanne, 263n74 large-­N studies: and case studies, 118; as dissertation format, 121, 123–­24, 126–­27; and hypothesis as term, 115; and sharp-­edged concepts (dichotomies), 97–­98, 102 leadership, as term, 106 level-­of-­analysis problem, 135–­36, 176 Levine, Robert, 292n5, S80, S81 Lewis, Lionel, S18 liberalism, 43, 55, 104 libraries, using, 158–­62, 166–­68, S76, S77–­S78 Library of Congress, 159, 289n25 Lindblom, Charles E., 230n22, 233n43, 253n45, S7n7, S12, S59 literature reviews: in dissertation, 63, 175–­76, 192; and exams, 75–­76, 81; and prospective searches, 162 locomotive metaphor, 216n37 logics of explanation, 130–­43, S68–­S72 logistics, research, 157, 167–­68 Lowi, Theodore, 107, 110, 143, S28 luck, 204–­5 lumpers vs. splitters, 88, S64 Lustick, Ian, 29 Lynn, Kenneth, S25

James, William, 234n48 Jervis, Robert, 17–­18

macrocosm, managing through microcosm, 178, S82

Katznelson, Ira, 244n44, 254n52 key terms, defining in exams, 81 Kuhn, Thomas, 231n28, 241n30, S28, S55–­S56

312 INDEX

Mann, Thomas, 160, 171, 246n9, 288n6 mapping: cognitive mapping for exam, 78; discipline, 59; sources, 158–­62 market, as term, 18, 104, 106, 115 marking up text, 80 maturity, scholarly, 7, 161, 174 McCarthyism, 224n50 McNeill, William H., S71–­S72 McPhee, John, S81, S87–­S88 memory: and concept classification, 96–­97; of disciplines, 186; and framing, S59; of society, 57–­58 mental health, 183, 184–­86, 205, S84 meritocracy, 204 Merriam, Charles, S42, S43 metacognition: and awareness of framing, 112; and comparison as term, 120; and misperception, 23; terms for, 210n20 metaphors: vs. analogies and similes, 257n18; and causal mechanisms, 142; and concept classification, 96–­ 97; dead, 97, 142, S55; for evidence, 162–­64; role in thought and cognition, 96–­97, 107–­8, S7, S55–­S56; and social sciences conceptualization, 29–­31 methodism, S61 methodology: bias based on, 44, 118, S61; comparative methods, 119–­29, S63–­S65; dissertation, 116–­18, 125–­ 29, 156, 198, S60–­S61; and evidence metaphors, 162–­64; interpretivism and case studies, 117; methodological nationalism, 136, S69; multimethod approach, 118; qualitative methods, 116–­18, 121, 125, S63–­S64. See also quantitative methods #MeToo movement, S40 microcosm, managing macrocosm through, 178, S82 Microsoft Word, S77–­S78, S83–­S84 Midgley, Mary, 285n69 Mill, John Stuart, 185–­86 modeling, 118, 140–­41, S70–­S71

modernization, 30, 51, 55, 103, 114–­ 15, 122, 241n28 Moore, Barrington, 54–­55, 181 Moravcsik, Andrew, 181 Morgenthau, Hans, 50, 186, S42–­S43, S47 motivation, 117, 118, 133 move, as term, 243n43 Movement for a New Political Science, 47 narrative vs. thematic exposition modes, 192–­94, S87–­S88 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), 290n25 national interest, as term, 106 nationalism, 113, 253n45 nationalism, methodological, 136, S69 National Science Foundation, 219n16, S13 nations: invention of traditions, 63–­ 64; nationalism, 113, 253n45; national values in research, 124–­25, 128–­29, 249n14, S65 natural sciences: and causality concepts, S71–­S72; diversity of methods in, 264n1; focus on experiments in, 169; focus on quantitative methods in, 116; personal isolation and social connection in, 293n20, 294n24; vs. social sciences, 32; unification theory in, 219n15 nature: bringing back in, 67–­68, 221n24; and concept formation, S54–­S55; disciplinary differences in human nature concept, 131; and evidence metaphors, 163; idea of in social science, 24, 31–­32; and “natural/given” framing, 112; as term, 32 networking: across disciplines, 38; and dissertation, 39, 183–­84; and employment/career, 39, 43–­44; with other students, 5, 39, 71, 73, 183–­84; with scholars, 71–­74, 183–­84, S40–­ S41; and topic selection, 150 Nisbet, Robert A., S56

INDEX 313

normalization of speech, 209n11 note-­taking, 80, 170–­71, S78–­S81 objectivity vs. subjectivity, 87 ocean/oceans metaphors, 164 Odom, William, S15 Okin, Susan M., 22–­23 ontology: and comparisons, 121; defined, 270n6; and explanation, 285n74; ontological questions, 135–­ 36, S69 open dynamic research, 52, 54, 269n5 opening statement for dissertation defense, 198, 200 optical illusions, 17, 19–­20 originality, 110–­11, 153–­54 Osgood, Robert, 185 outlines: in dissertation prospectus, 157; in exams, 80, 81 Pandora Papers, 136 paradigms: flexibility in, 280n30; as methodological concept, 64–­65, S55–­S56; as term, 78, 114–­15; and topic selection, 153 Parsons, Talcott, 122, 222n42, 233n45, S44 passion and topic selection, 86, S45–­S46 perception and misperception, 17–­23, S1–­S2 Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Jervis), 17–­18 perestroika controversy, 47, 89, 123, 273n36 personal experiences: and explanation, 138–­39; and topic selection, 86 phronesis, 271n23 play, 107, 110, 258n19 political correctness, 41, 42–­43, 205 political process in institutions, 34–­ 35, 39–­44, S11, S14, S15–­S18 political psychology, 135 political science: biographical approach to, 243n42; comparative studies, rise of, 122–­25, S63–­S65; defined, 26; disciplinary agenda

and paradigms, 51–­52, 65, 66–­67, 88, 89, 90–­92, 107, 128–­29, S46–­S52; disciplinary dimensions, 30–­31, 60–­ 61, S13–­S14; ethics and morality in, 52, 84; as ethnocentric, 60; experiments in, 169; and explanations of behavior, 131, 132–­33, 134, 137, S68, S69–­S70; and framing, S59; international differences in scholarship, 26, 90–­92, 128–­29; and interpretation of classics, 50; lack of interest in history of discipline, 49, 186, 241n30, S29, S31; and modeling, S71; and multimethods, 118; nomenclature for departments and disciplines, 252n35, S35; progress in discipline, 47, 48, 89, 122–­23, S26–­S29; and quantitative methods, 116, 117, 123, S31, S60; racism in, 92, S11, S48, S49–­S52; relation to other disciplines, 26, 36, 38, S4–­S6, S31; research approaches and motivation, 28, 85; role in society, 46, 92, S48–­S49; scale shift, 139; scientism shift, 84, S42–­S45; specialist encyclopedias on, 77; subdivisions of, 60, S34–­S35; US dominance of, 90–­92 Political Science Quarterly, S51 Politics among Nations (Morgenthau), 50, S43 polyarchies, 104 pool/pools metaphors, 164 Porter, Theodore, 223n50, 266n28, 266n30 positivism, 83–­84 postmodernism: and framing, 111–­ 12; term, 103 post-­postmodern term, 103 power: asymmetries in relationships with professors, 72, 173, S40–­S41; as explanation, 132, S68; as term, 18, 104, 106 pragmatism, 48, 105–­6 presentism, 58, 65–­66, 103 prestige: of disciplines, 37, 124, 134; of scholarship, 205–­6

314 INDEX

primates, S54 probative values, 87 process tracing, 142 procrastination, structured, 292n5 Proctor, Robert N., 212n6, S5 professionalization of scholarship, 25 progress: assumptions of, 45, 48–­49, 55, 57; and bias toward new materials, 49–­50; as cyclical, 68; disagreements about, 47–­48, S24–­S26; within disciplines, 46–­52, 68, 89, 122–­23; and interpretation of classics, 50; optimism about, 47, S24; personal concept of, 45, 52, 56; in social sciences, 45–­58, 122–­23, S24–­ S32; societal, 55, 56–­57; and topic selection, 64; and utopianism, 45, 48–­49, 56, 57, S24 properties, emergent, 281n38 ProQuest, 150, 153 prospective searches, 161–­62 prospectus, dissertation, 147, 149, 151–­52, 154–­57, 178, S74 psychology: and experiments, 169, S7n7; explanation in, 131, 134–­35; and quantitative methods, 116; relation to other disciplines, 290n32, S4 publishing and publications: and academic authority, 40; bias toward new materials, 49–­50; and case studies as format, 272n27; classification in, 62; of dissertation, 190, 291n1; interpretation of classics, 50; methodological bias in, 226n72; titles and subtitles, 120; and topic selection, 149, 153 “pure” research, 85 qualitative vs. quantitative methodologies, 116–­18, 121, 125, S63–­S64 quantitative methods: and comparison methods, 123, 125; focus on, 116–­17, 123, 265n17, S13, S60; and oversimplification, S31; vs. qualitative, 116–­18, 121, 125, S63–­S64 quasi-­experiments, 169

questions: building relationships with, 73; at defense of dissertation, 198, 200–­202; exam, 78, 80, 81; fear of asking, 160–­61; for framing comparisons, 126–­28; ontological, 135–­ 36, S69; in prospectus rationale, 155; rhetorical, 192 race and racism: and artificial intelligence, 235n57; and career challenges, 43; in example of framing, 113–­14; and level-­of-­analysis problem, 136; and mortgage lending, 169; rise of interest in, 62; in social sciences, 92, S48–­S52; term use and assumptions, 210n16; in Tocqueville’s concept of democracy, 101–­2 rational choice, 38, 134, 141, S28 rationale, dissertation, 155–­56, 191 readers: and chapter titles and headings, 178–­79; and concept formation, 95, 106; revising with reader in mind, 182–­83, 187, 188–­94; and topic selection, 149 reading: decision making in, 5; for dissertation, 148–­49; and evaluating research design, 118; and exams, 79–­80; outside of discipline, 86, 162; strategies for, 79–­80, 164 realist paradigm, S30 Reconstruction era, S49–­S50 reflection, role of, 7 reflexivity term, 112. See also metacognition regions as fuzzy concepts, 273n38 relational databases, 239n8 relationships: and avoiding social isolation, 183, 184–­85; with other students, 5, 39, 71, 73; power asymmetries in, 72, S40–­S41; with scholars, 5, 71–­74, 183–­84, S40–­S41 research: and academic authority, 40; complexity of process, 4; and concentric scales of topics, 151–­52, 182; dissertation research as different from other experiences, 148–­49; framing with history, 27–­30; and

INDEX 315

institutional review boards, 156–­ 57; as non-­linear, 165–­66; “pure” research, 85; resource availability and topic selection, 149, 150–­51; stages of, 165–­66; temporal approaches to, 52–­55, 269n5; tools, 158–­59, 161–­62, 165–­66, S76–­S79 research design, 109, 118, 156, 176 research-­in-­progress seminars, 183–­84 research question: as determining methodology, 118, 125; formation of, 110–­11; and framing, 111–­14, S59; relationship to literature review, 176; as term, 110 resources for exams, 75–­80 reviews, using in reading strategy, 79 revising: dissertation, 177–­78, 180, 187–­97, 202, S86–­S90; in exams, 82; literature reviews, 175; relation to writing, 177–­78; role in scholarship, 183 revolutionary science, rhetoric of, 231n28 rhetoric: and dissertation strategies, 178–­80, 191–­92, S86–­S87; and prospectus, S74; of revolutionary science, 231n28 Ricoeur, Paul, 263n75 rigor: in dissertation writing, 177; and specialization, S64 river metaphor, 216n37 Rodrik, Dani, 242n35, 266n23, 284n62, S26n4 role playing, 170 Ross, Dorothy, 211n5, 212n12, 247n3 Ruse, Michael, 287n1 Sartori, Giovanni, 95, 98, 269n2, 269n4, 276n52, S29 schemas, disciplinary, 64 Schloming, Gordon, 179, 299–­300 scholarly secession, 31 scholars: building relationships with, 5, 71–­74, 183–­84, S40–­S41; dissertation committee, 72, 153–­54, 188, 189, 198–­202; examiners, 75, 77–­78;

meeting with, 72–­73; and planning/ drafting dissertation, 147, 173, 180; role in topic selection, 149, 150, 153–­54 scholarship: as competitive, 204; engaging with in dissertation, 63, 175–­76, 192, 201; international differences in development, 25, 48, 137, 213n14, 218n5, 233n43, 244n47; international differences in disciplinary agendas, 90–­92; as open-­ ended, 32–­33; and political process in institutions, 34–­35, 39–­44, S11, S14, S15–­S18; professionalization of, 25; role of, 202, 205–­6; as social process, 34–­39, 43–­44, 183, S11–­S17. See also disciplines; specialization Schwartz-­Shea, Peregrine, S60 Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Morgenthau), S42–­S43 scientism, move to, 84, S42–­S45 Scott, James C., 99, 162, 250n19, S31, S64 search, resources and tools for, 160–­62 secession, scholarly, 31 self-­interest, 132, 133–­34 self-­observation and perception, 23 Sewell, William H., Jr., 246n8 sexism in social sciences, 92 sexual harassment, S40–­S41 sexuality and concept formation, 107, S54–­S55 sharp-­edged concepts (dichotomies), 97–­98, 99, 100–­102, 111 Shepsle, Kenneth, S28 shock therapy, S69 simulations, 140, 170 single-­factor explanations, 115, 130, 138 “1619 Project,” 225n59 slavery, 101, 103 small-­N studies: as dissertation format, 121, 123–­24, 126–­27; and hypothesis as term, 115; rise of, 123–­24 Smith, Adam, 50, 61–­62, 134

316 INDEX

Smith, Rogers M., S28–­S29, S69–­S70 social construction metaphor, 99 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Moore), 54–­55 Social Science Citation Index, 161 social sciences: change vs. constancy focus in, 26–­27; complexity of research in, 4; concept of nature in, 24, 31–­32; dimensions of, 31, 59–­68; and dissemination of knowledge, 57; domestic vs. international focus in, 124–­25; ethics and morality in, 61–­62, 84, 85, 86, 125, 232n37, S44–­ S45; individual vs. group focus in, 213n14; instrumental vs. critical stance in, 47–­48; international differences in development, 25, 48; metaphors for the social sciences, 29–­31; modernity of, 30; vs. natural sciences, 32; progress in, 45–­58, 122–­23, S24–­S32; racism in, 92, S48–­ S52; relationship to history, 24–­33, 58, 131, S4–­S7; relationship to human values, 83–­85; role in ethics and morality, 236n75; sexism in, 92; as term, 24; terms for, S4; US dominance of, 48, 90–­92; uses and purpose of, 46, 47–­48, 56–­57, 58, 84–­85. See also disciplines; scholarship society, as term, 18, 106 sociology: determinism in, 281n37; and disciplinary agenda, 88, 122; ethics and morality in, 84, S11, S44–­S45; and explanations of behavior, 131, 132; internal disagreements in, 47, S27; progress in discipline, 122; and quantitative methods, 87, 116, S42; relation to other disciplines, 36, S4; specialist encyclopedias on, 77 software tools, 180, 194, 196, S77–­S79, S82–­S84 sources: citing strategies, 180–­81; clarity about in dissertation, 196; and classification of data, S31–­S32;

evaluating, 164–­65; gathering and using, 148, 155–­56, 158–­71, S76–­ S79; literature reviews as, 75–­76; mapping, 158–­62; outline of in prospectus, 151, 155–­56, S74; resource availability and topic selection, 149, 150–­51, 156; rules of selection, 158; specialized encyclopedias as, 75, 77–­78, 165–­66; surveys as, 168–­ 69; tools for, 76, 160–­62, S78–­S79, S83; using libraries and archives, 158–­62, 166–­68, S76, S77–­S78 spatial allocation in dissertation, 193 spatial research approach and context, 28–­29, 59–­60, 152 specialization: and analogy use, 97; fragmentation and overlap of, 35–­ 36, 252n36, S12, S13; vs. interdisciplinary research, 36–­37; limits of, 6; relation to discipline and other specializations, 26, 220n22, S4–­S5, S12–­S13; and rigor, S64; rise and proliferation of, 25, 35 specialized encyclopedias, 75, 77–­78, 165–­66 splitters vs. lumpers, 88, S64 static research, 52–­53 statistics, 53 stress, 185, 199 structured procrastination, 292n5 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), S28 students: building relationships with, 5, 39, 71, 73, 183–­84; and exams, 75, 78; observing defense by, 198, 199; and writing dissertation, 173–­74, 180 studies, as term, 274n43 study groups, 75 subjectivity vs. objectivity, 87 suicide, 185, 294n31 supplementary material, about, 7 surveys: aggregate, 214n26; large-­ scale surveys, 48; using, 168–­69 syllabi, exam, 75 synesthesia, 209n7

INDEX 317

Syracuse University Institute for Qualitative and Multi-­Method Research, 117 table of contents, dissertation, 195, 196 tacit explanation, 193 Taylor, Frederick W., 248n5 technocracy, 57 tenure: and academic authority, 40, 42, 43, 44, S17; and author, 205, S14–­S15; and role of citation indexing, 181 terms: assumptions of meaning, 18, 22–­23, 115; and concept formation, 94, 95, 102–­8; defining in exams, 81; geography terms, 127–­28, S64–­S65; and revising dissertation for clarity and consistency, 194 testing hypotheses, 115 Tetlock, Philip, S59 Thaler, Richard, 222n34, 243n42, 283n62 thematic approach and context, 28–­ 29, 59–­60, 152 thematic vs. narrative exposition, 192–­94, S87–­S88 theories: theory chapter of dissertation, 176–­77; theory term, 109–­10, 114–­15, S60; understanding, 109–­ 15, S59–­S61 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 62 3-­D Heuristic, 19 tides metaphor, 216n37 time: and concept of progress, S24; and narrative vs. thematic exposition modes, 192–­94, S87–­S88; perception of, S1–­S2; and periodization, 215n30; and process explanation, 142–­43; spatial metaphors for, 257n17; and temporal approaches to research, 52–­55. See also chronology time management: and dissertation, 151, 157, 164, 292n5, S76–­S77, S81–­ S82; and exams, 81–­82; and meet-

ings, 72–­73; and reading strategies, 79–­80, 164; timeline in prospectus, 151, 157 titles and subtitles: of books, 120; dissertation, 178–­79; dissertation chapter titles and headings, 178–­79 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 101–­2 tools: for archives, 167; software, 180, 194, 196, S77–­S79, S82–­S84; for sources, 76, 160–­62, S78–­S79, S83; word processing, 180, 194, 195, 196, S77–­S78, S82–­S84 topical sentences, 179–­80, 194, S82 topic selection: and concentric scales of topics, 151–­52, 182; and dissertation title, 178–­79; and emotions, 87; and formation of research question, 110–­14; and fuzzy-­set concepts, 98–­102; and imagination, 110; and intellectual diary, 77; and national values, 128–­29, S65; and originality, 110–­11, 153–­54; and other publications, 149, 153; and personal interests and experiences, 4–­5, 86, 148–­49, S45–­S46; and personal values, 83, 85–­88, 93, 128–­29, 149–­50, S45–­S46; and reading outside discipline, 86; role of advisors in, 4–­5, 149, 153–­54; and sharp-­ edged concepts (dichotomies), 97–­ 98; and understanding of discipline, 63–­64, 68, 83, 88–­93, S46–­S52 totalitarianism: development of concept, 91, 258n24, S56; as term, 262n60 tracing, process, 142 tradition, scholarly, 63–­64 trichotomies, 258n21 Trump, Donald J., 46, 279n26 Tucker, Robert C., S15 turf battles, 37–­38, S14–­S15 turn, as historical term, 66 Ukraine, as term, S65 uncertainty and dissertation, 148, 172–­74, 184, 185

318 INDEX

unified theory or framework, search for: and building blocks metaphor, 31; and comparative methods, 122–­ 23; in history, 27; and interdisciplinary research, 36–­37; in natural sciences, 219n15; persistence of idea, 114, S12–­S13; and progress of disciplines, 51–­52, 122 United States: American exceptionalism, 129, 276n52; democracy in as static vs. dynamic process, 103–­4; differences in development of disciplines from Europe, 48, 137, 213n14, 218n5, 233n43, 244n47; differences in disciplinary agendas from Europe, 90–­92; as empire, 101; focus on modernization, 103; and immigration of scholars, 91, S47; lack of comparative approaches in study of, 128–­29, S65; support for foreign-­area research, 124–­25 universe metaphors, 163–­64 University of Florida, 224n51 University of North Carolina, 225n59 university presses and academic authority, 40 USSR: as empire in concept formation example, 100–­101; geographic terms, 127–­28, S64–­S65; scholarship in, 41, 90 utopianism, 45, 48–­49, 56, 57, S24 value freedom (Wahlfreiheit), 252n34 values: aesthetic, 87–­88; and comparison decisions, 121; and concept of progress, 52; and dissertation rationale, 155; existential, 85–­87; and foreign-­area studies, 125; national values in research, 124–­25, 128–­29, 249n14, S65; probative, 87; social sciences relationship to human values, 83–­85; and topic selection, 83, 85–­88, 93, 128–­29, 149–­50, S45–­S46;

value-­free scholarship concept, 83–­85 Vietnam War, S47–­S48 visual perception, conventions of, 19–­22 Wæver, Ole, S30 war-­gaming, 170 wave metaphor, 284n67 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 62 Weber, Max, 185, 249n13, 252n34, 269n3, S63 Web of Science, 161–­62, S78 West, as term, 128 Wilson, E. O., S1–­S2 Wilson, Woodrow, S50 Wolfowitz, Paul, 274n45 women: employment advances, 43; and male terms in scholarship, 22–­ 23; and sexual harassment, S41 Women’s Caucus for Political Science, 228n10 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, S45 word processing tools, 180, 194, 195, 196, S77–­S78, S82–­S84 World Values Survey, 168 World War II, effect on scholarship, 91 writing: compass-­setting devices, 179–­81, 194–­96, S82; decision making in, 5; dissertation writing as different from other experiences, 148–­49, 172–­74; drafting dissertation, 172–­86, S80–­S84; effect on writer, 6; prospectus, 151–­52; quality of, 190–­92, 195–­96, S88–­S90; relation to revising, 177–­78 Yack, Bernard, S18 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 215n30, 256n10, S80, S81 Zolberg, Aristide R., 244n46