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The Political Scientist as Painkiller

出版	Indiana University, 2004
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=1F0eAQAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Working from the pragmatic instrumentalism of John Dewey, I argue that the positivist temper of mainstream political science and the theory-driven nature of that mainstream's critics, their shared preoccupation with methodologically established disciplinary identities, and their underdeveloped understanding of public scholarship, have together left both the "empirical" and the "normative" study of politics disengaged from politics and public life. After describing Dewey's reconstructive method of political inquiry and defending its central and intrinsic commitment to expansive and participatory democracy, I review the history of the development of the mainstream positivist temper, showing that while it responded to real political and intellectual problems, its proponents depended on a narrow and severely flawed set of models of science. Their opponents, however, took these models as given and simply rejected the application of science to politics, leading to their own form of detachment from empirical engagement with politics. This fruitless division of tendencies has been more or less frozen into political science since the 1970s. Using case studies of public opinion research and public deliberation theory, I conclude that political science as it is now has failed our aspirations meaningfully to contribute to democratic politics, and on its own terms to advance political inquiry. I argue for a "painkilling" political science, based on Dewey's reconstructive theory of inquiry, and a view of public scholarship as contributing to the conditions under which solutions to the problems of the day can emerge (rather than having necessarily to craft those solutions ourselves). This would entail a political science defined not as a discipline around a set of methods, but as a profession around inquiry into a set of political problems--questions about structures of power, legitimacy, public deliberation, and collective judgment.