Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach [online version ed.] 019883294X, 9780198832942

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Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Title Pages Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

(p.i) Interpretive Social Science (p.ii) (p.iii) Interpretive Social Science (p.iv) Copyright Page

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018

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Title Pages Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942144 ISBN 978–0–19–883294–2 (hbk.) 978–0–19–883295–9 (pbk.) Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Introduction

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Introduction Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords Readers are introduced to the major philosophical paradigms shaping social science research today, including hermeneutics and naturalism. The pervasive influence of naturalism on social scientific research is explained and the interpretive alternative is sketched. As part of this, readers are offered an account of the philosophical origins of today’s social science disciplines with a special focus on the case of political science. At the beginning of the twentieth century a modern, ahistorical, and formal paradigm for the study of politics was formed as scholars increasingly rejected the developmental historical narratives and Hegelianism of the nineteenth century. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the argument of the book. Keywords:   naturalism, hermeneutics, philosophy of social science, political science, Hegelianism

This book is written for anyone who wishes to understand human behavior better. Some readers might be students and scholars in the social sciences— political scientists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and psychologists. Others might be political theorists, philosophers, or free-spirited experts in the humanities or natural sciences. Still others may be policy analysts, political actors, and strategists coping with the world of action. But this book is not merely written for experts and elites. It is also intended for ordinary citizens: tenacious laypeople, inquisitive undergraduates, curious autodidacts, and amateur seekers. No one can live for very long without needing to decode and grasp the behavior of those around them.

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Introduction One purpose of this book is to argue that anyone who really desires to understand and explain human agency must adopt a “hermeneutic” or interpretive philosophical perspective. But what is an interpretive approach to the social sciences? Many people in the social sciences already think they know the answer. So the most widely read introductions to political science often give a familiar but misleading reply: namely, interpretivism is a “qualitative” method favored by researchers who have a squishy, touchy-feely view of the world. This means interpretivism is just one among various tools (one with a strength for focusing on the analysis of meanings and beliefs) that social scientists can opt in or out of depending on their disposition and research goals.1 On this view, an interpretive approach is basically reducible to activities like conducting longform interviews, hunting in archives, beefing up on foreign languages, doing ethnography, and traveling to foreign countries for case studies. Interpretivism is instrumental because it is a means for achieving some further research goal or aim. It is optional because those who do not share a particular research goal can safely ignore it (much like a piano tuner does not need to bother with a wrecking ball or a jackhammer). But as we hope to show, this standard conception of interpretivism is seriously wrong. Hermeneutics is non-optional. Anyone from a social scientist to a layperson who truly wishes to grasp human behavior needs hermeneutics. This is because hermeneutics is an entire philosophical paradigm, with consequences for nearly every aspect of the study of human behavior and politics. Specifically, hermeneutics maintains that the study of human beliefs and actions is historical, cultural, and narrative in form. Studying human agency inescapably requires the interpretation of meanings—relating beliefs, actions, and practices to further webs of meaning. Because hermeneutics or interpretivism is a philosophy, it must either be accepted or rejected as a whole. As we (p.2) will show at length in the coming chapters, an interpretive approach cannot be picked up and put down instrumentally without falling into serious confusion and incoherence that does damage to social scientific inquiry. A second major concern of this book is that although we believe interpretivism is the best philosophical approach to the social sciences, it is also true that interpretive philosophy is itself a broad plethora of often rival approaches developed as part of the “interpretive turn” in the last century or so.2 Indeed, philosophers and social scientists from a wide range of competing and not always compatible traditions have converged on hermeneutics—including phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, Hegelians, American pragmatists, British New Left Marxists, post-structuralists, neo-Aristotelians, social constructivists, and social material relations theorists, to name only a few.3 One of our book’s goals is to identify the family resemblances across some of the major interpretive approaches to research, while at the same time arguing that what we call an “anti-naturalist” framework for interpretive research provides the most consistent, coherent basis for this paradigm. By doing this, our hope is Page 2 of 19

Introduction to vindicate the work of the many brilliant interpretive philosophers and social theorists of the last century while also critically clarifying for readers how an anti-naturalist articulation of this philosophy has an impact on nearly every aspect of social scientific research, from concept formation and methods to empirical inquiry and public policy. Indeed, so profound is the effect of interpretive philosophy on the social sciences that it even opens new areas for empirical study and ethical engagement. Our particular anti-naturalist approach also sheds light on some of the most important social science findings of the last fifty years—placing major contributions to our understanding of social, psychological, economic, and political reality within a coherent philosophical framework. But we are running ahead of ourselves. For now the first step is identifying the nature of hermeneutics and the interpretive turn. This involves discerning what interpretive philosophy is “turning” away from; what it is rejecting. Indeed, interpretive philosophy originated as a critical response to the dominant philosophical paradigm in the social sciences—a movement known to philosophers as “naturalism.” Anyone who wishes to fully grasp the interpretive turn must first understand the critical dialogue between hermeneutics and naturalism.

Naturalism and the modern social sciences Naturalism is the general philosophical view that the study of human behavior is analogous to the natural sciences—hence the name “naturalism.” Naturalists have attempted to revolutionize the social sciences by making them look more like the natural sciences in countless ways; these include: searching for (p.3) ahistorical causal laws; eliminating values and political engagement from the study of human behavior; removing or demoting the role of meanings and purposes in favor of synchronic formalism and quantification; and treating social reality as reducible to brute, verifiable facts in need of minimal interpretation. Because naturalism (like hermeneutics) is a philosophy and not simply a method, it is all-pervasive and capable of innumerable variations. Once taken on board, naturalism colors and informs almost every aspect of what are otherwise starkly different research programs and agendas in the social sciences. Naturalism’s protean ability to shape social science concepts, explanation, description, and research will be dealt with in detail throughout the coming chapters. But first we will briefly narrate how naturalism came to dominate the social sciences in order to better understand the current situation and how it has provoked the hermeneutic backlash. Naturalism’s deepest historical roots reach back to the seventeenth century and the attempt by a group of European intellectuals to model knowledge of ethical and political life on the newly emergent revolution in the natural sciences.4 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is a classic, early example of this ambition. Hobbes opens with a famous attempt to construct a purely materialist psychology of human sense perception by discussing the way an organ like the eye apprehends Page 3 of 19

Introduction material objects. Hobbes linked this materialist account of visual perception to an entire anthropology of the state of nature and a theory of political sovereignty. His goal in doing so was to achieve the same kind of epistemological certainty for the study of human beings found in Descartes’ geometry and Galileo’s scientia.5 Joining the new advances in mathematics to those of the new natural sciences, Hobbes believed he had discovered a science of politics built purely on material causes and clear logical deductions. Hobbes is only one of the earliest and most influential attempts to found a science of human behavior modeled on the natural sciences. But many ingenious forms of naturalism were devised and advanced by intellectuals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For our purposes, we do not need to take a deep dive into naturalism’s past or familiarize ourselves with all its astonishing varietals. Instead, we only need to focus on the birth of the contemporary social sciences, and the particular versions of naturalism used to philosophically orient many of today’s disciplines. The key shift toward the current reign of naturalism occurred near the end of the nineteenth century, when many intellectuals turned away from the historical narratives that had shaped the study of politics and society for a century.6 Specifically, they renounced the nineteenth-century study of human behavior via grand historical narratives of the development of politics and society through organic phases. Part of the success of this nineteenth-century developmental paradigm had been its ability to encompass many of the otherwise unbridgeable intellectual divides of that age. So, idealists inspired by Hegel sought to explain social and political life as the unfolding of an idea, Geist, or even Providence through (p.4) history, while at the same time their more materialistically minded adversaries wove grand narratives inspired by Darwinism and evolutionary theory.7 Similarly, Victorian students of politics sought laws of historical progress and evolutionist accounts of the societies around them.8 And English Whigs like J. R. Green, William Stubbs, and Edward Freeman conceptualized history as a gradualist culmination toward liberty and the fulfillment of national identity.9 In the United States, Herbert Adams and John Burgess also constructed big, developmental narratives—in their case encapsulating a progressive view of the democratic nation-state that unsurprisingly gave their own country pride of place.10 Even positivists in this century, like Auguste Comte, thought the study of society was organized by constructing grand historical narratives of development. So Comte argued there was a “law of human development” which passed through three historical stages, reaching a culminating form of scientific society.11 To this diverse assemblage of social theorists must also be added Karl Marx, one of the most momentous thinkers of the nineteenth century. Marx famously unfolded a monumental historical narrative that argued history passed through a complex dialectic of economic phases of production and politics, climaxing in a crisis of capitalism and a global communist revolution.12 History had a definite, fixed Page 4 of 19

Introduction trajectory, and understanding human society without unlocking this trajectory was impossible. In short, among the enormous diversity and conflict of nineteenth-century intellectual life, there was nonetheless an underlying broad consensus that students of human society needed to construct a developmental historical narrative, a system of the past culminating in present institutions, beliefs, and practices. Thus, despite the impressive variety and major differences distinguishing the social theories of this age, a linear, developmental view of history nonetheless proved almost ubiquitous. These thinkers made no basic distinction between the study of politics and that of history. Politics unfolded through historical time and (in their own arcane form of naturalism) according to the dictates of some logic of development akin to the stages of maturation for a creature in biology. Although they have never disappeared entirely, what is certain is that very few professional social scientists today are interested in building such culminating, quasi-organic narratives of the past. To the contrary, the kind of naturalism that currently dominates the social sciences was born out of a rejection of developmental historicism in favor of ahistorical and formal modes of explanation and analysis. Indeed, the naturalists who set up the foundations of disciplines like political science, economics, and sociology drew on countertrends in the nineteenth century. One crucial source of the break away from developmental historicism was utilitarianism. Although utilitarians like J. S. Mill seemed to accept a developmental view of human liberty, creative dispositions, and capacities, utilitarianism also provided resources for a more synchronic study of society. For example, William Stanley Jevons took (p.5) utilitarianism’s ahistorical notions of rational preference selection as well as its emphasis on quantification in order to develop a neoclassical theory of economics. Jevons’ view of economics stressed formalism, mathematization, and static systems as opposed to grand historical developments and changes.13 Although neoclassical economists sometimes still linked their theories to historical narratives, a decided shift away from history and toward ahistorical formalism was taking place.14 During the first half of the twentieth century developmental historicist approaches were gradually replaced by methodological approaches committed to formalism, quantification, ahistorical analysis, and atomism.15 Historians have now traced in detail the way in which a naturalist desire to make the social sciences more scientific fueled this turn away from an earlier emphasis on history. In making this shift, entirely new naturalistic conceptions of economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the other human sciences were created.16 But for the sake of brevity, we will focus more narrowly on sketching how this movement took hold of the study of politics and shaped it into the contemporary discipline of political “science” that now dominates. Parallel Page 5 of 19

Introduction histories exist in each of the other major disciplines of the social sciences, meaning that the transformation of political science stands in for a wider revolution in the human sciences. Interpretivists, as we shall see, are responding critically to the transformation of the human sciences as a whole. Early reformers of the study of politics were skeptical of the nineteenth century’s optimistic narratives of civilizational progress. The catastrophic experience of the First World War in particular helped motivate a generational shift away from the prior century’s meta-narratives of progress in favor of the empirical analysis of discrete, discontinuous atomistic units of political reality. For example, Herman Finer devised an analytic index so students of comparative government could compare institutions across states. This was part of a wider shift away from concerns with historical evolution and in favor of isolating institutional features of political reality and treating them as synchronic, formal systems, whose historical past and development were largely irrelevant.17 Finer was symptomatic of a larger trend afoot to modernize the study of politics by making it more naturalistic. The notion of a nation-state that was expressive of some basic ethical unity, a Hegelian Geist, a single Whiggish value, or somehow the culmination of the arc of history was replaced by that of a government as a collection of competing interests and beliefs. Rather than focus on history, students of government looked to psychology. Behavior—conceived of as simply the empirical analysis of human action free of ethical or historical depth—became central to the study of politics. The concept of behavior as an ahistorical field of human action would become crucial to all the modern social sciences. For example, in England Graham Wallas rejected idealist historicism and tried to create a political science that relied solely on the quantitative study of (p.6) behavior, dropping deeper historical meanings.18 Meanwhile in America, Charles Merriam, one of the key figures in the founding of political science as a discipline, shared Wallas’s goal of a form of inquiry that used surveys and statistics to analytically categorize and relate isolated beliefs and actions. Merriam insisted that the new political science use “instruments of social observation in statistics” together with “the analytic technique and results of psychology.”19 His approach helped shape what came to be known as the Chicago school of political science, which trained many of the leading political scientists of the next generation.20 The effort to make politics into a more thoroughgoing naturalistic science was also helped along by the burgeoning interest in survey research. Researchers like Walter Lippmann focused on aggregating public opinion analyzed in terms of census data and statistics.21 Major survey institutes began opening at universities across the country at midcentury.22 These survey institutes sought to promote the study of public opinion and political behavior as an ahistorical, Page 6 of 19

Introduction atomistic, formal enterprise. Again, deeper historical inheritances or the active power of the past on the present were underemphasized or ignored. A more genuinely scientific study of politics meant generating data about social reality in terms of immanent, discrete units of space and time disconnected from a strong historical dimension. Likewise, these historically muted units were freed from the surrounding noise of meanings, beliefs, and interpretive context. In other words, the role of culture was largely sidelined or else devolved into the aggregate of individual, ahistorical units of belief. During this time many universities opened what they dubbed “political science” departments, which increasingly replaced the historical political studies of the prior era.23 This is not to say that the new movement to modernize the study of politics was all of apiece. To the contrary, the new political science was characterized by certain deep divisions that persist today. The most important of these was advanced by theorists who had been influenced by a positivist conception of science. For instance, at the University of Chicago, David Easton led a growing number of political scientists who believed that the new shift to an ahistorical, formal political science involved too much collection of facts and not enough general theoretical explanation. Easton helped advanced the so-called behavioral revolution in political science in which deductive theories of general, law-like rules were constructed and subsequently assessed in light of individual facts.24 The response by many to this behavioral revolution was in part a reassertion of the earlier empiricist insistence on induction and midlevel theorizing. What never gained mainstream traction, however, was a return to more historical and narrative forms of study that had been typical of the nineteenth century. Instead, the discipline became divided between empirically minded, midlevel theorists who focused on case studies and gathering facts within particular (p.7) polities, and more positivistic theory-builders who hypothesized certain generalizations and then tested these in light of sets of facts. Against this historical background many of the divisions of contemporary political science become more intelligible. Consider, for instance, the research program known as historical institutionalism, which is often openly skeptical of general theories and large-N statistics. Despite their skepticism of more positivist theorizing, thus far historical institutionalists have remained tacitly committed to the larger philosophical currents of naturalism by rejecting nineteenth-century historicist themes and advocating “analytical induction” in which midlevel theories are still constructed in relation to ahistorical typologies, classifications, and correlations of atomistic bits of social reality.25 Deep historicizing of social reality is not part of this form of inquiry; as a result, the disagreement between historical institutionalism and behavioralists does not mark a break on either side from the naturalist weltanschauung. This means that the major opposing research programs that have formed in modern political Page 7 of 19

Introduction science—in spite of all their important differences—remain competing forms of naturalism and not alternatives to it. A similar philosophical point might be made about a research paradigm like rational choice theory, which has largely been adopted by political scientists who admire the advances of neoclassical economics. We will have much more to say about rational choice in Chapter 5. Indeed, we believe that as a method interpretivists can use rational choice theory, large-N statistics, and midlevel case studies pragmatically to advance their own research concerns, provided they steer clear of philosophical naturalism. They can even use rational choice and other more positivistic methods “as if” they were true—Colin Hay’s provocative argument—so long as certain distortive costs and dangers are carefully weighed and considered.26 Nonetheless, in its current form the method of rational choice is too often combined with naturalism in a way that remains completely unaware of the philosophical ramifications and pitfalls. The historical roots of rational choice are found in the American Cold War attempts to develop a science of decision-making that would help win the strategic standoff between two nuclear-armed states.27 Yet this method was also rapidly adopted by economists who were steeped in the neoclassical revolution and sought to reject historical narratives and thick cultural meanings in favor of synchronic, formal conceptions of human rationality.28 This means rational choice theory (as well as much of mainstream economics) has an importantly different and more rationalist intellectual lineage from the positivism of the behavioral revolution and the empiricism of the early turn away from the nineteenth-century focus on historical narratives. Like the behavioral revolution, rational choice theorists often criticize historical institutionalists for the “stockpiling of concrete case studies,” which they insist are “not the solution” to the problem of achieving (p. 8) true scientific generalizations.29 Instead of beginning from empirical cases, rational choice theorists deduce from certain axioms of an idealized conception of human agency.30 This is an important difference. But at the same time advocates of rational choice theory also tend to justify their approach in terms of some empirical claim about their model’s ability to describe or capture some important feature of the political or economic world (at the very least, as we will see, they claim that the value of the model is its predictive capacity).31 Moreover, rational choice theorists and with them many neoclassical economists reject the notion that historical narratives and thick interpretive engagement are central to social scientific explanation. Thus, in their own unique way, rational choice theorists also share in the philosophical naturalism of historical institutionalism and the behavioral revolution. This implies that the three main research camps in political science today (and the dominant theoretical premises of neoclassical economics) are, philosophically speaking, various forms of naturalism.

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Introduction Making this claim does not negate the deeply important differences in methods, training, and aims embodied by the various empiricist, positivist, and rational choice branches of contemporary political science. Nor are we trying to suggest that modern economics is reducible to rational choice. To the contrary, there are undoubtedly extremely important differences dividing these and many other research traditions and communities.32 But it does mean that philosophically the mainstream in these disciplines embodies rival attempts to achieve the naturalist goal of an ahistorical science of society, and not a full-blown interpretive alternative. The three-cornered debate between forms of political science concerned primarily with universal theory building through the use of large-N statistics versus an idealization of human rationality versus those concerned with the accumulation of regional case studies in order to induce certain midlevel correlations and analytic classifications continues to the present day. What they all share at the philosophical level is the break away from historical narrative and holistic treatments of meaning, in favor of formalism, atomism, and units of analysis that remain historically silent. In short, the major research programs of contemporary political science are heirs to the project of modernizing the discipline by cleansing it of the noise of interpretive phenomena. The messy nature of interpreting meanings—its lack of susceptibility to a fixed method or reduction to a science—remains largely hidden from view. Rather than the study of politics being concerned with history and narrative, it is presented as a science closer to the formal quantifications and ahistoricism of the physical sciences. This attempt to free (albeit to differing degrees) the study of human life of strongly historical and thick meaning dimensions forms the main impetus of the interpretive critique of naturalism across the social sciences. Rather than a formal, synchronic knowledge, hermeneutics sees the social sciences as primarily engaged with webs of meaning, beliefs, and significances. Rather than (p.9) searching for ahistorical correlations, typologies, or causal laws, hermeneuticists and interpretivists maintain that social science must construct narratives of the contingency and holistic complexity of the meanings and cultures comprising social reality. These are all points that will be developed at length (in Chapters 2 and 3). But this much should be clear: interpretive philosophy emerges as a repudiation and a turning away from naturalism’s increasingly dominant conception of social science which was spreading with astonishing speed throughout the universities of modern society.

Interpretive philosophy and anti-naturalism Interpretive or hermeneutic philosophy holds that the study of human behavior— and thus all the social sciences—ought to be historical, employing narratives as explanations, and not neglecting the meanings and beliefs of the relevant agents. One of the chief goals of this book is not only to gather and make sense of the varying iterations and justifications of interpretive philosophy, but also to argue that a particular articulation of that philosophy (what we call antiPage 9 of 19

Introduction naturalism) best clarifies the interpretive turn and helps political and social scientists achieve a comprehensively distinct research agenda. The goal of this book is thus to provide a basis for turning away from the highly ingrained and pervasive naturalism that dominated the twentieth century and continues to reign supreme in the intellectual culture of modern societies. The research paradigm presented here is the basis for a transformed conception of the human sciences—but one that can absorb, learn from, and accept much from the methodological rigor, empirical research, and investigations currently conducted by working social scientists. The interpretive turn does not call for wholesale rejections of current research and findings in the social sciences, but rather for gaining greater clarity about how to ground, understand, and explain the growing trove of knowledge about human beings and their societies. What parts of contemporary social science are accepted, rejected, and reformed by those undergoing the interpretive turn will become clearer as our argument progresses. The basic structure of our argument in favor of hermeneutic or interpretive philosophy will be as follows. First we offer readers a basic primer in the key philosophical concepts of the hermeneutic tradition. How should social scientists think about an interpretive approach to their chosen discipline of social science? What are the basic features of the interpretive turn that color the other aspects of empirical research and study? Chapter 2 is devoted to explaining the basic philosophical concepts and features of the interpretive turn. Philosophical reflection is needed in order to decide the concepts and forms of reasoning that are appropriate to a given domain of study. Interpretive philosophy governs the (p.10) approach social scientists take to research and what kinds of topics they favor. This will be contrasted with some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions found in naturalist approaches to social science. The interpretive turn has been advocated by an impressive array of philosophical traditions and individual philosophical virtuosos. Why should working social scientists adopt a specifically anti-naturalist framework for advancing the interpretive turn? Chapter 3 considers some of the classic philosophical justifications that have been offered to establish the need for an interpretive turn in the social sciences—including phenomenology and post-structuralism. Although we are philosophical pluralists and affirm that a wide variety of positions (pragmatism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, social constructivism, and so on) have validly established the need for an interpretive approach to the social sciences, we nonetheless also believe that our antinaturalist framework can effectively sort through and ground these claims. Specifically, anti-naturalism corrects the tendency of some advocates of the interpretive turn to drift back into naturalist concepts as well as to distort the proper conception of human agency. This is where we begin to develop a recurrent theme: namely, that an anti-naturalist framework is especially helpful in philosophically clarifying how social scientists ought to think about the Page 10 of 19

Introduction interpretive turn. This is a claim that we hope gains continual nuance and complexity as layers of argument are added to the thesis in each ensuing chapter. How is it the case that an interpretive and anti-naturalist approach informs all aspects of social scientific research? Chapter 4 is crucial for furthering the claim that interpretive philosophy is not simply a method that working social scientists can treat neutrally like a tool that they pick up and put down at will. This is because the basic ways in which researchers conceptualize social and political reality can either take naturalist forms or more philosophically defensible antinaturalist forms. Concept formation is inescapably philosophical and social scientists cannot study political reality without making some tacit assumptions about the relevant concepts. The question then becomes: which concepts are proper to the human sciences? To answer this question, Chapter 4 draws on some of the most influential political science methodology literature as well as top research programs of empirical political science (including critical discussions of voter behavior, so-called “contentious politics,” democratic peace, and selectorate theory, to name a few). As part of this argument, readers will also see how naturalist versus anti-naturalist philosophy is not simply a method but pervades all aspects of research. What is the role of methods in interpretive research? After all, most students of social science today will spend a significant portion of their education and training learning to become experts in a particular set of methods—statistics and regression analysis; foreign languages and ethnography; decision theory frameworks; or various forms of polling, surveys, and interviews. Do interpretivists need to wed a particular set of methods? We (p.11) have already proclaimed that we are methodological pluralists. That is, we believe that researchers can select whichever method or methods best serve their research interests. This contrasts with naturalism and interpretivism, which are not methods, but rather philosophical worldviews or approaches. Whereas methods can be used by social scientists on a completely pragmatic basis depending on their research goals and the constraints on their time and resources, philosophical assumptions are omnipresent and inescapable. Chapter 5 draws on the latest methodological literature in order to elaborate these crucial claims and show how an anti-naturalist framework justifies multi-methods reigning supreme. Here we also justify our claim that interpretive social scientists can make use of what are sometimes dubbed “quantitative” and “qualitative” methods like mass surveys, random sampling, regression analysis, statistics, rational choice modeling, ethnography, archival research, and long-form interviewing. Chapter 5 will also show readers how to avoid naturalist pitfalls when employing methods in their research. Important to understanding our discussion of methods is our belief that methodology (or the tools used for empirical inquiry) is distinct from philosophical questions. Our hope is that our anti-naturalist approach will help methodological debates take a more Page 11 of 19

Introduction philosophical direction. Researchers should be much more concerned about philosophical differences than methodological ones. Is there anything distinct or special about an interpretive research agenda? How does it generate a particular set of empirical concerns or particular ways of looking at social and political reality? Chapters 6 and 7 explain how interpretivism unlocks a range of empirical concerns that remain inaccessible to those making use of naturalist concepts. The empirical topics taken up by interpretive social scientists are not accidental or random, but reflect their philosophical commitments. Chapter 6 focuses on synchronic research topics (or those pertaining to a single snapshot of time) and argues that anti-naturalism generates distinctive ways of studying beliefs, identities, cultural practices, traditions, and political resistance. Examples are drawn from cutting-edge interpretive research into subjects like the politics of Islam, race, globalization, and democratic civic engagement. By contrast, Chapter 7 focuses on large-scale, diachronic research topics (or those developing across time). Contrary to widespread belief, the interpretive approach to political science is not limited to the small-scale study of single cases. Rather, anti-naturalist philosophy can ground empirical research of largescale and diachronic historical sociologies. Once again, hermeneutics generates a distinctive approach to empirical study—in this case one that is genealogical and narrative, rejecting naturalist attempts to reduce explanation to classification, formal modeling, or ahistorical causal mechanisms. Exploring some of the most urgent domains of social scientific research today (including topics such as violence, religion, secularism, nationalism, economic history, and the state), we show how justifying interpretive inquiry with an (p.12) antinaturalist framework makes for a conceptually and empirically superior approach. The result is a clear picture of what anti-naturalist empirical research in the social sciences looks like. Can students and scholars who wish to explain human behavior also engage in ideological and ethical critique? When and how do values enter into social scientific research? One of naturalism’s most serious limitations results from its disavowal of ethical engagement, ideology, political theory, and the critical analysis of values. Inspired by the natural sciences, naturalist philosophy encourages social scientists to believe they have no intrinsic contribution to make in debates over values and ideology. Instead, their research must remain value-free, an instrumental repository of facts, and never engage in ethical, ideological, or political criticism. By contrast, most interpretive philosophers reject this strict dichotomy between facts and values. But once again, our antinaturalist framework can clarify the ways in which political and social scientists are free to engage values if they are so inclined.

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Introduction Specifically, Chapter 8 shows how political scientists working within an interpretive, anti-naturalist framework can legitimately take an interest in ethical critique. An anti-naturalist framework opens the way to ethically and politically engaged research by giving a distinct account of values that reveals the uses of critical sociologies and the ethical significance of history, and shares certain affinities with deliberative and democratic forms of political theory. As will be made clear, this does not imply that political or social science is synonymous with ethics and political critique. To the contrary, social science is broadly concerned with the study and explanation of human behavior, which need not develop particular ethical or political claims. But it does mean that social scientists who take the interpretive turn are free to wrestle with values and normative critique as one possible concern. In this way Chapter 8 complicates naturalism’s aping of chemistry, physics, and the hard sciences by dichotomizing facts and values. The work of ethical philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists has overlapping zones of concern. Is the interpretive turn limited to the concerns of academic researchers? Is there no impact on the actual workings of real-world politics? Chapter 9 rejects the cliché response that philosophy in general and hermeneutics in particular are purely academic or scholarly pursuits with no wider impact. It considers how an anti-naturalist framework can ground a distinctively deliberative and interpretive turn in public policy and generate a more humanistic conception of power in society. Over the last three decades there has been an important shift among a minority of public policy scholars toward interpretive and deliberative modes that are critical of naturalism’s justification of technocracy and rule by supposedly scientific experts of human behavior. Like the interpretive turn more generally, this deliberative remaking of public policy has drawn on a great diversity of philosophical sources, including phenomenology, discourse theory, Dewey’s pragmatism, and post-structuralism. (p.13) While we embrace the fact that this transformation of policy discourse and practice can be reached by a variety of philosophical routes, we also argue that our anti-naturalist framework dispels certain confusions that cloud these debates. Once again, readers will see how an anti-naturalist approach to social scientific inquiry reshapes the field, generating criticisms of the naturalist assumptions that currently dominate. In this chapter we also return to Colin Hay’s important point that naturalism might still be used by social scientists and public administrators “as if” it were true, provided they recognize its philosophical limitations.33 Ultimately our philosophical arguments substantively demonstrate why social science and public policy scholars ought to take an interpretive turn away from the present naturalist consensus. A few important provisos are necessary, however, before beginning our analysis. First, as we have already mentioned, our conception of the interpretive turn allows for philosophical pluralism. The chapters that follow explore the critique of naturalism and the shift to more interpretive forms of social science. When it Page 13 of 19

Introduction comes to this paradigm shift, there is much shared ground among poststructuralists, phenomenologists, American pragmatists, analytic philosophers, social constructivists, and others. Different traditions generate a variety of reasons and arguments for making this turn. Specifically, the interpretive turn allows philosophical pluralism in the domains of ontology and epistemology. Readers can accept our case for the interpretive turn and remain either realists or anti-realists when it comes to ontology; empiricists or anti-empiricists when it comes to epistemology.34 Indeed, some of the most prominent proponents of the interpretive turn (especially those hailing from the phenomenological tradition like Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer) have argued that explanation in political science is based on intrinsic, ontological features of the object of inquiry. As we will touch on again in later chapters, Taylor famously claimed that interpretive study in the social sciences is justified by the ontological claim that humans are “self-interpreting animals.”35 In a different vein, social constructivists like John Searle and others have made ontological claims about the nature of institutions as distinct from the brute facts of the natural sciences.36 But the interpretive turn has also been justified by those who are more philosophically reluctant to make ontological claims. For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson have emphasized the kinds of explanations that are appropriate to human behavior as the grammar of a particular language.37 These linguistic arguments are about the logic of conceptual languages and not about the nature of being or ontology. Yet other advocates of the interpretive turn have drawn on pragmatic arguments stemming from John Dewey.38 This means that our arguments in subsequent chapters withstanding, the interpretive turn can rest on a variety of philosophical claims: from ontological claims about how human beings are in reality to linguistic claims about the grammar or logic of certain language games.39 We leave these questions for individual readers to decide for (p.14) themselves. What we do argue, however, is that whatever the fundamental philosophical commitments generating the interpretive turn, they ought to have a certain general shape and form. This shape and form is what we call “anti-naturalism.” The interpretive turn thus allows for a far wider range of philosophical commitments than many of its own proponents realize. Our anti-naturalist approach in this book affirms this broad-tent notion of interpretivism that can embrace positions that otherwise disagree on other key questions in philosophy. However, this philosophical pluralism has certain necessary limits. There is no way for us to philosophically affirm naturalism as an acceptable pluralism. This is because—as will be substantively established in each chapter—naturalism and interpretivism are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Both cannot be affirmed without contradiction. Getting a little ahead of ourselves, our claim that the study of human behavior must properly reckon with meanings doesn’t entail that social scientists are prohibited from the use of statistics, regression analyses, and mass polling if Page 14 of 19

Introduction these prove handy for their research. We agree, therefore, with Bent Flyvbjerg’s argument that determining which methods are appropriate to a research project depends on exercising judgment within context (Flyvbjerg follows Aristotle in dubbing this “phronesis”).40 At the level of practical day-to-day research, mastering particular methods is difficult and time-consuming. Social scientists currently spend years mastering a method like regression analysis or ethnographic immersion into a foreign culture. The sophistication of modern methods means that future social science may need to engage in more collaborative work across methodological lines for sheer practical purposes in order to advance certain research goals. Ethnographers and statisticians may yet learn to work in tandem, and produce insights out of dialogue and collaboration with one another, as opposed to the closed silos of inquiry that too often predominate in the modern university. However, all will receive fuller treatment in the coming pages. We believe an anti-naturalist framework is helpful in clarifying what is at stake in the interpretive turn. Moreover, we believe that interpretivism is the most philosophically cogent approach currently on offer in the social sciences. The lessons of this book therefore amount to nothing more or less than a dramatic remaking of the study and application of knowledge about human beings. We are far from the first people to have made this call, but we believe our work systematically articulating and elaborating an anti-naturalist approach has the potential to be the most comprehensive. Social science is in some senses still catching up with history. Certain breakthroughs in philosophy advanced by pioneers hailing from traditions as diverse as Hegelianism, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, New Left humanism, post-structuralism, social constructivism, and many others have yet to be appreciated and understood by the wider social scientific (p.15) community, let alone the wider political culture of modern society. Social science and civil society must catch up to philosophy. Like a flash of lightning that illuminates the sky, many are still waiting for the thunder. Notes:

(1.) See, for example, David E. McNabb, Research Methods for Political Science: Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015) xix, 287–8. (2.) For important collections of interpretive philosophy, see: Michael Gibbons, Interpreting Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). (3.) Examples, of phenomenology: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, Page 15 of 19

Introduction 2004); Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967); analytic philosophy: Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); Hegelianism: R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946); American pragmatism: Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); New Left Marxism: E. P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines,” New Reasoner 1 (1957): 105–43; post-structuralism: Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983); neoAristotelianism: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); social constructivism: Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Colin Hay, “Social Constructivism,” in Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science, eds. Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes (New York: Routledge 2016), 99– 112; Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); social material relations: Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995). (4.) Charles Taylor, “Introduction,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2. (5.) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Leviathan, with Selected Variants From the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994). (6.) What follows draws heavily on the work of the scholars in: Mark Bevir, ed., Modernism and the Social Sciences: Anglo-American Exchanges, c. 1918–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). (7.) See: Mark Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000,” Political Studies 54 (2006): 584–8. (8.) J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). (9.) J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). (10.) Herbert Adams, “Special Methods of Historical Study,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 1 (1884); John Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934).

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Introduction (11.) Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 1., ed. and trans. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), 1–18. (12.) Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978). (13.) Margaret Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). (14.) See: Donald Winch, Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). (15.) William Everdell, First Moderns (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chs. 8–10. (16.) See the essays collected in: Bevir, Modernism and the Social Sciences. (17.) Herman Finer, Foreign Governments at Work: An Introductory Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1921); Herman Finer, The Theory and Practice of Modern Government, 2 vols. (New York: The Dial Press, 1932). (18.) Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Archibald Constable, 1908). (19.) Charles Merriam, “The Present State of the Study of Politics (1921),” in New Aspects of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 82–3. (20.) Barry Karl, Charles Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974) viii–ix, ch. 8. (21.) Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922). (22.) Susan Herbst, “Polling in Politics and Industry,” in The Modern Social Sciences. Vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science, eds. Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 577–90. (23.) James Farr, “Political Science,” in The Modern Social Sciences. Vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science, eds. Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 315. (24.) David Eason, The Political System (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 24–5, 65–6. Page 17 of 19

Introduction (25.) For example: Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3–43. (26.) Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public Administration 82:1 (2004): 39–62; Hay, Political Analysis, 40. (27.) S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). (28.) Schabas, A World Ruled by Number. (29.) Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 198. (30.) Jon Elster, ed., Rational Choice (New York: New York University Press, 1986); Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., The Economic Approach to Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). (31.) For two seminal examples from economics—the first arguing that something essential about human behavior is captured by rational choice modeling, the second claiming that its value is chiefly predictive—see: Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in The Philosophy of Economics, 3rd ed., ed. Daniel Hausman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 145–78. (32.) For an insightful discussion, see: Hay, Political Analysis, chap. 1. (33.) Hay, Political Analysis, 40; Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or SelfFulfilling Prophecy?” (34.) For a detailed philosophical justification of this claim to acceptable pluralism of competing positions among interpretivists in areas such as ontology, epistemology, and even explanation, see: Mark Bevir, “Meta-Methodology: Clearing the Underbrush,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology, eds. Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Henry Brady, and David Collier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 48–70. (35.) Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45–76. (36.) John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995); John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization

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Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Colin Hay, “Social Constructivism,” 99– 105, 110. (37.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958); Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in The Essential Davidson, eds. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 23–36. (38.) For example: Frank Fischer, Democracy and Expertise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). (39.) Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). (40.) Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87.

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Philosophical roots

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Philosophical roots Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explains the basic philosophical concepts and features of the interpretive turn, including: meaning holism, the hermeneutic circle, selfinterpretation, the social background, and contingent causality. Sociologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and other social scientists can no longer afford to ignore philosophy. This is because philosophical reflection is needed in order to decide the concepts and forms of reasoning that are appropriate to a given domain of empirical study. Interpretive philosophy ought to govern the approach social scientists take to research and what kinds of study they favor. This will be contrasted with some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions found in naturalist approaches to social science. Keywords:   meaning holism, self-interpretation, hermeneutic circle, contingent causality, law-like explanation

There is a lot of philosophical confusion over how to conduct research in the social sciences today. On the one hand, naturalists envision the social sciences as analogous to the hard sciences. In the naturalist view, the social sciences are presumed to be gradually climbing up the tower of knowledge toward the lofty heights of physics, chemistry, and the other natural sciences. Yet on the other hand, far from converging on a single, recognized paradigm, rival theories proliferate and multiply with each decade (for example, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, neoclassical economics, structuralism, institutionalism, behavioral genetics, behavioral economics, behavioralism, neurocomputationalism, neurosociology, and the list goes on). Meanwhile, certain forms of naturalism Page 1 of 28

Philosophical roots become faddish, crowned in the public square as the standard-bearers of science (for example, Alex Pentland’s “social physics”) at the same time that bygone forms are discarded and condemned to the curiosity heap of history (for example, Auguste Comte’s “social physics”).1 So the commitment to a science of human behavior coincides with the explosion of conflicting claims to true science. The intellectual culture of naturalism thus generates deep, often unspoken anxieties about pseudoscience. But what if this entire babble of tongues is the consequence of a philosophical mistake—an error and bewitchment by a false analogy? To understand how interpretivists and anti-naturalists think, one must be willing to seriously entertain this possibility and view the world from this perspective. Indeed, the falseness of the analogy between the human and natural sciences is one of the central claims of anti-naturalism. For this reason, anti-naturalists believe the disorderly jumble of “sciences” that populate today’s social science departments are often the result of a philosophical misunderstanding. This chapter takes the first steps in breaking the naturalist spell. What is the anti-naturalist approach to the study of human behavior? In what follows, we articulate the basics of the anti-naturalist perspective in order to help illuminate the philosophical features motivating the interpretive turn across the human sciences. Determining which concepts and forms of reasoning are appropriate to an empirical domain of study is largely a philosophical task. For this reason, it is no accident that at the roots of all disciplines of knowledge we find an assemblage of philosophical and theoretical considerations. Social science is no exception. At its most basic level anti-naturalism is a claim about what concepts and forms of reasoning ought to be adopted by working social scientists. Without this philosophical understanding, social science runs the risk of compromising and distorting otherwise well-intentioned research efforts. (p.19) The interpretive turn calls on social scientists to radically reform their approach to the study of social and political reality. Our anti-naturalist framework synthesizes claims made by phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, social constructivists, Hegelians, pragmatists, post-structuralists, and many others who have gone before us in advocating an interpretive turn. At the same time, anti-naturalist premises can also be used to draw critical contrasts between our approach and some of the other major advocates of interpretivism. In the first part of this chapter we introduce readers to some of the basic philosophical features of the anti-naturalist approach, including meaning holism, the relationship between beliefs and actions, the self-interpreting aspects of human agency, the role of the social background, and the importance of history. Along the way we also show how anti-naturalist philosophy implies social constructivism, bottom-up studies, and historical explanations (terms which will be defined).

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Philosophical roots In the second part of the chapter we contrast anti-naturalist concepts like meaning holism and historical contingency with the basic philosophical concepts characteristic of naturalism. Contrasting naturalism with anti-naturalism will help shine a light on what is at stake in these debates and controversies. But it will also alert readers to the creeping dangers of naturalist modes of thought, which can distort, undermine, and otherwise invalidate good social science research. This will provide vital premises for our arguments in later chapters about anti-naturalism’s impact on concept formation, methods, ethics, democracy, and public policy. Before we start we need to make one brief point about our use of the term “naturalism.” In philosophy this term often refers to the overriding authority of the natural sciences over the social ones.2 But in some areas of sociology and particularly ethnography, the term “naturalism” instead refers to a rejection of scientism in favor of beginning from the natural, conversational life-world of social agents.3 Such a confusing reversal of a word’s usage across academic communities is unfortunate, especially if it leads to misunderstandings and a failure to build larger intellectual solidarities. But as long as readers keep in mind that our use of the word is born out of the philosophy of social science and not to be confused with other deployments, this basic misunderstanding should be averted.

Anti-naturalism’s basic philosophical features Perhaps the central claim of anti-naturalists is that the human beliefs, actions, and practices constituting social reality are no less expressive of meanings than the spoken word or written text. Indeed, much like the words of a language, anti-naturalists believe social reality embodies the meanings of the individuals (p.20) who helped create it. In this sense, social reality is a matrix of meanings, continually and collaboratively composed by the people who inhabit it. The latter implies social constructivism, or the idea that in its very being social reality is constructed through human activity (a point articulated by a number of social constructivist philosophers).4 Because social reality itself is constructed out of meaningful phenomena, social scientists (no less than literary scholars, legal theorists, or historians) must engage in the activity of interpretation. Indeed, social science chiefly consists of the interpretive explanation of the meanings comprising social, psychological, economic, and political life. But how ought social scientists go about this task? This is one of the central questions of this book and we hope to add a great deal of nuance and complexity to our answer. However, at the most general level we can say that the activity of interpretation is characterized by a basic pattern that hermeneutic philosophers have dubbed “the hermeneutic circle.” As Hans-Georg Gadamer, perhaps the most important interpretive theorist to have worked in the phenomenological tradition, put it, the hermeneutic circle is Page 3 of 28

Philosophical roots the principle that “we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole” such that there is a circular structure to the “art of understanding.”5 In other words, this view implies that meanings are not atomistic and freestanding in nature but rather are the function of holistic relationships between parts. This holistic nature of meaning is of great importance to an anti-naturalist approach to social science and we will elaborate upon it throughout the course of this chapter. Specifically, we will do so by examining four major assumptions of anti-naturalism: first, that human beliefs and actions are holistic in nature; second, that these beliefs are subject to continual change; third, that individuals are always embedded within a larger social background; and fourth, that history is the horizon of human meanings.

Human beliefs and actions are holistic in nature Social scientists generally focus on studying the beliefs and actions of particular individuals and groups. But how are they to think about and treat such beliefs and actions? Are human beliefs and actions immediately and unproblematically observable to any reasonably attentive onlooker? Or do they require some special background knowledge and approach? Let us begin by analyzing beliefs and then afterwards consider the case of actions. Anti-naturalists believe that human beliefs might be understood in light of the philosophical doctrine of meaning holism—a doctrine that emerged out of debates in analytic philosophy of language and epistemology (p.21) over the last century (especially in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein) but which has important consequences for social science research.6 According to meaning holism, beliefs simply hold no meaning in perfect, atomistic isolation. Rather, the meaning of beliefs is a function of their place within a wider context or web of beliefs that sustain and inform them. The status of this hugely important claim can be clarified with an example that is also pertinent to social science research. Consider the case of a social scientist who wishes to understand the fascist slogan “el silencio es salud” (silence is health) expressed by so many Argentines living under the military junta during that country’s Dirty War.7 At the most basic level, the very meaning of the slogan el silencio es salud requires some background knowledge of the meanings of words and grammar in the Spanish language. Although such background knowledge normally remains tacit to social inquiry, it is no less true that the content of these beliefs is filled out in relation to such wider webs of belief. But our inquirer into this fascist slogan cannot stop at webs of belief concerning the Spanish language. Rather, the meaning of this belief also needs to be related to the relevant historical and social contexts— things like Argentine ultra-nationalism in the 1970s and 80s, practices of state terrorism, the Cold War, and so on. More concretely, this might mean relating the slogan el silencio es salud to any number of related beliefs that were part of the Dirty War—beliefs captured in such terms as los desaparecidos, tratamiento, and vuelo. The point is that because the meaning of particular beliefs is only Page 4 of 28

Philosophical roots filled out in relation to other beliefs, social scientists will often need knowledge not only of the languages but also of the social milieus and ways of life that inform particular beliefs. Because beliefs are holistic in this way, social scientists are necessarily involved in an interpretive act—that is in the hermeneutic circle of relating parts to various wholes. Of course, everything we have presented thus far might be readily conceded by social scientists that are otherwise hostile to anti-naturalism. Such critics might accept that the meaning of particular beliefs must be grasped by placing them within wider webs of belief. However, such critics might then draw a distinction between explanation and understanding, noting that while interpretation is an essential part of understanding beliefs, it is not indispensable to explaining them. Explaining beliefs might then take a more natural scientific form, like inferring a general causal mechanism by correlating the beliefs with some other feature of social reality (for instance, demographics, an ahistorical structure of rationality, or stimuli-triggers in the environment). But anti-naturalists hold that drawing this distinction between explanation and understanding in fact misses how we should explain beliefs. Anti-naturalists point out that normally we explain why people hold a certain belief by appealing to the reasons they have that support it. This means that in normal cases (we will return to abnormal ones shortly) beliefs are explicated by reconstructing the particular webs of belief that sustain and inform reasons. (p.22) Thus, to return to our example, the explanation for why different Argentines adopted the authoritarian slogan el silencio es salud will vary depending on the particular reasons of individuals. So, in one case, an individual’s reasons for adopting the slogan “silence is health” might be explained by referring to his belief that Argentina’s national security is being undermined by noisy dissenters and subversives. For such an individual the silencing of dissidents in the form of intimidation, torture, and killings is the “health” of the Argentine nation, ensuring its restoration to greatness and underwriting a politics of terror. By contrast, another person’s reasons for espousing this slogan might be very different—for example, driven by the belief that life is about survival at all costs, and that surviving in a police state means quietly conforming to the will of the powerful. In such a case, this slogan might be held ironically to mean that one’s own silencio is necessary for preserving one’s own salud. The crucial point for social science is that the reasons for espousing this slogan change along with the varying web of supporting beliefs. And as meaning holism would lead us to expect, a change in the relevant web of beliefs can also lead to important shifts in the very meaning of the slogan (i.e., from a fascist expression of terroristic intimidation to a cowardly and ironic expression of self-preservation).

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Philosophical roots Anti-naturalists therefore insist that the holistic nature of beliefs renders social science an interpretive discipline—one in which meanings are ascertained through the hermeneutic circle of relating parts to wholes. At its furthest extreme, the consequence of abandoning holism is that there is no access whatsoever to a slogan like el silencio es salud. But a more common error among contemporary social scientists is to isolate a given belief from the relevant webs that inform it. For instance, social scientists might mistakenly rush to assume the expression el silencio es salud means the same thing across a subset of individuals, when in fact the meanings are quite different. Such a lack of sensitivity to the holistic nature of beliefs is essentially a failure of interpretation. But it is also a failure to properly achieve social science. The lesson for social scientists is that in order to keep their research and findings from the warping effects of wrongly imposed meanings, they must cultivate a heightened awareness of the holistic nature of particular beliefs. That is, they should be careful not to rush to the conclusion that beliefs that at first blush appear the same necessarily translate across different webs. The latter also means that anti-naturalists tend to prefer inquiries into social reality that are sensitive to belief formation at the local level, working from the bottom up. As we will see in Chapters 5 and 7 on methods and historical sociologies, this doesn’t mean that social scientists cannot make grand generalizations, use mass surveys, or employ large-N statistics in their explanations. It simply means that whether they work on small or large-scale studies, they will need to remain sensitive to the way that beliefs are formed in local contexts and thus be aware that all generalizations (p.23) form from the bottom upward and are not to be ahistorically imposed by the social scientist from the top down. Yet at this point those resistant to anti-naturalist approaches might put in a further objection: namely, although beliefs perhaps must be explained in light of wider webs of belief, the same is not true for actions. After all, these critics might argue, it is possible to simply observe actions (for instance, voting, running a campaign, fighting a war, or shopping for a particular commodity) without reference to the web of beliefs. Actions, in other words, are observable in a straightforward, empirical way without the need to descend into the holistic dimensions of meaning. The problem with this response, however, is that it involves a faulty conception of human action. Anti-naturalists hold that actions are not simply brute givens that can be plainly observed. Rather, actions are expressive of beliefs, and so no less holistic than beliefs themselves. Specifically, anti-naturalists hold that beliefs are constitutive of actions, such that changes in belief can transform the identity of actions. How is this so? One way that anti-naturalists commonly argue for the constitutive relationship between beliefs and actions is by drawing a basic distinction between actions versus movements. Take, for example, the Page 6 of 28

Philosophical roots involuntary spasm of a tired runner’s leg. Such a spasm can be explained without reference to the particular beliefs and meanings that the marathon runner holds. It might be symptomatic of fatigue or low levels of potassium, but this movement does not make any essential reference to the beliefs or attitudes of the athlete. By contrast, properly identifying an action requires grasping the relevant beliefs or meanings of the person. Imagine, in this vein, a covert spy hand signaling a fellow spy in East Berlin in 1961. Identifying this hand signal as a certain action requires grasping some of the relevant webs of belief that inform it—including beliefs about the Cold War, the practices of espionage, the particular aims of a given rendezvous, and so on. Indeed, without any sense of the beliefs informing this gesture, it might dissolve again in appearance to a mere physical tick. Antinaturalists believe what is true of signaling a fellow spy is no less true of voting, marching in a battalion, smoking a cigarette, inaugurating a president, and indeed the entire world of human actions. Namely, properly identifying the action requires correctly identifying the relevant beliefs. It follows that human action—as a medium of meaning and expressive of particular beliefs—is also holistic. Human agency can therefore embody as many subtleties, gradations, nuances, and variations as are possible within human belief itself. So, for example, dancing might be expressive of an individual’s belief that it is the polite thing to do when attending a wedding or it might, like Sufi whirling, be an effort at spiritual transcendence. Such differences will depend on the relevant webs of belief. As with the slogan el silencio es salud, the web of supporting meanings matters hugely. After all, even a spy against the government could use the opposition’s very slogan to (p.24) identify with another person in the resistance, subverting its meaning and radically changing the explanation for its usage. One crucially important aspect of our discussion so far is that both actions and beliefs are a function of the human capacity for self-interpretation. Because beliefs always come bundled in webs, when individuals alter and modify one belief it has the power to alter and modify the meaning of related beliefs and actions. And there are at least two important consequences of self-interpretation for social scientific research. First, as the hermeneutic philosopher Charles Taylor has influentially argued, the phenomenon of self-interpretation suggests a basic ontological distinction between the objects of the social versus the natural sciences.8 Geology, physics, and chemistry, for example, do not study objects whose very identity undergoes transformation through processes of self-interpretation. Yet the social sciences are chiefly concerned with the actions and artifacts of just such a being. The social sciences therefore consist of a “double hermeneutic” in which interpretations are advanced of phenomena that themselves change and are shaped via self-interpretation. This is a conclusion reached by neo-Hegelian Page 7 of 28

Philosophical roots philosophers as well as philosophers working in the analytic tradition: namely, social science consists of the interpretation of interpretations.9 It is therefore vital that social scientists learn to employ approaches that sensitively unlock meanings and avoid atomizing or otherwise distorting them. Second, self-interpretation is closely linked to the importance of the narrative form for the social sciences. Many philosophers have followed the great phenomenologists of the last century, like Martin Heidegger and later Paul Ricoeur, in arguing that human action is oriented by narrative sequences.10 That is, human beliefs and actions are not carried out in utterly disconnected segments, but rather are unified by a context of goals and desires that relate the past, present, and future to one another. In this way human agency continually gathers and orders temporally remote episodes of belief and action into an orienting narrative stream. For this reason, anti-naturalists hold that human agency actually embodies a narrative, and that human beings are, as the neoAristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “a story-telling animal” that continually enacts stories.11 The importance of this point for social science is that rendering beliefs and actions intelligible requires placing them in the context of such enacted sequences. A person may have adopted the slogan el silencio es salud on a particular occasion because he hopes to avoid being persecuted by his neighbors, while another might express it repeatedly in pursuit of his goal of bullying those around him into political conformity and complicity. Beliefs and actions occur within a wider narrative stream, such that social scientists are faced with the task of constructing narratives about actual, lived-out narratives. What they do not face is a series of isolated facts upon which they impose a narrative for aesthetic or some other reasons of their own.12 (p.25) Rather, the stories told by social scientists succeed or fail, to varying degrees, in capturing the enacted sequences of beliefs and actions that are the ongoing stuff of social life. A story explains a given slice of social reality. Sometimes a social scientist’s story will reinforce, sometimes extend, sometimes question, sometimes contradict the conscious, official stories told by those studied. But making sense of human beliefs and actions requires some sense for the spontaneously narrative dimension of human agency itself. Explanation in the social sciences— as in history and literature—is narrative.

Human beliefs continually change and modify So far we have argued that anti-naturalists explain a particular belief or action by reconstructing the web of beliefs that supports it and telling a story about it. But this much only gives us a small, frozen snapshot of beliefs and actions. How are we to explain the continual and ongoing flux that is so characteristic of human beliefs? We believe there are two general ways that social scientists might explain changes in belief, which in turn transform actions, identities, practices, and social reality itself. The first type is dilemmatic change, which Page 8 of 28

Philosophical roots explains how rational modifications in webs of belief occur. The second is pathologic, which encompasses cases of disease, self-deception, irrationality, and other forms of distortion. Because human beings hold beliefs for particular reasons, those beliefs are vulnerable to change whenever the supporting webs of belief are challenged, pressured, invalidated, or in any other way presented with dilemmas. Dilemmas, in this sense, are any authoritative understanding that puts pressure on existing beliefs. Because new beliefs can be generated by any experience, any experience is capable of generating a dilemma. Thus, dilemmas in our sense of the term mark the entry of any new belief or beliefs that challenge an existent web, and can set off all kinds of revisions from the utterly trivial to the dramatic and life changing. The anti-naturalist concept of a dilemma is therefore helpful for social scientists seeking to explain why humans alter their beliefs in particular cases. To say that humans hold beliefs for specific reasons is not the same as subscribing to a rationalist view of the human mind in which every belief has been subject to systemic rational interrogation. On the contrary, reasons are often loosely, inconsistently, or vaguely held as simply an inherited way of being in the world or a form of embodying certain understandings.13 Readers should make no mistake: interpretive philosophers in general, and anti-naturalists in particular, are not committed to some ultra-rationalist conception of the human mind or social life. Rational is being used here in a very weak sense to simply indicate beliefs and actions that are the result of other beliefs, reasons, intentions, and desires. (p.26) The evocation of desires brings us to another feature of human agency. After all, it is a commonplace since at least Saint Augustine that human beings often do not know their own desires and will that which they do not desire, while desiring that which they do not will. For this reason it is important to see that dilemmatic changes in webs of belief are also sometimes influenced by distortive and pathological occurrences. Pathologies, in this sense, can have an innumerably wide variety of sources, including but certainly not limited to: disease, injury, narcotic influence, self-deception, irrationality, emotional disorder, and so on. For example, an inebriate often wills actions he or she does not desire (e.g., driving through a stop light) and desires actions he or she cannot will (e.g., sounding eloquent and sober before the bartender). Likewise, the paranoia that distorts the beliefs of schizophrenics or the memory loss experienced by victims of head trauma are both instances of physiological pathologies. The explanation of such changes in belief involves invoking the appropriate natural processes in the brain and human physiology.14 As antinaturalists we are happy to concede that medicine, biology, and the other natural sciences have an authoritative role to play in describing and explaining the necessary physiological conditions that allow for healthy, undistorted selfinterpretation. What we strenuously object to (as we will explain below) is the

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Philosophical roots reduction of the central phenomenon of the social sciences to modes of explanation that neglect meanings. Of much more central concern to social scientists, however, are the pathological effects of ideology, repression, rogue desires, and other like phenomena which interact and enmesh with normal belief formation. Such distortions of belief can be understood as forms of self-deception—that is, as changes in belief that are driven by unacknowledged or hidden motives. The cause of such repressed changes in belief might be a hidden desire, physical need, or reason that leads the individual to form an entire sub-system or web of inauthentic rationalizing beliefs, while remaining unaware of the unconscious driving motive.15 For example, a social scientist might try to argue that a given group’s belief in libertarian ideology as a highly rationalized system of meanings might reflect a post-hoc justification for an underlying, not fully acknowledged desire to retain disappearing class privileges.16 Famously, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons catalogued an enormous variety of such unacknowledged reasons or beliefs generating commitments to the increasingly radical political ideologies of late nineteenth-century Russia.17 The point is not whether any of these cases of ideological distortion are persuasive on their own account. Rather, the point is philosophical: that some systems of belief are accommodated within an existing web of beliefs in a normal way while nonetheless being distinguished by the fact that the change is driven by a pathological process or repressed motive (i.e., some hidden need, desire, or unacknowledged reason). For a clear case of this phenomenon consider the Nazi or “Aryan physics” developed by Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, two world-renowned (p.27) physicists and Noble laureates. In such a case, a social scientist might wish to argue that Lenard’s and Stark’s development of this Aryan physics was distorted by a repressed or unacknowledged motive that led them to unreasonably discount the contributions of Jewish physicists like Albert Einstein. Social scientists could argue that although otherwise excellent in their field, Lenard and Stark developed a sub-system of rationalizing beliefs (i.e., Aryan physics) that were driven by an irrational resentment and unwillingness to accept Jewish contributions to human culture and science. Note that in such a case the acquisition of anti-Semitic beliefs might still be explained in dilemmatic terms. But the important difference is that the motivating force of such a sub-system of rationalizing beliefs remains self-deceptively operative. So, where Lenard and Stark might have thought Aryan physics was simply another way of saying “good” or “proper” physics, a social scientist could claim that they were in fact carrying out the development of a system of beliefs under a kind of false consciousness or inability to see the true, distortive sources of their own thoughts. This suggests that social scientists might explain ideology, neurosis, and other forms of distorted rationalization as cases of self-deception (one of Dostoevsky’s literary obsessions).

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Philosophical roots Clearly, if true, the foregoing discussion of dilemmatic and pathological sources of beliefs has important consequences for research in the social sciences. This is because social scientists must remain alert to the question of distortion, selfdeception, ideology, neurosis, and the social criticism that the diagnosis of these conditions entails. In a later chapter we will show how anti-naturalism offers a critically and ethically engaged form of social scientific inquiry. Specifically, antinaturalism has evaluative implications for ethics, ideology, public policy, and democratic theory. This means that anti-naturalists do not accept the widespread view that social science is an utterly value-neutral domain. But for now it is important to register that interpretive social scientists cannot fully evade the task of evaluating reasonably versus unreasonably held beliefs, and that this has an ideological component to it.18 What should also be clear is how these concepts help anti-naturalist social scientists explain changes in belief, action, and human social life more generally. As part of this, anti-naturalists must also remain highly sensitive to the specifically historical dimensions of human behavior.

Individuals are embedded in a social background So far our emphasis on self-interpretation might create the impression that individuals are largely autonomous in terms of their beliefs, actions, and identities. But this would be a mistake. Anti-naturalists do not believe selfinterpretation entails autonomy. To the contrary, anti-naturalists emphasize (p. 28) that there is an inescapable social background in which individuals always find themselves embedded. Likewise, so far our emphasis on the ever-changing nature of human beliefs might create the impression that there are no stable, regularized features within social reality. But this would also be a mistake. Antinaturalists do not believe that the continual flux of human beliefs entails an absence of long-term patterns, stability, and regularity. To the contrary, human beings develop reliable patterns of order, language, institution, law, religion, and government. These stable features are part of a larger, inherited social background. This key concept requires more definition. The social background is a source of stability and regularity that also places strong limits on human autonomy. It is composed in part out of complex matrices of practices and inter-subjective beliefs. Practices are any collective or shared pattern of human action that remains relatively stable across time. Democratic elections, car ownership, duels, the English language, chess tournaments, social networks, holiday shopping, and even various forms of warfare are all examples of practices. That is, they are all stable forms of patterned action into which individuals are socialized. Practices are also expressive of inter-subjective beliefs or meanings. These are beliefs and meanings that are not reducible to the minds of single subjects because they are expressed (often implicitly) in shared patterns of activity or practice. So, although an individual participant in elections may not be able to Page 11 of 28

Philosophical roots bring the inter-subjective beliefs that inform his practice into articulacy, nevertheless he is sharing in the expression of a certain conception of freedom, individuality, sovereignty, and so on. Likewise we often make use of our language in patterned ways, without being able to bring into full articulacy the shared meanings and beliefs that inform our words or grammar. So, for example, a man might be quite fond of the adage “time is money,” and repeat it often, while being unable to give full articulacy to the inter-subjective beliefs and practices that make this adage attractive to him (e.g., the emergence of capitalism, the Protestant-Calvinist ethos of individual productivity, neoliberal notions of efficiency, etc.). The social background thus helps comprise the particular worlds within which individuals are socialized. Some philosophers have been so impressed by the inescapability of the social background that they have argued human agency is essentially determined or limited by it. In Chapter 3 we will argue that such views (particularly among post-structuralists) have gone astray and that our anti-naturalist framework offers a better conceptual basis for studying social science. For now it is enough to emphasize that we heartily affirm poststructuralism’s insistence that individuals are not autonomous over the meanings they express and that the social background should never be neglected in the study of society and politics. We also affirm the tremendous genius and creativity of Michel Foucault in particular in studying such background matrices of meaning. (p.29) But why are individuals limited in their autonomy by the social background? Individuals are not fully autonomous in terms of their meanings because some social background is the inescapable starting point for all individual belief formation. This is not only due to the obvious fact that individuals are born and socialized into communities of meaning and languages that precede them. It is also because, as we saw in the case of dilemmatic belief formation, individuals always form new beliefs against a background of existent beliefs. Some readers may have noticed that the latter claim presents us with a kind of paradox. Namely, if beliefs must always exist in webs, then how does anyone come to hold any one belief in the first place? Wouldn’t they need to begin with just one belief and then add onto it one belief at a time? This apparent paradox is dissolved because human beings always inherit a great number of their beliefs from a particular social background or tradition.19 This is most apparent in the case of languages, which are never the product of a single mind, but instead the fruit of a history of social interaction. But it is no less true of any other domain of life. So, some of us may spend much conscious energy revising our inherited beliefs within a particular area, say, astrophysics, automotive repair, or American government. But in most domains we will largely adopt complexes of inherited beliefs and traditions.

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Philosophical roots As has been rightly stressed by Gadamer, this inheritance of background beliefs is not necessarily irrational. To the contrary, because beliefs must always exist in webs, inheriting them is absolutely necessary in order to form any further beliefs in the first place.20 Of course, as we have seen, individuals are capable of suspending, modifying, or even radically changing parts of their social inheritance. Tradition is not destiny. But Gadamer is right to insist that cognitively speaking the starting point for all individual understanding of the world is just such a traditional inheritance. Because individuals always begin from some social inheritance or tradition, social scientists can explain present beliefs by identifying the relevant tradition —or background web of meanings—from which they stem. Likewise, social scientists can explain changes in a tradition by considering how a given tradition was altered by individuals who grappled with dilemmas or perhaps were driven by some unconscious, distortive desire or pathology. The social background therefore presents a crucial feature not only of individual human action and belief formation but also of social scientific explanation.

History is the horizon of human meanings For all its inescapability, the social background is itself subject to continual ongoing transformation. Indeed, this transformation is what accounts not (p.30) only for the different forms of social background that exist across cultures today, but also for the historical rise and fall of entire ways of life (e.g., Hellenistic, Medieval, Imperial Chinese, Pueblo Indian, and so on). The Hegelian insight that human beings are dwellers in historical worlds of meaning finds explanation within an anti-naturalist framework. The social background is a product of history. This is because the social background, while more stable and permanent than individual beliefs and actions, is in fact also ultimately the product of self-interpretation. And self-interpretative activity—which relentlessly guides and modifies beliefs, actions, identities, practices, and social worlds—is what drives history. So although interpretivism does not hold that history is the reflection of one, transcendent interpreting spirit or Geist that gives human life fixed developmental stages (as discussed in Chapter 1’s treatment of nineteenthcentury developmental historicism), it does affirm that history is a complex process of meaning formation and negation as past meanings and practices are abandoned and new ones are generated and created. Anti-naturalism thus gives central importance to the role of history. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, according to anti-naturalism, historical explanation is basic to the social sciences. This is because all the forms of human meaning, which together constitute social reality, emerge historically. Thus, to finally explain a given set of meanings is to explain how and why they arose—be they in the individual story or biography of a single person or the

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Philosophical roots large-scale narrative or chronicle history of a group, society, civilization, or people. Anti-naturalism stresses two features of the historical process in particular— contingency and power. Contingency is an ineliminable feature of social life because no practice, norm, or social background is able to exhaustively fix the way individuals will act, let alone how they will innovate and respond to novel situations. We have seen that under normal, undistorted conditions, changes in belief are the result of individuals responding to dilemmas. It is because individuals can creatively accommodate new beliefs in response to dilemmas that history does not follow any logically determined path of development as nineteenth-century social science imagined. Rather, history is the contingent process of the alteration of social and political life through self-interpretive action. Contingency also suggests that social scientists can critically unmask or “denaturalize” accounts of social life that are wedded to fixed forms of human reasoning, the path-dependency of institutions, or the supposed inevitability of social developments. Take, for example, the view common among social theorists (from Max Weber to Steve Bruce) that modern history is subject to an inevitable process of decline in religious beliefs and practices. This is often called the “secularization” or “disenchantment” thesis, and has recently been subject to a powerful denaturalizing critique by a number of critics, most (p.31) notably Charles Taylor. Against the picture of a determined path, Taylor has argued that such secularization narratives are unable to account for the actual contingent features of modern history. So, for example, such narratives have difficulty explaining the mass mobilization of denominational and lay movements in the nineteenth century, the persistence of politicized religious identities in the twentieth, and the explosion of individualist spiritualities in the twenty-first.21 On top of this, Taylor argues that secularity itself is a historically contingent cluster of beliefs and so cannot be explained as some inevitable end-station for modern human belief.22 Of course, the point here is not whether Taylor is right in all the details, but rather to give readers a sense for how the contingencies of history can be harnessed to undermine supposedly ineluctable, fixed accounts of human belief formation. The fact that contingency can be deployed critically against various forms of historical determinism does not preclude the power of history to shape and limit human subjectivity. Indeed, we have already seen that self-interpretive activity does not entail the absolute autonomy of the human subject. Rather, history has the power to shape and form particular subjects through the practices and intersubjective beliefs that comprise a given tradition or social background.

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Philosophical roots This conception of power allows social scientists to give both critical and vindicatory accounts of history. So, for example, the genealogies developed first by Friedrich Nietzsche and later by Foucault are critical histories of the way in which the past contingencies of history shape, distort, and inhibit present human practice.23 But likewise, social scientists might instead attempt to vindicate the shaping power of past traditions or practices and seek to justify their influence.24 We will have much more to say about the anti-naturalist conception of genealogy and the important contributions of Nietzsche and Foucault in a later chapter. For now the point is that anti-naturalists believe history is both contingent and exercises a certain power over human agents who find themselves circumscribed within an existing ambit of meanings and practices. The reader will recall that we began our analysis with arguments about the holistic nature of beliefs and actions, then noted the role of narratives in orienting human agency, which itself is embedded in a social background. We have now seen why anti-naturalism maintains that all these forms of human meaning are the result of contingent historical change. In this way, individual beliefs and actions fit in various widening concentric circles with history as their outermost horizon. Indeed, history is even the horizon that inscribes the beliefs, practices, and inter-subjective presuppositions of the social scientist.25 To engage in social science is therefore to seek the explanation of particular historical processes from within the historical process itself. History—in both its contingencies and shaping power—marks the horizon of human meanings and understanding.

(p.32) The contrast with naturalism Perhaps some readers of our account so far will find the basic precepts of antinaturalism commonsensical, even obvious. But although we agree that antinaturalism overlaps with many of individuals’ everyday understandings about the world, the claim that it is simply commonsense must be treated more cautiously. For while it is true that many philosophers have grounded their defense of interpretive approaches in ordinary, everyday forms of understanding (for example, phenomenologists and folk psychologists), simply reducing these insights to “commonsense” is problematic in at least two ways. First, the historicism entailed by interpretive approaches implies that there is no such thing as an ahistorical “commonsense,” accessible in all places and all ages, free of the protean transformations of self-interpretation. Second, anti-naturalism itself is clearly a historical tradition that formed in reaction to rival traditions. In this regard, anti-naturalism’s main antagonist has been a family of modern theories that American pragmatists like Richard Bernstein helped dub “naturalism.”26 Contrasting naturalism with anti-naturalism will not only help us see what is at stake in the philosophical debates that have fueled the interpretive turn, but it will also set up the critical arguments we wish to advance in later chapters concerning how to study social reality.

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Philosophical roots As has already been mentioned, naturalism consists of a highly heterogeneous group of philosophical theories and social scientific research programs that nevertheless share a common resemblance. Specifically, this family shares the basic assumption that the methods of the natural sciences are in some sense the model for all valid knowledge about the world. Naturalists therefore hold that the social sciences must be remade in their image. From a contemporary philosophical perspective, the twentieth century saw the rise of one particularly influential strain of naturalism known as the unity of science movement, which rejected idealism’s older division between the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences.27 The fundamental aspiration of the unity of science movement was succinctly expressed by A. J. Ayer, the famous advocate of logical positivism: “There is no field of experience which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond the power of science to give.”28 Naturalists, then, are philosophers, social scientists, and laypeople that assume that a mechanistic, law-like form of explanation inspired by the natural sciences is in some senses universal and hegemonic. This assumption is what brings them into conflict with anti-naturalists. For anti-naturalists are philosophers, social scientists, and laypeople that assume there is a basic difference in the forms of explanation appropriate to the human versus the natural sciences. In particular, anti-naturalists reject various recurrent premises of naturalist research programs. We will critically examine three (p.33) such recurrent assumptions, in light of the concepts developed in the first part of the chapter, including the assumptions that: human beliefs and actions can be treated as a kind of brute data; human life is governed by causal laws; and the goal of social science is prediction and social engineering. Having explained why anti-naturalism rejects these doctrines, our opening exposition of anti-naturalism will be complete. However, in later chapters we will see just how complex and multi-faceted the anti-naturalist rejection of naturalism really is. In some senses, each subsequent chapter will add a new layer to this determinate negation of naturalism.

First naturalist assumption: human beliefs and actions are identifiable as brute facts Naturalist assumptions in the social sciences often inspire researchers to reduce human beliefs and actions to verifiable, brute facts. Such researchers often concede that the social sciences deal with meanings. However, unlike antinaturalists, they believe meanings do not require deeper hermeneutic deciphering so much as verification. In this way naturalist researchers reduce meanings to a kind of brute given, assuming that “there is knowledge only from experience, which rests on what is immediately given” and “sets the limits for the content of legitimate science.”29

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Philosophical roots But we have already seen there is a fatal problem with this naturalist attempt. Namely, meaning is the function of holistic relations that requires entering the hermeneutic circle. In the case of beliefs and actions, social scientists must explain them in light of a wider web that links them to further, sustaining reasons and beliefs, embedded in a particular social background. Meaning is a holistic set of relations, such that, strictly speaking, perfectly atomized units of belief and action have no meaning. Verification of brute data is therefore not the proper model for grasping and explaining beliefs and actions. In order for critics to show anti-naturalism is mistaken on this point, they might try to overturn meaning holism, showing that in fact there are pure experiences, which comprise the foundational units of language. Philosophically speaking, such critics would have to show that words and concepts directly represent objects. This would then allow them to argue that human beliefs and actions can be treated as brute data because they are not holistic in nature, but rather atomistic bits of language that directly relate to atomistic bits of reality. The problem with this rebuttal, however, is that so far this move has not been shown to be a philosophically valid conception of meaning. To the contrary, (p.34) the philosophical edifice that sustains such atomistic views has more or less collapsed. Instead, a commonplace within various leading schools of philosophy today has been the truth of meaning holism.30 Alternatively, naturalists might offer a language that systematically eliminates the need for any reference to human beliefs and intentions. Such is the hope of a number of physicalist research agendas that seek to replace our familiar concepts of belief, reasons, desires, etc. with a complete explanatory language derived from, say, cognitive science or neurophysiology.31 Anti-naturalists cannot rule out a priori the arrival of such a language. However, at present there is no such system that is able to comprehensibly and completely replace our dependence on the concepts of beliefs, reasons, desires, purposes, and so on when explaining human social life. Moreover, past attempts to achieve this goal, like psychological behaviorism (despite being systematically carried out and well funded by the leading research institutions of our time), have either collapsed or not yet reached their goal.32 There have also been much more recent attempts to reduce meanings to brute facts. The famed MIT computer scientist, Alex Pentland, has claimed to discover a predictive science of human behavior he calls “social physics” that is largely built on the ability to aggregate data on an unprecedented scale. For Pentland the only obstacle to developing a predictive science of human behavior is having enough data to capture the complexity of social reality. What the new era of “big data” offers are the computing tools and data troves (“call records, credit card transactions, and GPS location fixes, among others”) to finally “view society in all its complexity” and render human behavior predictable.33 However, from the above discussion we can see that Pentland’s mistake is philosophical: namely, to Page 17 of 28

Philosophical roots neglect the way in which data is not rendered meaningful or explanatory until it is interpreted within a wider web of meanings and against a historical background. In this sense, more or less data is neither here nor there in achieving the naturalist goal of a science of society. Bits of data can be important to interpretive inquiry but they must be integrated into narratives capturing the contingency of human belief within a social world. Pentland’s claims on behalf of “big data” are at best exaggerated. At present, then, the aspiration toward a total science of human behavior based on indisputable brute facts remains a goal or hope but not an actual present reality.34 In the meantime, anti-naturalism is well within its philosophical rights to continue to see further corroboration of its own views in naturalism’s inability to produce a brute-data-based science of human behavior. Indeed, one of the best reasons for social scientists to adopt anti-naturalism is precisely this inability of naturalism to provide an alternative that does not make recourse to interpretive forms of explanation. Anti-naturalists have for this reason often argued that even those who most wish to rid the social sciences of interpretive influence are in reality thus far unable to ever fully free themselves of its most basic concepts.35 Hermeneutics (p.35) continues to be inescapable. Even social scientists who refuse to let it in through the front of the house must secretly let it in through the back door. Otherwise, their sociological data (big or not) would be bereft of all meaning.

Second naturalist assumption: scientific explanation seeks general causal laws The assumption that human beliefs and actions are explained in terms of general causal laws is another frequent feature of naturalist philosophy. It appears, for example, in some versions of Marxism, analytic philosophy of science, as well as in the mainstream of American behavioral political science.36 What knits these otherwise disparate and incompatible groups together is the naturalist conviction that in social science, “as anywhere else in empirical science, the explanation of a phenomenon consists in subsuming it under general empirical laws.”37 Anti-naturalism offers a number of reasons for rejecting naturalism’s ongoing quest for the laws of human behavior. We will restrict ourselves to only two that draw on our prior analysis. We have already seen that explaining a given belief or action requires citing the other beliefs that inform it. This means viewing human behavior as the product of a process of creative agency or (weak) reasoning. But the explanation of beliefs in light of reasons is logically incompatible with the determinism of general causal laws. This is because viewing human behavior as the product of reasoning implies that individuals could have reasoned differently, leading to different outcomes. Therefore, so

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Philosophical roots long as we retain the explanation of beliefs in light of reasons and beliefs, we cannot subsume human behavior under determinate causal laws. This draws attention to a second, closely related problem with the naturalist attempt at general laws of explanation—namely, the inadequacy of the concept of cause that formulating such laws involves. The naturalist conception of cause is ahistorical in that it attempts to establish the way certain antecedent conditions are connected to consequent outcomes by a necessary causal link. General laws thus take the form of “whenever a given set of antecedent conditions X are obtaining (all other things being equal), a given consequent event Y follows.” But as we have seen, this necessary causal link runs afoul of the historically contingent nature of human beliefs. Human beliefs are not the result of ahistorical causal links, but rather have contingent, context-specific origins that reflect particular webs of meanings. Because beliefs and actions are contingent and context specific, we cannot adequately subsume them under purportedly trans-historical causal mechanisms. The historical contingency (p. 36) that informs belief formation is incompatible with naturalism’s ahistorical notion of cause. Naturalists are perhaps led to erroneously reduce the explanation of human behavior to mechanistic causes by beginning from the correct assumption that explanation does indeed involve relating one thing to another. However, because of the allure of the natural sciences, naturalists then tend to draw the conclusion that such relationships must be necessary, mechanistic, and law-like as opposed to the result of contingent links. But this is not a valid inference. Of course, once again, anti-naturalism must concede that some future research program might yet eliminate the need for contingent forms of causal explanation in terms of reasons and beliefs. In the wake of such an historic event, anti-naturalist arguments would be negated and the interpretive turn would have to be abandoned. But at present such a naturalist system of mechanistic causal laws explaining human social and political action remains elusive. There exists a plurality of causal bonds that differentiate the social from the natural sciences. Naturalists have been wrong to reduce the human sphere to the mechanistic, necessary causal bond and not see a special kind of historical, contingent causality that retains a place for the creative agency of human persons.

Third naturalist assumption: the goal of scientific knowledge is predictive power We have seen that naturalists often assume that human beliefs and actions are reducible to brute verifiable data, which in turn can be forged into general causal laws that govern and determine social reality. Yet the driving force of this purely scientific agenda is often a very practical and understandable goal: the discovery of a science that enables predictive power and thereby the ability to control (or at least forecast) social and political outcomes.38 The phenomenon of technocracy will be discussed in greater depth in Chapters 8 and 9 on ethics, Page 19 of 28

Philosophical roots democracy, and public policy. But one egregious example should suffice for present purposes. The contemporary field of behavioral genetics, which has vied (albeit not always successfully) for a kind of symbolic power over public policy and discourse, generates a particular claim to technocracy. According to Aaron Panofsky’s detailed critique, behavioral genetics has made a power grab that has been tied to the popular rise of a “geneticized” discourse, in which the broader public treats genes as fully determinant of human behavior, and a kind of “astrological genetics” pervades public discourse.39 These claims to genetic expertise over human behavior have been marshaled to varying ends—by elements of the American Right to advance racist ideas of intelligence and (p. 37) by sectors of the American Left to scientifically resolve the controversies over sexual orientation.40 But generally it has been more broadly tied to efforts to neoliberalize and marketize the public sector by claiming that behavior is fundamentally individually determined such that social programs attempting to reshape behavioral outcomes are predictably futile.41 Beyond the many problems with behavioral genetics’ claims to scientific status, there are at least two deeper philosophical problems with the naturalist goal of strong prediction. First, it does not in fact seem possible to gain a strong form of predictive power, and second, when this is linked to a program of social engineering or technocracy, it becomes anti-democratic and anti-humanistic as a politics. The predictive goals of naturalism are unlikely insofar as even our most reliable social science generalizations have not furnished a strong form of prediction. Some anti-naturalists have attributed this failure to ineliminable sources of unpredictability within social life—most of these arguments center on the human capacity to creatively change beliefs and radically innovate in a way underdetermined by the antecedent set of conditions.42 Nearly all theorists involved (both anti-naturalists and naturalists) see the question of strong prediction in the social sciences as ultimately resting on whether determinate, law-like generalizations governing social reality can indeed be formulated. And as we have discussed, anti-naturalists believe the prospects of such laws are unlikely at best because they misunderstand the nature of human beliefs—their contingency and holism. Instead, anti-naturalism holds that prediction in the social sciences is at most still a form of educated guess work. An informed social inquirer can predict with some degree of success the regularities of individual and communal behavior (indeed, without a weak form of predictable regularity, no social order would be possible). But the prediction of such patterned regularities is not of the same kind as the exact or strong form of prediction found in the natural sciences. Rather, social science generalizations are always susceptible to counterexamples, anomalies, and other forms of fallibility. Moreover, as MacIntyre has argued at length, in the social sciences such fallibility is not necessarily a sign of the quality of the predictive statements, but reflects the nature of the phenomena.43 Human beliefs and actions cannot be determined by a necessary Page 20 of 28

Philosophical roots set of antecedent conditions. The conditions do not lock belief or action into place. Rather, because of the human ability to weigh different beliefs, the result could always have been otherwise than it is. This contingency makes the formulation of necessary causal laws (and with it strong, scientific prediction) in the domain of human social and political life impossible. Some naturalist social scientists have responded to this problem by acknowledging that individual behavior is unpredictable but then claiming that predictability emerges via large-scale statistical aggregates that form patterns and regularities. As Colin Hay has perceptively discussed, this is an attempt to discover a predictive science of politics “in which there is no recognition of the (p.38) role of agents as anything other than the carriers of behaviors which aggregate to form a particular pattern.”44 As Hay also rightly argues, the problem with this attempt to rescue a predictive science of human behavior is that it cannot infer mechanistic, causal laws from its statistical data without falling into serious distortions of social reality. The underlying philosophical problem remains the attempt to move from observing correlations to positing general causal laws.45 General mechanistic covering laws simply do not capture the contingent, creative form of causality that actually explains human beliefs and actions. Therefore, even supposedly aggregate predictive patterns are foiled by sudden, dramatic political changes and upheavals. Although statistical aggregation may be a useful method (a point we return to in Chapter 5 on methods), the attempt to infer general causal laws from such aggregations is destined to fail. Indeed, Hay makes a similar point about naturalist uses of rational choice theory in which social scientists assume that “structure determines agency” because “a rational actor in a given context will always choose precisely the same course of action” that optimizes their strategy.46 We will have much more to say (and much nuance to add) to our views of rational choice theory in later chapters. For now it is worth noting that this kind of predictive deployment of rational choice theory is very common in both contemporary political science and especially economics.47 Yet it falls short of its own goals for similar reasons as other naturalist approaches—namely, it neglects the contingency of human belief formation, assuming instead that there are necessary causal mechanisms that must be the case within certain incentive environments. Hay notes that a big irony of rational choice used in this way is that what appears to be a theory of rationality (and thereby freedom) is actually being subordinated to an “opportunity structure [that] dictates the rational choice…for any agent in any context.”48 In other words, the rational choice model assumes a predictive determinacy. Indeed, even indeterminacy in rational choice games is conceived of naturalistically as dictated by the context itself and not by human creative agency.49

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Philosophical roots A further irony of the naturalist quest for a strong form of prediction is that antinaturalist approaches not only remain better at accounting for the kinds of weak prediction we in fact have at our disposal when facing social reality, but they are also able to explain (even predict) the ongoing failure of naturalism to reach its own goals. So, for example, anti-naturalists are not surprised in the least by the fact that all major paradigms of international relations failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union.50 Nor are anti-naturalists bewildered by the ongoing failure of the social sciences from anthropology to economics to achieve strongly predictive power. Indeed, the most recent empirical studies have found that social science experts claiming predictive expertise are no better at predicting phenomena like GDP growth or election outcomes than are wellinformed amateurs or even random algorithms.51 And (p.39) yet despite antinaturalism’s superiority in this regard, the allure of the predictive powers promised by naturalism remains strong. Indeed, the persistence of naturalist research programs might well have more to do with the promise of such predictive powers than with its ability to actually deliver on its goals at present. This brings us to a second problem with the goal of strongly predictive, naturalist social science—one we will only barely mention now, and will delve into in much more detail later in the book when we discuss democracy and ethics. Namely, naturalism has a subtle philosophical link to anti-democratic and anti-humanistic politics. Naturalism is anti-democratic insofar as it underwrites rule by technocrats, managers, and other forms of experts that can manipulate and predict outcomes by engineering antecedent conditions. A science of strong prediction would rationally justify a hierarchical form of expert authority. Naturalism is also anti-humanistic insofar as it conceptualizes the study of human beings as in principle much the same as the study of brute physical objects. By contrast, because it rejects naturalism’s claims to mechanistic laws, necessary causal links, and predictive knowledge, anti-naturalism also rejects the authority of rule by experts. In doing so anti-naturalism can be linked to participatory and deliberative forms of democratic theory and political organization. Likewise, anti-naturalists are often humanists insofar as they insist there is something unique about the explanation of human agency within the wider order of things. Human beings cannot be treated analogously to objects reducible to mechanistic sciences. Instead human beings are creative, rational creatures, whose lives are imbued with meanings, and not simply reducible to brute machines. Much more needs to be said to substantiate this series of claims. Indeed, the foregoing principles will all be elaborated upon, argued, and further substantiated throughout this book. In this chapter the goal has simply been to argumentatively outline some of the central philosophical features of anti-naturalism and contrast it with its main foil —this will provide crucial premises for later arguments. We will see that in fact the conflict with naturalism is far more complex than this starting point. Antinaturalism does not simply challenge naturalism’s philosophical starting points, Page 22 of 28

Philosophical roots and offer an alternative set of principles. It offers a completely different set of substantive concepts, agenda of empirical research, view of methods, theory of ethics, politics, and public policy. In doing so, anti-naturalism offers an entire paradigm shift in the approach to studying human life. However, before seeing how this is so, there is still a little more basic philosophical work to be done. Thus far we have articulated our anti-naturalist framework by relating our position to the work of other interpretive philosophers and social scientists. This has helped highlight that there are many family resemblances across the different philosophical schools pushing for an (p.40) interpretive turn. However, in Chapter 3 we will turn our attention to the philosophical differences among thinkers and approaches that are otherwise unified in their rejection of naturalism. This means examining some of the main philosophical debates internal to the interpretive turn, which have a major bearing on social scientific practice. Our claim will be that anti-naturalism is the best framework on offer, drawing insights from but also contrasting with rival philosophies justifying hermeneutics and the interpretive turn. Notes:

(1.) Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter (New York: Penguin Books, 2014); Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 1., ed. and trans. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896). (2.) For a highly influential early discussion see: Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976) 117–18, 138. (3.) Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications, 1985). (4.) For one elaboration of this important point see social constructivists like: John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995); John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Colin Hay, “Social Constructivism,” in Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science, eds. Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes (New York: Routledge, 2016) 99–112. (5.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (second, revised edition), trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004) 291. (6.) For a classic philosophical defense of meaning holism see: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958). Page 23 of 28

Philosophical roots (7.) This slogan is related in Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). (8.) Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophy Papers 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). (9.) Compare: R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946) 285–8; Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) 1–107; Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). (10.) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996) 292–304; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984–8). (11.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) 216, 211–12. (12.) Cf. Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 26–57. (13.) For a provocative attempt to grapple with such embodied understandings see: S. D. Noam Cook and Hendrik Wagenaar, “Navigating the Eternally Unfolding Present: Toward an Epistemology of Practice,” The American Review of Public Administration 42:1 (2012): 3–38. (14.) However, it is important to note that even in the case of some overriding physiological factors, the content of particular beliefs might not necessarily be fixed. Thus although physiological determinants might pervade and distort belief formation in predictable ways, just exactly what the content of, say, a given schizophrenic’s paranoid delusions are might continue to depend on contingent belief formation (this is, of course, a question for psychologists to determine). (15.) For further justification of this position see: Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) ch. 7. (16.) For an example of something like this claim, see: Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017) 39. (17.) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Peevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994). (18.) For a detailed version of this argument, see: Jason Blakely, “The Forgotten Alasdair MacIntyre: Beyond Value Neutrality in the Social Sciences,” Polity 45:3 (2013): 445–63. Page 24 of 28

Philosophical roots (19.) The reader might then wonder if the paradox has not been pushed back on the entire human species. Would not some generation of homo sapiens need to have been born without a social background and therefore formed beliefs prior to any inherited web or tradition? But this again is a false paradox, as it assumes that inherited traditions are something definite, rather than a phenomenon that arises along a continuum with other forms of inherited behavior like birds migrating, chimpanzees cooperating to capture other monkeys, and huntergatherers following weather patterns. For this argument see: Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 193–5. (20.) Gadamer famously argued this case in terms of the necessary role of both “tradition” and “prejudice” in human understanding: Truth and Method, 265–85. (21.) Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007) chs. 12–14. (22.) Taylor, A Secular Age, 22. (23.) See for example: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977). (24.) Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 36. (25.) See: Gadamer, Truth and Method, 300–7. (26.) See, for example, the pragmatist treatment of this by Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976) 117–18, 138. (27.) For example, compare with Otto Neurath, “Physicalism: The Philosophy of the Viennese Circle,” in Philosophical Papers: 1913–1946, eds. and trans. Robert Cohen and Marie Neurath (Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983) 48; as well as the manifesto of the Vienna Circle: Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis,” in The Emergence of Logical Empiricism, ed. Sahotra Sarkear (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996) 331. (28.) A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, second edition (New York: Dover Publications, 1952) 48. Despite the pervasiveness of such a sentiment, it is important to emphasize that naturalism is neither monolithic nor is it an uncontroversial way to conceptualize the natural sciences. Indeed, there are those who dispute naturalism is even the correct view of how the natural sciences carry out their practice. See for example the exchanges between Hubert Dreyfus, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty, in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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Philosophical roots (29.) Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung,” 331. (30.) In analytic philosophy this is evident in the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Willard Van Orman Quine as well as the turn toward pragmatism by philosophers like Richard Rorty. In phenomenology this has been advanced by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. (31.) For a neurophysiological version of this position see: Paul Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” The Journal of Philosophy 78 (February 1981). (32.) This is the importance (beyond mere historical interest) in the dramatic collapse of early behaviorist psychology, which loomed large over the human sciences of the early and mid-twentieth century. For a devastating critique of this research program see: Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behavior (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). (33.) Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) 8, 11. (34.) Such hope was prefigured (as was so much of naturalism) in the pathbreaking work of the Vienna Circle. It is evident, for example, in the overcharged rhetoric of their manifesto: “Everything is accessible to man; and man is the measure of all things…The arrangement of the concepts of the various branches of science into the constitutive system can already be discerned in outline today, but much remains to be done.” Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung,” 328, 331. (35.) For an extended defense of this claim, see: Jason Blakely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016) ch. 3. (36.) See, for example, Karl Marx, “Preface to A Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 388–91. Of course, Marx is also often read as a historicist. For more on these two Marxs, see Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) 7–8, 31–2. For this naturalist assumption among analytic philosophers see: Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 48; Carl Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965); Neurath, “Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism,” in Philosophical Papers. For a historical account of the importance of Hempel’s views for the “behavioral approach” in mainstream political science see John Gunnell, Philosophy, Science and Political Inquiry (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1975) 65–7, 84.

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Philosophical roots (37.) Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” 240. (38.) For example, compare: Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” 234. (39.) Aaron Panofsky, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014) 215. (40.) Panofsky, Misbehaving Science, 1–5, 173, 209–10, 217. (41.) Panofsky, Misbehaving Science, 217, 219–21. (42.) See: Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 55–6. For further arguments see: Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 239, 242, 250. (43.) Compare MacIntyre, After Virtue, ch. 8. (44.) Hay, Political Analysis, 51. (45.) Hay, Political Analysis, 78–9. (46.) Hay, Political Analysis, 53. (47.) For a famous defense of rational choice modeling as predictive, see: Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in The Philosophy of Economics, 3rd edition, ed. Daniel Hausman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 145–78. For examples of the influence of neoclassical understandings of rational choice in political science, see: Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper Collins Publishers Incorporated, 1957); David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). (48.) Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public Administration 82:1 (2004): 39. (49.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 51–5. (50.) Hay, Political Analysis, 198. (51.) Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)). For a further philosophical discussion of this point see also: MacIntyre, After Virtue, ch. 8.

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Philosophical debates

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Philosophical debates Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter considers some of the major philosophical traditions that have established the need for an interpretive turn in the social sciences—including phenomenology, post-structuralism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and social constructivism. We reject the view that there is only one privileged philosophical route to an interpretive social science. Instead, the philosophical pluralism of the interpretive turn is defended albeit from a uniquely anti-naturalist perspective. Specifically, anti-naturalism corrects the tendency of some advocates of the interpretive turn to drift back into naturalist concepts as well as to distort the proper conception of human agency. Major philosophers of the interpretive turn are critically engaged, including Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Keywords:   interpretive turn, anti-naturalism, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Michel Foucault, HansGeorg Gadamer, Charles Taylor

In Chapter 2 we drew on a wide array of interpretive and hermeneutic philosophers to establish some of the basic arguments supporting an antinaturalist approach to the social sciences. We now turn our attention to the way in which anti-naturalism stakes out a unique position within the wider field of philosophical schools calling for an interpretive turn. Although we are philosophical pluralists and believe many schools of thought (including phenomenology, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, neo-Hegelianism, social constructivism, and post-structuralism) have made tremendously important and substantive contributions to the debates over the interpretive turn, we also Page 1 of 23

Philosophical debates maintain that an anti-naturalist approach holds certain advantages when compared and contrasted to otherwise allied positions. In particular, antinaturalism clearly overcomes two wayward tendencies among the philosophies calling for an interpretive turn. The first wayward tendency is toward ahistorical, quasi-naturalist concepts. Sometimes even the most sophisticated and historically influential exponents of an interpretive turn remain entangled in naturalist tendrils. This is most notably evident in the work of two old-style phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz. These two thinkers have made enormous contributions to the debates over social science, inspiring social science research programs that are both humanistic and interpretive. Indeed, in the last century Husserl’s and Schutz’s phenomenology has formed the theoretical basis for important interpretive research paradigms like ethnomethodology and phenomenological sociology.1 Nonetheless, although there is undoubtedly still much to learn from their work, the approach of these thinkers is sometimes compromised by a lingering naturalism and ahistoricism. Against this ahistorical tendency we will argue for a more radically historicist anti-naturalism as can be found, for instance, in the works of later German phenomenologists like Hans-Georg Gadamer, post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, as well as recent hermeneuticists like Charles Taylor. The second wayward tendency we wish to criticize in philosophies otherwise friendly to an interpretive turn is anti-humanism. This tendency is probably most pronounced in the writings of post-structuralists who affirm Foucault’s doctrine of the “death of the subject” (which we explain below). In this and later chapters we affirm an enormous debt to Foucault, not only for his innovations within genealogy as a form of inquiry, but also for rightly criticizing elder phenomenology’s pretensions toward an ahistorical, universal subject. However, an anti-naturalist approach also must take issue with Foucault’s proclivity toward anti-humanism—expressed especially in his (p.45) early works and arguably resurfacing in his later writings as well. Once again, our anti-naturalist critique draws on the support of both later phenomenologists who followed Martin Heidegger and Anglophone thinkers influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anti-naturalist philosophy is equally historical and humanistic. This contrast with other approaches will be explored in four different topic areas that are of crucial importance to the social sciences: subjectivity, explanation, objectivity, and the role of normative political critique in empirical research. By arguing against lingering ahistorical and anti-humanistic tendencies in the interpretive turn, this chapter advocates for a particular philosophical approach to the research and methods questions we explore in later chapters. We believe anti-naturalism represents the best theoretical framework currently on offer, equipping social scientists with unique ways of thinking about subjectivity, explanation, objectivity, and critique. By the end of this chapter readers should have a deeper, Page 2 of 23

Philosophical debates enriched sense of what it means to work within the anti-naturalist approach that builds on the philosophical roots elaborated in Chapter 2. However, before beginning, one brief disclaimer is in order: namely, our critical dialogue with thinkers like Husserl, Schutz, and Foucault in this chapter is part of our wider goal of clarifying certain theoretical points about an anti-naturalist approach to the social sciences. In this regard, these thinkers serve as points of contrast to the type of anti-naturalism we wish to promote. But we are perfectly happy to concede from the outset that Husserl, Schutz, and Foucault are subject to a wide and plural set of readings. There are multiple Foucaults and Husserls out there, not just one. Different readings of these thinkers might well render them closer to the anti-naturalist position we prefer. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Foucault appeared to be moving toward a more humanistic conception of agency that we find amenable.2 Our goal here, however, is not a survey of the rival interpretations of Husserl and Foucault, but rather to philosophically clarify certain features of anti-naturalism as an approach. These anti-naturalist positions will be both explicitly and tacitly evoked in the subsequent arguments made throughout the book.

Subjectivity All social science assumes some basic view of the human subject. In particular, how much agency we grant the human subject is of great consequence to our explanations of social and political life. So, for example, if human beings are considered little more than cogs in social and political structures, then this will undoubtedly shape the kinds of explanations we offer about their lives. Likewise, if we assume individuals are fully autonomous, absolute (p.46) sovereigns over their beliefs and actions, then our explanations will look accordingly different. Anti-naturalism is no exception in this regard. It too must come to terms with the puzzle of how much agency, if any, to credit to the human subject. Within interpretive debates this problem often arises in the context of questions of meaning. We have already noted that anti-naturalism views the social sciences as interpretive because social reality is expressive of meanings in a way that is not true of the natural sciences. But the many philosophical schools advocating for an interpretive turn also differ sharply over how to parse the relationship of the individual subject to these social meanings. Are individual subjects fully autonomous over the meanings expressed in social and political reality? Or are the meanings encoded in these realities limiting or somehow determinant of individual expression? Although there are diverse views in these debates among interpretive philosophers, there are also two opposite poles or camps that have formed in response to such questions. On one side are old-style phenomenologists who argue that meaning is largely the product of an autonomous, individual subject.

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Philosophical debates On the other are post-structuralists who argue that systems of social meaning and discourses severely limit the agency of individual subjects. Older forms of phenomenology, as espoused by Husserl and Schutz, often took a view of the human subject as autonomous in relation to meaning. Although Husserl and Schutz agreed with the basic anti-naturalist position that the social sciences have a uniquely “subject-related” object of study, they also advanced theories of language in which meaning was the product of independent, individual reflection.3 In this vein, Husserl wrote that meaning is largely the creation of an autonomous, “primal ‘I’” who “stand[s] above all natural existence that has meaning.”4 Similarly, Schutz believed that “meaning lies in the attitude of the Ego toward that part of its stream of consciousness which has already flowed by,” such that meaning is simply the product of how the individual “Ego regards its experience.”5 In this way the phenomenology of Husserl and Schutz defended a theory of meaning in which a largely sovereign ego confers sense onto the world. The problem with this individually autonomous view of meaning will perhaps be made clear if we temporarily shift our attention to the opposing camp of interpretive philosophers—one that rejects individual autonomy in terms of meaning in favor of an anti-humanistic vision of life. Foucault is widely held to be the most notable thinker to have arisen out of French post-structuralism and its famous, anti-humanist call for the “death of the subject.” According to Foucault, historical inquiry reveals all human subjectivity to be the product of collective systems of meaning, epistemes, or regimes of power that comprise a given social background. In Chapter 2 we noted that anti-naturalism holds the view that humans live against a background of some social inheritance or tradition that makes belief formation possible. Foucault is (p.47) notable for pushing the role of the social background to a radical conclusion, arguing that it essentially abolishes independent subjectivity.6 Thus, during his early “archaeological” years Foucault argued that researchers should eliminate the role of human agency from their investigations, instead focusing on epistemes or discourses as determinant of particular historical subjectivities.7 This hostility to the human subject also remained present at times in Foucault’s later genealogical writings, where he exhorted researchers to “get rid of the subject” and pursue genealogy as “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject.”8 Foucault’s approach to interpretive theory was thus anti-humanistic because it denied any special status or dignity to human beings as creative, rational, or otherwise uniquely purposive agents. Instead, he advocated a view of humans as determined by larger systems of meaning (be they epistemes, discourses, or regimes of power). It is important to see that if Foucault was right about this, then social scientists must drop human agency in favor of the analysis of systems Page 4 of 23

Philosophical debates of meaning. We will return to the problems with Foucault’s position shortly, but first it is worth noting how his critique of the subject draws attention to a fatal flaw in phenomenology’s autonomous theories of the subject. Namely, Foucault makes us aware of the way that Husserl’s and Schutz’s theories of meaning fail to account for the role of the social background. To posit meaning as the fruit of autonomous self-reflection not only ignores the social dimensions of language, it also occludes them with the illusory picture of an ego creating meaning in herculean isolation. In this way, overly autonomous accounts of human agency largely erase the social features of language and belief formation. Meaning suddenly becomes the ahistorical achievement of individual psyches, as opposed to the shared and ongoing inheritance of particular language communities. Part of the value of Foucault’s radical critique of Husserl and early phenomenology’s autonomous subject is that it forces far more suspicion about such claims to ahistorical autonomy, drawing attention to the power and shaping influence of the social background. Yet despite the undoubted importance of Foucault’s critique, his anti-humanist call for the abolition of the subject is equally problematic. Specifically, Foucault’s vision of social and political life loses sight of the fact that ultimately people create meanings and practices, not the other way around. In Foucault’s histories individual subjects often seem reducible to their location within a particular discourse or ritual of power. But this fails to take into account that while a given social background may present an initial horizon of meaning, it is never sufficient to determine particular beliefs. It loses sight of the humanist insight that human beings are capable of the creative exercise of their linguistic capacities so that they can play with and innovate upon their social inheritance. (p.48) The problem with Foucault’s anti-humanist position can be shown by the fact that wherever a given social background or tradition is the same, individuals may still hold vastly different beliefs. So, for example, two individuals who are shaped by a given tradition (or episteme or discourse) X, and therefore share beliefs A, B, and C, may still hold incompatible beliefs D, E, and F. The existence of such differences in belief implies that post-structuralists should allow that individuals can at least to some degree reason creatively against their inherited social background. Discourses, epistemes, and other such concepts do not over-determine the content of particular beliefs. Therefore, the subject’s agency is not reducible to a discourse. The discourse is the starting point for understanding a given individual’s beliefs, but it can never be the full story. Instead, human beliefs must be looked at on their own terms, albeit always deeply sensitive to the inherited social background. A related problem with Foucault’s anti-humanist dismantling of the subject is that it simply displaces the problem of agency from individuals and onto entire discourses, epistemes, or regimes of power. As Charles Taylor has argued, regimes of power in Foucault’s view have a “strategic logic” that “cannot be Page 5 of 23

Philosophical debates attributed to anyone as their plan, as their conscious purpose”—and yet it is never made clear how such a disembodied “purposefulness without purpose” might work.9 Indeed, in Foucault’s later writings the human subject is often portrayed as the outcome of practices and strategies of power that are deployed by no one in particular. Power appears as an ever-changing system or strategy that produces subjects who are rendered its mere effects. So, for example, Foucault writes that power has a “logic” that is “perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them.”10 But as Taylor has argued, how such a disembodied, dispersed agency works remains unresolved in Foucault’s work. Fortunately, it is possible to embrace Foucault’s critique of an autonomous subject without following him in abolishing the weaker notion of agency. Likewise, it is possible to be humanistic like Husserl and Schutz without falling into the error of erecting a sovereign ego that creates meaning above the given historical context. What is needed, as Colin Hay has rightly noted, is an option that falls into the problems of neither autonomous voluntarism nor deterministic structuralism.11 Our way of formulating a solution is through the anti-naturalist concept of a situated agency, or the assumption that while meaning is always part of an inherited social background, nevertheless individuals can modify and creatively alter any one of their beliefs. In doing so, anti-naturalism follows those like Gadamer who have argued that all human belief formation occurs against a background of an inherited tradition. As we discussed in Chapter 2, a tradition in this sense is an ideational background against which individuals adopt an initial web of beliefs. Traditions thus capture the way our inherited social background can strongly influence the beliefs we hold without utterly determining them. So Gadamer (p.49) emphasizes the way in which human understanding and agency exist on the “horizon” of a given tradition. The concept of a horizon metaphorically captures the way in which individuals are born into the limits of some historically inherited tradition, but these limits can change and move as individuals creatively choose their own paths within belief. Our horizon, as Gadamer notes, travels with us.12 The concepts of horizon and tradition are central to an anti-naturalist social science because they help us understand how human subjectivity is always dependent upon a historically inherited social context (and therefore not autonomous) while also not being reducible to it. Rather, human agency is capable of the creative innovation and play of local reasoning. Local reasoning is “local” because it always takes place against the background of a certain tradition. Although the specific beliefs that form the background tradition may vary from case to case, it is not possible for human reason to be free or outside of any background whatsoever. An individual cannot break out of all historical horizons. Local reasoning therefore bars autonomous forms of reasoning and subjectivity, emphasizing the way beliefs form contingently against a particular Page 6 of 23

Philosophical debates background. There is no exit from history for human belief, action, practice, and thought. Thus, the anti-naturalist point of the foregoing debate is now clear. Social science must resist twin temptations. First, it must be careful not to treat human subjectivity as autonomous and ahistorical, free of all social backgrounds. But second, and no less important, it must avoid the anti-humanist temptation of dissolving subjectivity altogether in favor of impersonal systems of power, meaning, or other such mechanistic devices. Rather, an anti-naturalist approach that is humanistic and historicist must keep in mind that people are the source of beliefs and practices, while at the same time affirming that all human life begins from an inherited history of beliefs and practices. In this way, the concepts of situated agency, local reasoning, and tradition help social scientists avoid the philosophical problems of an ahistorical subjectivity on one side, and the anti-humanist reduction of the subject to the social background on the other.

Explanation Controversies over human agency are closely related to a second area of great importance to any social science—namely, how to explain social reality. Once again, we maintain that anti-naturalism’s assumptions are philosophically superior to the tendency to render the explanation of human life either somewhat ahistorical (Schutz) or somewhat anti-humanistic (Foucault). Once again, we accept that there are rival interpretations of these thinkers (p.50) that are not susceptible to our critiques. If other scholars are able to reformulate Schutz’s or Foucault’s philosophies so as to make them more compatible with anti-naturalist insights, then we are happy to affirm their philosophical validity. The point, however, is to see the way that ahistoricism and anti-humanism, no matter where they arise, are philosophically problematic. Interpretive social science is thereby best justified by anti-naturalist insights. Early on in their tradition, phenomenologists often tried to combine interpretive insights with more ahistorical and naturalistic forms of explanation. The work of Schutz is emblematic in this regard. Schutz argued that an interpretive approach to social science was also fully compatible with naturalistic forms of explanation that we examined in Chapter 2. As an advocate of an interpretive turn, Schutz began from the premise that social scientists must engage the selfunderstandings of those they study. For Schutz this interpretive requirement was a result of the fact that “the constructs of the social sciences are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene.”13 However, Schutz also went on to argue that these interpretive constructs could be reconciled with a social science that adopted mostly formal, ahistorical models of explanation. Inspired by Max Weber’s notion of ideal types, Schutz argued that what he called “puppets” could reconcile the interpretive constructs of social reality with Page 7 of 23

Philosophical debates the naturalist goal of general, universal forms of explanation. Puppets, according to Schutz, were abstractions constructed by social scientists in order to capture some shared feature of a given group of people. All such puppets or modeled abstractions were answerable to the concrete, historical meanings, purposes, and beliefs of the actors they purported to represent. But Schutz also believed that once a particular characteristic of an entire class of individuals had been validly captured, such puppets could then be placed into formal systems of interaction that transcended particular historical contexts and explained social behavior. As Schutz put it, the social scientist “thus ascribes to this fictitious consciousness a set of typical notions, purposes, goals, which are assumed to be invariant…This homunculus or puppet is supposed to be interrelated in interaction patterns to other homunculi or puppets constructed in a similar way.”14 Schutz believed that these abstracted puppets, interacting in an idealized model of social reality, made possible naturalist scientific explanation. So Schutz wrote that “it is possible to predict how such a puppet or system of puppets might behave under certain conditions and to discover certain ‘determinate relations between a set of variables, in terms of which…empirically ascertainable regularities…can be explained.’”15 In this way Schutz argued that abstracted characteristics of human agency (so long as they were carefully crafted out of interpretations of individual purposes and beliefs) could explain human action across historical contexts and yield predictive power. (p.51) Explanation was thereby a form of general causal prediction that transcended historical context. We will return to the question of ideal types and other such aggregate concepts for the social scientific enterprise in our discussion of anti-naturalist concept formation as well as in our critical treatment of neoclassical economics and rational choice. For now we wish to show that the problem with Schutz’s proposal does not reside in his notion of abstraction per se. Rather the problem is his attempt to legitimize naturalism’s ahistorical approach as the standard model of explanation for the social sciences. For as we argued in Chapter 2, naturalistic explanation may be appropriate in outlying cases of physiological pathology, but otherwise it fails to deal with the contingent or volitional links that inform human beliefs and actions. The reader will recall that we argued beliefs and actions are the result of contingent streams of reasoning and cognition, not of necessary, law-like bonds. But the naturalist model of explanation, championed by Schutz, assumes regularities between variables that have necessary links. Schutz’s effort at squaring interpretive approaches with naturalist explanations therefore runs afoul of this basic conceptual distinction. That is, Schutz fails to recognize that naturalist and interpretive modes of explanation are philosophically antithetical because the former assumes necessary links between beliefs, and the latter contingent ones.16 Social scientists should not follow Schutz’s lead because it is contradictory at the conceptual level. Research programs built on such assumptions will therefore be Page 8 of 23

Philosophical debates plagued by confusions and inconsistencies. The effort to find necessary causal links predicting human behavior will be perpetually frustrated. Moreover, insofar as social scientists adopt naturalism, they will distort the true, contingent nature of human beliefs and actions by positing over-arching ahistorical explanations that are supposedly necessary and law-like. This will obscure what is actually going on in social and political life. We have already noted that Foucault is one of the most creative and thoroughgoing historicists of the last century. His works investigating the historical nature of social meanings are nearly unrivaled. For this reason it is especially ironic that when it comes to social explanations, Foucault’s poststructuralist approach sometimes goes awry in a similar way to Schutz. This irony is made even deeper by the fact that in Foucault’s case it is the very antihumanist quest to demolish the subject (and abandon early phenomenology’s transcendental ego) that leads to an overly formal and synchronic form of explanation that neglects historical context. For example, in his early, archaeological period Foucault sought to explain social reality in terms of formal discursive rules that governed the beliefs and actions of individuals across varied contexts without their being aware of it. As Foucault put it, the rules of a discourse do not operate primarily “in the mind or consciousness of individuals, but in discourse itself…according to a sort of uniform anonymity, on all individuals who undertake to speak in this (p.52) discursive field.”17 Thus social science explanation focuses neither on “an individual, nor…some kind of collective consciousness,” but rather on “an anonymous field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking subjects.”18 In this way, particular human beliefs and actions are reduced by Foucault to a synchronic form of explanation that locates them like sites within the larger map of the relevant discourse. Social scientific explanation consists of placing the right belief, action, practice, or event within the proper discursive scheme. Discourses in this way come to be abstract, transcendent entities, neglecting the contingent meanings of more localized contexts. This synchronic form of explanation thus neglects subtle variations in meaning at the individual and local level. Unfortunately, this tendency toward structures transcending individual meanings persisted in Foucault’s later turn to the concept of power. For the late Foucault the subject is not free “in relation to the power system, but on the contrary…must be regarded as so many effects” of power.19 Power in this view (similar to what we saw with discursive rules) is “nonsubjective” in that it does not result “from the choice or decision of an individual subject.”20 Explaining beliefs and actions therefore once again consists in locating them within the proper synchronic field or background (albeit this time the background is defined in terms of practices and rituals of power more than discursive rules). As Foucault described this research, one must “provide oneself with a grid of Page 9 of 23

Philosophical debates analysis which makes possible an analytic of relations of power.”21 In this way, Foucault’s crusade to rid social research of the human subject ends in his attempting to identify formal grids, rules, or schemes of meaning that transcend any one individual and fix the meanings of their beliefs and actions. One reason Foucault’s form of explanation is inadequate to the social sciences is that, like Schutz’s phenomenology, it fails to be adequately historical enough. However, unlike Schutz’s recourse to naturalist law-like explanations, Foucault instead evokes formal, synchronic concepts like epistemes, discourses, or regimes of power that appear to transcend local contexts and the creativity of particular agents, while also globally determining articulation and practice. So, in books like The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish, discourses, epistemes, regimes of power, and other such explanatory concepts appear to bestride the social world like titans, seemingly determining every act and belief of individuals that fall under their shadow. Such post-structuralist accounts thus exhibit a lingering structuralism that is not yet historical enough. But post-structuralism’s tendency to slouch toward an ahistorical structuralism also leads to two other dilemmas that render it unfit for use by social scientists. First, despite the historical profundity of his works, Foucault’s approach actually struggles to explain historical change. Indeed, especially the early Foucault’s account of discourse appears to imply determinism. For if individual beliefs and actions are fixed by a disembodied discourse then those same individuals are unable to fundamentally modify this discourse. But this (p.53) renders actual historical modifications in discourse inexplicable. Is it the disembodied discourse itself that is changing? And if so, how does such an impersonal form of agency operate? Answers to this problem still remain problematic within Foucault’s corpus. Indeed, the more explanatory work that concepts like discourse or power are relied upon to carry out, the less intelligible particular changes in belief and action become. Second, those who adopt such explanatory frameworks appear unable to selfnarrate. That is, explanatory concepts like discourse and power seem inadequate to the task of explaining why, for example, Foucault shifted emphasis after 1968 from a more archaeological-inflected approach to a genealogical one. But a form of social explanation that cannot explain the very researcher’s own beliefs and actions needs philosophical revision. Some post-structuralists have tried to respond to these dilemmas by evoking the inherent instability, volatility, and open-ended nature of structures like discourses and regimes of power. Jacques Derrida, for example, has argued that every discourse is inherently unstable and “is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”22 Similarly, Foucault has argued that a given network of power is “constantly in tension, in activity”; it is “not univocal” and so is never fully present, fixed, or realized.23 But unfortunately such responses pose the Page 10 of 23

Philosophical debates same questions. Namely, how do disembodied discourses, or matrices of power, actually change? If the source is individual agency, then a mode of explanation that gives at least some room to the individual subject must be reintroduced. The human subject is no longer dead. Indeed, in the final years of his work, Foucault himself appeared to increasingly appreciate the need for some role for human individual agency.24 But the attempt to evoke instability or tension within discourses elides whether we are to understand such instabilities as qualities of disembodied structures or as the result of the contingent activity of agents. Until post-structuralists can provide an adequate resolution to such problems, the anti-humanist form of explanation and the death of the subject are not the right path for social scientists wishing to move away from naturalism. Fortunately, once again a social science that is at once humanistic and historicist avoids being snagged in these traps. This can be seen by briefly revisiting the form of explanation introduced in Chapter 2. In brief form, social explanation ought to be conceptualized in terms of the humanistic conception of situated agents and the historicist conception of a tradition. Explanation ought to consist of seeking the contingent connections (as opposed to either law-like bonds or structural determinants) that agents form between their beliefs. But social scientists must also stay aware of the fact that agents always act within the horizon of a historically inherited tradition. Individuals can creatively change and modify that inheritance in the face of dilemmas, but they might also transform their inherited beliefs in response to some pathology or distorted unconscious process as discussed above. (p.54) Because social explanation consists of reconstructing the contingent beliefs of agents in the context of traditions, it follows that social science is essentially a historical form of explanation. That is, social scientists must be sensitive to the contingent historical reasons why a given set of beliefs, actions, practices, and traditions emerged. They should seek to identify the various practices and traditions that create a particular social background, while also being on the lookout for the hidden effects of pathology and distortion. Because social explanation deals with the contingent beliefs and actions of situated agents, it implies (as we have already discussed) that social science is ultimately narrative in form rather than a quest for decontextual laws or structures of social behavior. Social science is essentially narrative because the contingent linking of particular beliefs is a narrative task. To explain human social and political life is nothing more than to narrate the beliefs, actions, practices, and traditions that constitute a given area of concern. Social science, like history, is a science that consists of finding the right stories. In short, anti-naturalist philosophy opens a clear path forward through the problems presented by the ahistoricity of old-style phenomenology on one side, and the quasi-structuralism of Foucault’s anti-humanist framework on the other. Social scientists should think of explanations as historical and narrative. This is Page 11 of 23

Philosophical debates because social reality is the product of situated agents who creatively modify their beliefs and practices in light of shared traditions that form their ongoing social inheritance.

Objectivity One reason social scientists have been reluctant to accept the primacy of narratives is that they can seem intellectually arbitrary and lacking in scientific rigor. Are not stories a genre for children, one extending back to humanity’s most primitive stages, and to be told around a campfire, not as a serious form of scientific explanation? How could stories possibly make objective progress in the knowledge of social and political reality? This skepticism about the relationship between narratives and objectivity is widespread among naturalist social scientists and even sometimes amid those otherwise sympathetic to an interpretive turn. Yet anti-naturalist philosophy can help dispel this confusion by providing social scientists with a clear justification for treating narrative and interpretive inquiry as objectively rigorous. This anti-naturalist framework can in turn be contrasted with two mistaken tendencies among advocates of interpretivism: a return to naïve naturalistic views of the social world (as seen sometimes in the work of Schutz) or an adoption of a radically skeptical antihumanism (sometimes evident in the thought of Foucault). (p.55) Advocates of the interpretive turn have not always clearly broken away from naturalist ideas. In search of a resolution to the problem of objectivity, oldstyle phenomenologists like Schutz made recourse to an ahistorical, quasinaturalist approach. Specifically, Schutz hoped to treat meanings as if they were immediately accessible facts about the world that could be straightforwardly verified, more or less on par with empirical sense data. This led him to criticize logical positivist philosophers for restricting empirical experience to sensory observation alone. Instead, Schutz argued that what was considered immediately and empirically given needed to be broadened to include the meanings and actions of the social domain. Where our eyes were the organs of observable sense perception, Schutz argued that meanings and actions were perceived by “our commonsense thinking…without any difficulty” such that “the experience of the existence of other human beings and of the meaning of their actions is certainly the first and most original empirical observation man makes.”25 Once the data of immediate experience had been expanded to include the perception of meanings, Schutz believed that social science could be placed on no less an objective footing than the natural sciences. As Schutz expressed it, social scientific explanations “can be verified by empirical observation, provided that we do not restrict this term to sensory perceptions of objects…but include the experiential form by which commonsense thinking in everyday life understands human actions.”26

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Philosophical debates In other words, for Schutz objectivity consisted in the empirical adequacy with which social scientists represented the meanings of those they studied. The key was to remain sensitive to the fact that such constructions were the meanings of other subjects. But once this was taken into account, there was nothing especially tricky or vexed in picking out their objective meaning. This straightforward empiricism concerning meanings was likewise adopted by those who followed Schutz in the social sciences. So, for example, David Bidney argued that the “life-world of a given society must be taken as empirically given,” such that the task of a social scientist is largely to “describe in detail, and ‘objectively,’ the life-world of his subjects as he has observed it.”27 If meanings were indeed apprehended in a straightforward, empirical manner then the problem of objectivity in an interpretive social science would meet with an easy resolution. Unfortunately, this bare appeal to a commonsense empiricism is philosophically inadequate. The basic dilemma facing this form of objectivity is that it relies on an appeal to pure experiences. But once one accepts philosophy’s turn toward meaning holism, there cannot be any such entreaty to pure units of experience. Rather, only further beliefs (and not some pure experience) can serve as the basis for holding a particular belief. This does not mean individuals lack direct experiences of the world per se but it does imply that any such claim to direct experience is without epistemological weight. Or rather, the only thing that gives these experiences weight is a belief unpacked in terms of further beliefs. In brief form, this is (p.56) because our appeal to experience is always itself theory-laden: any one particular belief is always part of a bundle of supporting beliefs. In this way, the holism we explored in Chapter 2 undermines any straightforward empiricism about meanings. For holism implies that all appeals to observation entail a wider web of supporting beliefs and meanings. So, for example, if a given observation X disproved a theory B, the latter might still be retained by insisting that observation X rested on a false web or theory. Likewise, if an observation Y proved theory C, the latter might still be discarded by insisting that Y was similarly suspect. Theories, in short, can be retained or discarded in light of any one piece of evidence by evoking ad hoc arguments about the validity of any given datum. The philosophical case against appeals to pure senses has been argued at length by the likes of Donald Davidson, among others.28 That theories are buffered from any one empirical observation in this way should not come as a surprise. Individuals often hold to a given theory with greater certainty than any particular datum that might come along to disprove it. For example, if one observes a shamelessly power-hungry politician suddenly make a sweeping gesture of generosity and self-abnegation, this would not necessarily upend the theory that this leader is calculating and self-serving. Instead, one would likely fit the contradicting evidence into the wider theory. Perhaps this leader was trying to recourse to populism, curry favor, or some other subterfuge. Of course this does not mean that theories are utterly impregnable to new Page 13 of 23

Philosophical debates experiences (to the contrary, they might be undermined by any number of such experiences); it simply means that the objectivity of a theory cannot be justified by a straightforward appeal to empirical observation, but only by appealing to further beliefs. Objectivity cannot rest on single commonsense units of perception. Schutz himself often seems to affirm this holistic, anti-foundational turn in philosophy. He writes that “strictly speaking, there are no such things as facts, pure and simple,” but rather in the natural as well as the social sciences there are only “interpreted facts.”29 However, he seems less aware that this creates a serious tension between his holistic commitments and his appeals to objectivity on the basis of empirical validation. These two positions are philosophically contradictory. A defender of Schutz could try to rescue his philosophy by taking it more in the holistic direction and away from claims to simply verify meanings. We would welcome advocates of Schutz taking this anti-naturalist stance. But what cannot be affirmed is a form of objectivity in the social sciences that appeals to quasi-empiricist processes of verification. Another pitfall in the search for objectivity in the social sciences is to let holistic and anti-foundational philosophical insights lead to relativism. We already noted how Foucault’s hostility to humanism led to the demotion of subject agency in favor of largely synchronic structures of discourses or power. Foucault often put aside the philosophical problem of truth and objectivity in favor of the sociological study of such structures of knowledge-power. Many of (p.57) these sociological inquires have been nothing less than revolutionary. However, in doing so Foucault sometimes came close to suggesting that social inquiry was characterized by two forms of relativism: one based on a critique of individual rationality and the other on incommensurability. We will look briefly at each one. At times Foucault writes as though no one could have objective knowledge in the social sciences because human beliefs are not rational but the product of nonrational structures of power. So, for example, he famously wrote that: “Truth isn’t outside power…each society has its own régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”30 One common interpretation of this passage is that truth has been reduced to power. If this is the case then Foucault runs into the same dilemma of the inability to self-narrate that we explained above. This position would leave social scientists with no way to claim Foucault’s own works were objectively better than the very rival historical narratives he did so much to dispel. However, arguably this criticism of Foucault is unfair, as he might instead be read as uninterested in the philosophical question of truth, focusing instead on the sociological question of how different practices of truth are developed in differing societies. If this is the case, then Foucault does not present social Page 14 of 23

Philosophical debates scientists with a way to think about the objectivity of their own inquiries. If this reading is correct then Foucault is not interested in the philosophical question of how to establish truth. This means readers should not be surprised, angry, or disappointed to find Foucault is of no help on the question of objectivity because it is not his question. A second form of relativism that can arguably be ascribed to Foucault rests on the claim that meaning holism entails the incommensurability of competing conceptual frameworks. Especially in his early, archaeological period, Foucault sometimes seemed to imply that truth and objectivity were relative to particular epistemes or discourses.31 In this view, although beliefs may form rationally, what counts as rational is relative to the conceptual scheme governing a particular discourse or language. Moreover, because the content of particular beliefs is always filled out by a specific web or context, beliefs cannot be transferred from one web to a radically different one without a fundamental change in meaning taking place. The objectivity of particular beliefs therefore can only be established internal to a given system or paradigm of thought. The result of this philosophy is that there is no way to arbitrate between radically incompatible schemes. Anti-naturalist philosophy can be of some help in overcoming the impasse posed by radical incommensurability. Specifically, anti-naturalism holds that the existence of radically incompatible rival frameworks does not entail relativism. To the contrary, the case for a form of objectivity that avoids both anti-humanist forms of relativism as well as philosophically naturalist (p.58) appeals to given data is one that has been advanced by a growing number of anti-naturalist philosophers.32 This form of objectivity is possible because competing theories need not be proven true in absolute terms, but rather can be objectively justified through critical comparison with one another. Crucially, comparison is possible by an appeal to shared or agreed-upon facts that both rival theories recognize as valid. Although facts are always theoryladen, it does not follow that theories determine facts to the point that there cannot exist an overlapping consensus on certain facts between competing theories. Take, for example, the heated debates in international relations over “democratic peace theory” or the theory that democracies don’t go to war with one another.33 Both proponents and critics of this theory no doubt agree on a large assortment of shared facts; for instance, that the First World War was fought between two warring alliances that included Austria-Hungary and Germany on one side, and France, Britain, and Russia on the other. However, the same proponents and critics of the theory might also disagree over whether Germany at this time was a democracy. In such cases, a critic of the theory might try appealing to further shared facts—for instance, certain neglected features of Wilhelmine Germany’s political structure—in order to argue that it was as democratic as its adversaries Britain and France were. In doing so this Page 15 of 23

Philosophical debates critic would pressure the proponent by arguing that democratic peace theory had failed to comprehensively ascertain certain shared facts. The existence of shared facts therefore allows social scientists to judge which theory best meets criteria such as accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, and opening new possibilities for inquiry. But what about cases of more radical disagreement in which few if any facts are agreed upon or serve to judge between theories? For example, what if the proponent of democratic theory disputes the very facts cited by the critic? Such an advocate of democratic theory might argue that the critic has distorted the facts because his theory of democracy is faulty, leading him to a mistaken set of facts. Yet even in extreme cases, where there is radical disagreement over the very nature of the facts in question, comparison is still possible. For instance, in such cases theories might still be rationally assessed according to their ability to resolve anomalies or dilemmas internal to a competitor’s own conceptual framework. In this way, the move from theory X to theory Y might be considered either an “error-reducing” move or else some kind of epistemic gain in comparative terms.34 Here the criteria are not necessarily shared facts, but rather the ability to deal with a rival’s dilemmas and anomalies. Such comparative objectivity consists of an immanent assessment of each theory’s ability to resolve problems and advance aims. For example, critics of democratic peace theory might argue that the theory’s very historical development betrays the continual tweaking of definitions in order to exclude counter-examples (like the Spanish–American War (p.59) of 1898 and the U.S. Civil War). Critics might therefore hold that the career of the theory suffers from the internal dilemma of definitional circularity. Such circularity, they might add, does not reflect a concern with accurately defining democracies but with buffering the theory from anomalies. Such a critic might then argue that their own preferred theory of democracy allows for a more historical account of democracy that does not suffer the dilemma of definitional circularity. The point, of course, is not whether democratic peace theory is wrong or right. It is rather that anti-naturalist philosophy makes clear how both proponents and critics of particular social scientific theories have recourse to comparative forms of objective justification that steer clear of the two pitfalls of foundationalism and relativism. Naturalists often conceive of objectivity in terms of certainty—some indubitable pure experience or bedrock appeal to commonsense (this is likely due to the effect of a certain vision of the natural sciences on epistemology). When certainty proves impossible because of the holistic nature of beliefs, the response is too often to swing toward an exaggerated relativism. But this is a mistake. Rather than viewing objectivity in terms of certainty, the foregoing antiPage 16 of 23

Philosophical debates naturalist arguments suggest four conclusions about objectivity in the social sciences. First, because objectivity is ultimately comparative, our knowledge does not rest on a simple or immediate appeal to some absolute criteria or access to truth. Objectivity is a feature of comparing entire theoretical webs with one another. Second, because objectivity is comparative and not absolute, the claim to truth is always provisional and amounts to a best theory so far. Because of the nature of beliefs, human knowledge never achieves an absolute terminus or endpoint. Third, because our terms are provisional, we must always remain reasonably open to the possibility that either a new theory (or an old theory rethought) will reclaim superiority. In this way, objectivity takes the form of an ongoing dialectical and historical process as opposed to an ahistorical game of once-and-for-all or winner-take-all definitive proof. Finally, a comparative form of objectivity appeals to the local, practical reasoning of situated agents. That is, social scientists and others do not decide what theory is better from outside of the historical process. Rather, they appraise the objectivity of theories in light of the best alternative on hand. In this sense, the best theory is not a flawless one, but simply one that represents a clear gain over whatever else is on offer at a given time and place. Some readers might be disappointed with anti-naturalism’s account of objectivity because the goal of certainty seems so much more appealing. But it is worth recalling that not even the natural sciences make claims to finality. To the contrary, natural scientists often emphasize that their theories are simply the best devised so far. In this regard, the mistake has been the quest for certainty. And yet in domains like social and political theory the fear of relativism and irrationalism has led some philosophers to call for a return to foundationalist models of truth as the only bulwark against intellectual (p.60) nihilism. Allan Bloom’s polemical The Closing of the American Mind is one of many such books proposing a return to foundationalist certainties and away from the threats of modern relativism.35 We hope we have shown readers that such reactions are an exaggerated fear of inexistent bogeymen. In fact, it is often the very search for foundationalist certainty that fuels a disappointed turn to relativism. Too often relativists are nothing more than disappointed foundationalists. By contrast, the future of interpretive social science rests with those who carry forth a humanistic and historicist research agenda, justifying their theories in light of shared facts and comparative assessments. Anti-naturalism therefore avoids the dual threats of absolutism and relativism.

Critique Objectivity, according to anti-naturalism, is a function of comparison. Appeals are made not to absolute criteria, but to relative gains or losses in occupying one position over another. Now we add that insofar as objectivity consists in making arguments about the relative rationality versus irrationality of holding particular positions, it has an inescapable evaluative streak. As anti-naturalist philosophers have noted, there is an ad hominem dimension to this kind of objectivity insofar Page 17 of 23

Philosophical debates as it is directly aimed at the holders of some theory X, and rests on the claim that “whatever else turns out to be true, you can improve your epistemic position by moving from X to Y.”36 In this way, theories in social science are justified by the comparative truth or falsity of rivals. Moreover, because political actors are inevitably guided (whether implicitly or explicitly) by some kind of theory about social reality, social scientific theories are always closely tied to the critique of the rationality guiding actual political actors. This is an argument we will return to and elaborate upon at far greater length in our discussion of ethics and the fact–value dichotomy. For now it is important to emphasize that this anti-naturalist line of reasoning runs directly against the grain of much mainstream social science, which maintains that social research is more or less independent of the project of political and normative critique. Yet anti-naturalism also challenges the value-neutrality latent in both ahistorical and anti-humanist forms of social science that otherwise support an interpretive turn. Old-style phenomenologists, for instance, defended the naturalist doctrine that scientists must cultivate a stance of value-neutrality. These theorists contrasted the disengaged objectivity of the scientist with the normatively engaged perspective of ordinary political actors. In this vein, Schutz wrote that the social scientist must be a “disinterested scientific onlooker of the social world,” who limits him or herself to trying to observe, describe, and classify social reality “with the same detached equanimity as physicists contemplate their experiments.”37 (p.61) But arguably a kind of value-neutrality has also crept in from time to time in the work of post-structuralists like Foucault. This may be surprising because it is undoubtedly true that Foucault is extremely sensitive to the pervasiveness of normativity within social theory. Indeed, his many inquiries into the intersection of knowledge and power have often illuminated how normativity and science are subtly intertwined. Nevertheless, various scholars have plausibly suggested that especially in his early, archaeological period, Foucault had a tendency to slide into the mode of writing as if from a completely descriptive, even ideological neutral vantage point.38 For example, this tendency is evident in Foucault’s method of “archaeological description” as a way of unearthing the “systematic description of a discourse-object” as well as his bracketing of questions of normativity and ideology.39 Once again, this is partly the result of Foucault’s anti-humanist campaign to eliminate the subject in favor of impersonal explanatory structures like discourses and epistemes. For, once human reality has been reduced to these “discourse-objects,” it seems that more or less straight value-neutral description might be attainable. In contrast to this flirtation with value-neutrality, anti-naturalism recognizes that critical evaluation is never completely separable from social research. Rather, social scientists must remain sensitive to evaluative or critical features of their research in at least two ways. First, as we already noted, comparative forms of Page 18 of 23

Philosophical debates objectivity as ad hominem imply that ideology critique is to some degree implicit whenever we claim that a rival’s social and political theory is defective. Because the social sciences study people who are themselves guided by some theory of social reality, social science necessarily clashes and has some critical purchase over the actors it studies. Charles Taylor has argued that explanatory concepts in the social sciences are shot through with evaluation because they inevitably assume some norm of what counts as rational human agency.40 We develop this argument at length with specific examples later. But for now the point is that because explanations in the social sciences always assume some idea of what counts as a legitimate or illegitimate, rational or irrational, normal or abnormal human action, they imply an evaluative picture. As Taylor puts it, explanations in the social sciences necessarily include some kind of “value slope.”41 Second, and related, anti-naturalist approaches in particular are inherently critical of political ideologies that are guided by philosophically incompatible assumptions, notably those premised on theories purporting foundationalist truth. Note that this does not mean that anti-naturalist approaches are determinate of a specific political viewpoint. To the contrary, anti-naturalism implies a critical deconstruction of any version of an ideology (from fascism to communism to liberalism) that claims justification on foundationalist grounds. Likewise, anti-naturalism is compatible with any ideology that is able to justify itself on its epistemological terms. But social scientists do need to remain alive to the ways anti-naturalism is inherently critical of scientism, (p.62) foundationalism, and other frameworks that might be used to justify particular political ideologies, practices, institutions, authority, and other forms of power. This will be discussed at length in later chapters in terms of anti-naturalism’s critique of technocratic forms of political power. We have argued that social scientists would do best to navigate debates within the interpretive turn by adopting an anti-naturalist philosophical framework. In the case of human subjectivity, this means social scientists should think of human agency as situated, capable of creative agency while always embedded in historical traditions. This situated view of human agency, moreover, suggests that social scientists employ historical, narrative forms of explanation that remain sensitive to the contingent reasons why agents form and inherit particular beliefs. Anti-naturalist philosophy also helps social scientists avoid the two pitfalls of foundationalist certainty and skeptical relativism. Rather, objectivity is possible in the social sciences through comparing rival theories. Finally, anti-naturalism points to a social science that is normatively engaged and critical—this means moving beyond the naturalist assumption that inquiry must be value-free. Indeed, social scientists should remain alive to the various ways in which all forms of social explanation involve comparative judgments that concern questions of rationality, irrationality, and ideology. Neither should they forget that anti-naturalism itself is philosophically incompatible with, and therefore implicitly critical of, absolutist forms of justification of political and Page 19 of 23

Philosophical debates moral life. In sum, the future of interpretive social science is humanist, historicist, objective, and critical. All these themes will be elaborated and explained in greater complexity in the coming chapters—opening up a wide horizon of possible research for social scientists and political theorists. Antinaturalism will also provide the starting point for clarifying how the substantive research of working social scientists—methodologically, empirically, normatively, and in public policy—needs to be thoroughly reconceived. Notes:

(1.) See: Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); George Psathas, ed., Phenomenological Sociology (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973). (2.) Cf. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 225. (3.) For Husserl in particular “to buttress humanistic science with natural science so as to make it supposedly exact is absurd.” Edmund Husserl, “The Attitude of Natural Science and the Attitude of Humanistic Science, Appendix III” and “Vienna Lecture, Appendix I,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970) 326, 272. Also, Brian Fay has written an insightful historical summary of phenomenology and meaning in the social sciences, which we are indebted to here: Brian Fay, “Phenomenology and Social Inquiry: From Consciousness to Culture and Critique,” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, eds. Stephen Turner and Paul Roth (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003) 42–63. (4.) Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 184–5. (5.) Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967) 69, cf. 31–44, 69–71. It is well known but important to note that late in his career Schutz grew increasingly skeptical of Husserl’s transcendental subject. (6.) Cf. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977) 142, 153. (7.) Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2010) 55, 122, 125, 203, 205. (8.) Foucault, “Truth and Power,” interview by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 117. Page 20 of 23

Philosophical debates (9.) Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 169–70. (10.) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 95. (11.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 205–8. (12.) For further discussion see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004) II:1. (13.) Alfred Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,” in Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, eds. Dorothy Emmet and Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970) 12. (14.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 16–17. (15.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 17. (16.) Cf. Alfred Schutz, “The Problem of Rationality in the Social World,” in Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, 96–7; Thomas Luckmann, “Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. 1, 174, 179, 180. For a powerful critique of phenomenology’s flirtation with ahistorical, natural kinds see: Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978) 158–61. (17.) Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 63. (18.) Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 122. (19.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 27–8. (20.) Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 94–5. (21.) Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” interview by Alain Grosrichard and others, in Power/Knowledge, 199. (22.) Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970) 249. (23.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26–7.

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Philosophical debates (24.) Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 225. (25.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 10. (26.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 17. (27.) David Bidney, “Phenomenological Method and the Anthropological Science of the Cultural Life-World,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. 1, 134, 136. (28.) For an extended technical discussion of the problem of appealing to pure senses see: Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in The Essential Davidson, eds. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006) 225–41. (29.) Alfred Schutz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action,” in Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967) 5. (30.) Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 131. See also: Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 93; Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 150. (31.) Cf. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. In the analytic context a similar case for incommensurability has also been defended by: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). (32.) See for example: Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Charles Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 34–60. (33.) For a standard reference book on these debates see the essays in: Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996). (34.) Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” 51. (35.) Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). (36.) Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” 54.

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Philosophical debates (37.) Alfred Schutz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” in Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broderson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964) 92; Schutz, “The Problem of Rationality in the Social World,” 94. Schutz’s hostility toward normative critique in social science was also taken up by his followers. So, for example, David Bidney recommended that ethnographers employ a “method of cultural relativism” in which they remained “impartial” when recording the “subjective life-world of a particular society.” Bidney, “Phenomenological Method,” 137. (38.) Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1:3 (1981): 272–87; Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” 182. (39.) Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 140; Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 118. (40.) Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” in Philosophy and the Human Science: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 58–90. (41.) Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” 73.

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Concept formation

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Concept formation Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords Concept formation is inescapable because social scientists cannot study political reality without making tacit assumptions about the basic relevant concepts. An anti-naturalist approach offers a distinctive form of concept formation, one that avoids naturalist distortions like essentialism, reification, and instrumentalism. In order to make this case, this chapter draws on some of the most influential political science methodology literature as well as top research programs of empirical political science (including critical discussions of voter behavior, the study of so-called “contentious politics,” democratic peace, and selectorate theory, to name a few). The chapter concludes by elaborating on the way that an interpretive social science forges concepts that are sensitive to meanings and human agency. Keywords:   interpretive concepts, anti-essentialism, voter behavior, contentious politics, critique of democratic peace theory

Philosophy matters to the social sciences. Indeed, it matters so much that working social scientists ignore the philosophical lessons of anti-naturalism at the risk of compromising their empirical work. So far we have argued that philosophical reflection can help philosophers and social scientists distinguish between naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches, while also establishing the superiority of a historicist and humanistic form of inquiry. Our anti-naturalist framework serves as a coherent, systematic starting point for the interpretive turn that avoids some of the problems with rival justifications for this move. To be clear, as established in Chapters 2 and 3, social scientists might continue to Page 1 of 25

Concept formation favor a particular philosophical tradition (e.g., pragmatism, phenomenology, post-structuralism, analytic philosophy, social constructivism) but our antinaturalist framework helps clarify what pitfalls should be avoided by adherents to the interpretive turn. Philosophical pluralism is possible in this qualified respect. What is not possible is a coherent or legitimate philosophical pluralism between naturalism and anti-naturalism. This chapter will further clarify and deepen our account of the basic logical incompatibility and why social scientists and all those wishing to explain human behavior should be deeply concerned. We would now like to show how the basic concepts used to describe and explain social reality can either take a naturalist or anti-naturalist bent.1 This means that neutrality about philosophy in empirical work is impossible. Social scientists might ignore philosophy but this does not free them from philosophical commitments and responsibilities. Our task is to draw off the arguments made so far in order to demonstrate the problems with naturalist concept formation and offer an anti-naturalist alternative for empirical research. In particular we will focus on recent developments in the methodological debates in political science—though these discussions will clearly have much broader implications. In the last two decades concept formation has received significant attention from qualitative political science methodologists such as Giovanni Sartori and David Collier. These methodologists have articulated perhaps the most sophisticated defense of a qualitative approach to concept formation to date. And yet their treatment of concept formation remains entangled in certain philosophical problems. Although Collier’s approach to concept formation is more flexible than Sartori’s, both men remain attached to philosophical naturalism. Specifically, we will claim that a lingering philosophical naturalism has inspired leading political science methodologists to slip into three kinds of (p.66) faulty concept formation, which we will analyze in detail: reification, essentialism, and linguistic instrumentalism. As part of our discussion of Sartori and Collier, we will also survey how these faulty types of concept formation are evident in some of the most prominent research programs of empirical political science. We will then conclude by proposing an alternative set of anti-naturalist descriptive and explanatory concepts. By the end of the chapter, the reader should have a clear sense of the drawbacks of naturalist concept formation and the virtues of an anti-naturalist alternative for empirical inquiry.

Reification In previous chapters we explained why anti-naturalists believe that social reality is expressive of the webs of meaning of creative human agents. But not everyone conceives of language and social reality in this way. Indeed, the reification of social science concepts is the result of neglecting the holistic nature of beliefs and meanings and instead rendering social reality as if it were composed of Page 2 of 25

Concept formation mere things. Reified concepts are attractive to some researchers because they allow for a vision of social reality as free of interpretive controversy. Meanings always involve hermeneutic conflicts over how to relate constituent beliefs and actions to wider narrative wholes. By contrast, the allure of treating social reality as consisting of mere things is that ostensibly these can be verified with little interpretive debate, and then perhaps plugged into the mechanistic and law-like models of explanation inspired by the natural sciences. For example, political scientists studying American voter behavior might reify demographic concepts like “age,” “race,” or “social class” by not taking into account how members of those demographic groups actually construe the significance of their social situation or the variant cultural meanings informing these terms. Once this has been accomplished, age, race, class, and other such demographic facts can then be correlated and eventually formed into supposedly law-like causal explanations.2 In this way, reification is one of the building blocks of a certain widespread approach to the naturalist project in the social sciences. We will illustrate this series of points using the case of American voter behavior in greater detail below. But first we must engage the methodological writings of Sartori and Collier in order to clarify how the reification of concepts can take one of two forms. The first form we will call brute fact reification. This type of reification occurs whenever social scientists strip their concepts of meanings and instead present them as brute facts—demographic, biological, social, or otherwise. This approach is found in the methodological writings of Sartori. (p.67) Sartori’s 1991 essay, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” champions a naturalist vision of social science, whose goal is “law-like generalizations endowed with explanatory power.”3 Yet, according to Sartori, comparative political science has not yet achieved this goal due to an approach to concept formation that does not allow for proper classifications. In particular, Sartori claims that comparative politics has created “cat-dogs,” or misconceptualizations that have led political scientists astray by referring to phenomena that do not exist.4 Sartori’s response to this problem appears in his influential edited volume, Social Science Concepts. Despite this volume’s approving reference to antinaturalist philosophy (specifically the work of Charles Taylor), it in fact carries out a naturalist approach to concept formation.5 In particular, Sartori commits the error of reification when he defines a concept’s referent as “whatever is out there before or beyond mental and linguistic apprehension.”6 The problem is that Sartori’s definition of a referent draws a sharp distinction between the meanings and language of our mental states and the social phenomena of the world. In doing so, he excludes the constitutive role of meanings in the actions and practices that comprise social life. Instead, he treats actions and social phenomena as if they were something different from individuals’ meanings and beliefs. In this way, Sartori’s approach to concepts displays a brute fact form of Page 3 of 25

Concept formation reification, in which social objects are not properly distinguished from mere physical things. Indeed, his theory of concept formation does not adequately discriminate between the referents of concepts in the social sciences and physical objects. However, a number of the contributors to Sartori’s Social Science Concepts also discuss concepts that explicitly refer to meanings and beliefs. But unfortunately even these concepts are naturalistic, exhibiting a second type of atomistic reification. This kind of reification occurs when meanings are given a role in the conceptualization of social life but there is a neglect of their holistic nature. Such reified concepts neglect the holistic nature of meanings and create concepts that fit within naturalist explanations as independent variables. For example, Glenda Patrick’s chapter defines political culture in a way that clearly includes meanings as a “set of fundamental beliefs, values and attitudes that characterize the nature of the political system and regulate the political interactions among its members.”7 However, at the same time she molds her concept of “political culture” to fit with naturalist explanations, even going so far as to explicitly endorse Carl Hempel’s naturalist analysis of concepts as designed to “permit the establishment of general laws” and allow events to be “explained and predicted and thus scientifically understood.”8 This naturalist reification of concepts is also present in the work of a leading qualitative methodologist, David Collier. At first glance, Collier appears less wedded to naturalism than Sartori. For example, Collier identifies interpretive inquiry as one of three sub-categories of small-N comparative analysis, and also calls for sensitivity to contextual diversity in comparative analysis.9 (p.68) However, Collier’s underlying naturalism is plainly evident in his coedited book with Henry Brady. For instance, in the glossary written by Collier and Jason Seawright, “interpretation” and “explanation” are given contrasting definitions, as if they were different activities entirely. Here interpretation is defined as “a description…of the meaning of human behavior from the standpoint of individuals whose behavior is being observed,” while explanation is defined in familiar naturalist terms, as an activity making use of dependent and independent variables.10 Collier thus occupies a position within the methodological literature in which he embraces naturalism in spite of the fact that he recognizes the constitutive role of meanings in social reality, the historical contingency of social science concepts, and even warns against the dangers of reification.11 Indeed, Collier and his coauthor, Robert Adcock, define the danger of reification as “the mistake of overstating the degree to which the attributes one seeks to conceptualize cohere as if they were like an object.”12 This definition of reification sees it as a neglect of contingency, or the danger of understanding social phenomena as unchanging objects rather than within an historical flux. But although the neglect of contingency is certainly a related problem, anti-naturalists believe Page 4 of 25

Concept formation that the key feature of reification consists of stripping the objects denoted by social science concepts of holistic meanings and beliefs. What Collier’s discussion of reification misses is the way that social science concepts must refer to objects constituted in part by meanings or beliefs. This slide into naturalist reification is evident in Collier’s coauthored work with Steven Levitsky on concepts of democracy in comparative research. This essay tries to determine how appropriate various definitions of democracy are when applied to differing historical and geopolitical contexts. Notably, Collier and Levitsky argue that a “procedural minimum” definition of democracy is insufficient in several Latin American countries where civilian government, even when freely elected, is without the effective power to rule. In such cases, they believe that political scientists would need to add effective power to rule to the procedural minimum definition of democracy.13 But although Collier and Levitsky display sensitivity to context, they ignore the meanings of the specific actors involved in the democracies in question. Their conceptualization of democracy is thus devoid of agents’ meanings as constitutive of actions and as crucial to the contextual diversity. Nor is this concept of democracy sufficiently embedded in a particular tradition and recognized as in conflict with other traditions of democracy. Rather, they treat the problem of properly conceptualizing democracy as one of adding or subtracting the right reified attributes in the quasi-ahistorical space of a political science lab. In this regard, no less than Sartori, they commit themselves to a naturalistic reification of concepts. So far we have noted how reification occurs in the methodological literature on concept formation. But it is also important to see that it surfaces in actual empirical research. For instance, many American political scientists maintain there is a strong correlation between a certain (reified) concept of human age (p.69) and the motivation to vote in presidential elections.14 John Mark Hansen and Steven Rosenstone, for example, have attempted to identify the “causes” and “personal determinants” of voter participation.15 Gathering data on voter turnout for American presidential elections from 1956 to 1988, Rosenstone and Hansen discovered that participation among the oldest citizens was twenty-nine percentage points higher than among the youngest. This in part led them to conclude that “as people grow older, their involvement in American politics deepens.”16 Undoubtedly there is much that is of empirical value in Rosenstone and Hansen’s work. They have certainly sketched an important set of relations that exist within recent American politics. However, the problem is that Rosenstone and Hansen’s concept of age is reified. How so? Age, in this study, is often presented as a more or less brute thing (e.g., the mere fact of “being eighteen”) and not as a phenomenon constituted by holistic meanings and significance for particular individuals. Moreover, these reified concepts are in service of a Page 5 of 25

Concept formation naturalist agenda. The goal is for political scientists to correlate this brute biological notion of “age” as a mere thing with other ostensibly brute facts in the hope that some more fundamental causal inference can be achieved. What starts with the seeming innocence of descriptive correlations ends with attempts to frame mechanistic causal laws. In this way, the reified fact of age plays a key role in the effort to model and predict voter behavior via naturalist explanations. By contrast, anti-naturalists insist that the political significance of age is necessarily the result of particular contexts of meaning and belief. Thus, although the mere biological fact of being a certain age undoubtedly exists, this does not yet give researchers any sense of the relevance of this fact for political and social life. Rather, in order to grasp the political significance of biological age, social scientists must engage the holistic webs of meaning and belief of particular actors. In this vein, an anti-naturalist-inspired critique of Rosenstone and Hansen might point to enclaves of elderly Americans that are either highly apathetic or antagonistic to voting (for example, the last remnants of the “turn on, tune in, drop out” generation). Similarly, they might point to segments of American youth that have become politically energized and enthusiastic voters (perhaps clubs of young Democrats or young Republicans on college campuses). The point of such counterexamples would be to show that there is no unmediated fact of “being sixty-five” or “being eighteen” that determines voter behavior. Instead, what is relevant to social science is how the biological fact of being a given age is interpreted by different individuals and groups. This implies that the political significance of being a certain age (or any other demographic fact) is always grafted into a wider web of meanings. The interpreted significance or meaning of what appear to otherwise be brute facts in the social sciences must not be ignored. Of course, defenders of Rosenstone and Hansen might respond by arguing that there is no need to neglect meanings in this way. Such defenders might (p.70) concede that although treating the political significance of biological age as a reified fact is a mistake, nevertheless the concept of age can be modified to make reference to meanings and beliefs. Indeed, something like this is what Rosenstone and Hansen do when they consider various possible hypotheses for how aging causally influences voter turnout. After weighing three possible hypotheses, these authors decide to treat the meaning of age on the “lifeexperience hypothesis,” which holds that “as people grow older…they accumulate information, skills, and attachments that help them to overcome the costs of political involvement.”17 In other words, the political significance or meaning of age is that experience gradually comes to outweigh the sacrifices involved in voting.

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Concept formation But the problem here (similar to Glenda Patrick’s work above) is that the concept of age is still being made to serve and fit within a naturalist formation. Indeed, although meanings are now referenced within the concept of age, this is still done while excluding the holistic beliefs of the actual agents involved. What if the meanings of age are defined by being part of a clique of young people actively involved in politics (e.g., the Hitler Youth)? Or what if instead, a given milieu of the elderly depoliticize because they believe all is lost in the current country’s polity? Of course, it might be that the meaning of increased participation has to do with a certain set of contingent developments within American history where aging allowed for more civic engagement. But this would have to be grasped and conceptualized by wrestling with the meanings of actual agents in the culture—not stipulated free of any connection to the webs of belief constituting actual social reality. Thus, the concrete meanings and beliefs constituting political reality cannot be ignored. In this regard, there is a lingering reification that persists. Rosenstone and Hansen have simply shifted from a brute fact reification to a slightly more defensible atomistic kind. Of course, none of this excludes the possibility that anti-naturalists might accept Rosenstone and Hansen’s finding that older Americans voted in higher numbers between 1956 and 1988. Indeed, as a starting point, Rosenstone and Hansen’s work gathering data about American elections is a substantive and valuable contribution to social science research. But anti-naturalists would insist that the conceptual grid imposed on social reality is causing neglect of holistic webs and leading to some disfigurations. Moreover, the actual work of explanation is yet to be done as no narrative has been constructed that grasps the beliefs and meanings of these groups that generate their actions.

Essentialism Reification results when social scientists ignore the constitutive role of holistic meanings and beliefs from the concepts they use to denote social reality. (p.71) Essentialism, by contrast, is the result of stripping away the historical specificity from concepts. Anti-naturalist philosophy implies that meanings and actions are historically contingent and can only be understood in particular contexts or life-worlds. By contrast, naturalism promotes the view that essential attributes occur cross-temporally and cross-culturally, transcending historical contingency. Freed of specificity, essentialist concepts are designed to capture historical and cultural constants, which might then form the basis for naturalist causal explanations. Generally speaking, essentialism in social science takes either a “strong” or “weak” form. Strong essentialism typically posits a fixed core of common traits that must be present for the concept to apply. Concepts in this view are built on a logic of commonality. Weak essentialism, on the other hand, allows for a spectrum of variation in core traits. We will look in more detail at both strong and weak essentialism, first in the context of the methodological literature, and Page 7 of 25

Concept formation then with an example from empirical research. Again this approach reveals the way that naturalist philosophical assumptions inform and mar even some of the best work conducted by contemporary social scientists. We have already seen that Sartori’s concept formation is naturalist insofar as it reifies the objects of social science. But Sartori is also committed to essentialism of the strong type. Sartori’s strong essentialism is evident in his “Rule 7,” according to which “the connotation [or intension] and the denotation [or extension] of a concept are inversely related.”18 Rule 7 (also called the “ladder of abstraction”) implies that the greater the number of attributes that comprise a concept’s intension, the smaller the number of empirical cases that comprise its extension, and vice versa. In this way, Sartori implies that when a concept is applied to new cases, if those cases do not share the core features shared by previous cases, the validity of the concept diminishes. Sartori’s Rule 7 thus expresses a logic of commonality that makes it strongly essentialist. It subtracts from social science concepts any contextual and historical specificity. Of course, Sartori might reply that he allows for diversity of context by forming varied concepts at a “low level of abstraction.”19 But even forming concepts at such low levels still assumes that they are defined by essential properties or at least core commonalities. And any diversity of context would appear only in the spaces between such concepts. Sartori’s conceptualization of social reality thus remains a strong form of naturalist essentialism. By contrast, Collier’s treatment of contextual specificity is subtler, and thus requires greater attention. In an essay coauthored with James Mahon, Collier tackles the problem of how to adapt social science concepts to fit a variety of contexts without weakening their explanatory or classificatory power. Collier and Mahon conceive of this as the problem of allowing for “conceptual traveling (the application of concepts to new cases)” without suffering “conceptual stretching (the impairment that occurs when a concept does not fit the new cases).”20 (p.72) Collier and Mahon begin by adopting Sartori’s strategy of avoiding conceptual stretching by allowing for an essentialist core concept that is preserved in new contexts by what they rename as an ascending “ladder of generality.”21 Tellingly, Collier and Mahon adopt Sartori’s strategy specifically in response to the concerns of “scholars committed to an ‘interpretive’ perspective.”22 But even when trying to address interpretive concerns, they are in fact aligning themselves with the essentialism we already saw in Sartori’s approach. But Collier and Mahon also attempt to go beyond Sartori’s treatment of concepts, as they claim the latter will only avoid conceptual stretching in certain Page 8 of 25

Concept formation “classical categories.” Two other types of concepts they consider are “radial categories” and “family resemblance categories.” Radial categories echo the strong essentialism of classical categories, as they are defined in terms of certain core attributes (or a “central subcategory”) that comprise a prototype. This prototype is then said to apply in actual cases only in combination with other “noncentral subcategories” such that relevant cases may share core attributes with the prototype but not with each other.23 However, “family resemblance categories” mark the deepest attempt by Collier and Mahon to break from naturalistic, essentialist concepts. Particularly promising is their attempt to recover “Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance” as a “category of membership different from that of classical categories, in that there may be no single attribute that category members all share.”24 The authors try to apply the notion of family resemblances as commonalities shared in varying degrees by a genetic group, in contrast with nonfamily members who may share few of these traits: “the commonalities are quite evident, even though there may be no trait that all family members, as family members, have in common.”25 Collier and Mahon’s use of family resemblance concepts presents a significant improvement over Sartori insofar as it shows they recognize that a principle of mutual fit between a given concept and various cases is too rigid for the social sciences. However, their analysis of family resemblance concepts is ultimately flawed, as it pulls them away from Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism and toward the essentialism of a naturalistic social science. Collier and Mahon’s break from Wittgenstein becomes clear once we draw a distinction between two senses of the concept of “family resemblance.” On the one side, a family denotes a clearly demarcated group that contrasts with nonfamily members; but, on the other, a family might instead be considered a dynamic set of relations with adoptive, honorary, and step members. Collier and Mahon use the “family” metaphor in the former, essentialist sense, while Wittgenstein used the metaphor in the second, anti-essentialist sense. Indeed, Wittgenstein was skeptical about the ability to draw a sharp boundary around all family members.26 For Wittgenstein, family resemblances lack any single, fixed set of attributes to begin with, and therefore the problem of conceptual stretching doesn’t even (p. 73) arise as there is nothing to stretch. Instead, Wittgenstein’s notion of a family resemblance allows for potentially limitless empirical diversity, in which concepts must always be considered within specific contexts. By contrast, Collier and Mahon commit themselves to a weak essentialism insofar as they insist on clearly identifiable commonalities. This is also why Collier and Mahon must consider conceptual stretching as a central problem even in family resemblance concepts.

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Concept formation But Collier and Mahon’s essentialism also appears in their proposed solutions to the problem of conceptual stretching. They attempt to allow for concepts that can capture greater empirical diversity by “emphasiz[ing] that the category is an analytic construct which the researcher should not expect to be a perfect description of each case,” and also by “identifying attributes that are present to varying degrees in particular cases, rather than being simply present or absent.”27 But this effort at diversity is undermined by their insistence that social scientists not violate the requirement of evident commonalities. Indeed, this insistence is precisely what keeps Collier and Mahon’s analysis trapped within a weak form of essentialism. Underlying this refusal to follow Wittgenstein’s more radically thoroughgoing anti-essentialism is once again a commitment to naturalism, which demands concepts that will function within general, causal explanations. For if the cases a concept covers do not share a common attribute, social scientists will not be able to posit a common cause. Instead, they would have to use family resemblance concepts to reference the particular origins of overlapping cases. The latter, anti-essentialist strategy is characteristic of a more hermeneutic approach to concept formation, which we will return to shortly. At present, however, the key point is to see how naturalism generates an essentialist distortion of social science concept formation. Once again, this distortion is not limited to the methodological literature, but can be found in high-profile empirical research. Strong essentialism is apparent, for example, in the influential study of “contentious politics” advanced by Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, and Sidney Tarrow. This research is worthy of singling out not only because of its prominence but also because the very field of “contentious politics” is framed in such a way that it presupposes a strong form of essentialism. The concept of contentious politics is strongly essentialist insofar as it presupposes the ability to capture the core features of what are otherwise disparate and heterogeneous political phenomena. Specifically, contentious politics is said to include phenomena as different as social movements, strikes, revolutions, nationalism, and democratization, to name only a few. According to Tilly, McAdam, and Tarrow, what the items on this list share is a nucleus of fixed features rendering them all cases of contentious politics. These core features include that all phenomena in this class are “episodic,” “public,” and involve collective interaction between two claimants, at least one of (p.74) which is a government.28 Contentious politics is thus defined by a logic of commonality that allows social scientists to include or exclude particular cases on the basis of whether they exhibit these core features.29

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Concept formation For example, consider the criteria that all forms of political contention must be episodic. True to the logic of strong essentialism, this feature is used to exclude all political phenomena that exhibit regularity. Thus, regularly recurring actions like elections, parliamentary debates, and associational meetings are all placed by Tilly and company outside the boundary lines of the concept of contentious politics. Indeed, because of their regularity, not even the most embattled elections are instances of contentious politics. Likewise, an essentialist logic informs Tilly, McAdam, and Tarrow’s criterion that politically contentious phenomena be public. In this case, the aim is to exclude from the concept any actions that occur inside “well-bounded organizations, including churches and firms.”30 Some readers may have already guessed the reasons why an anti-naturalist approach rejects the strong essentialism upon which the concept of contentious politics is based. Because anti-naturalists believe that actions are expressive of historically specific webs of meaning, they are skeptical of claims to the existence of a universal class of action, which transcends historical and cultural context. Indeed, they would argue that the attempt to posit this universal class runs the risk of hiding the very beliefs and actions social scientists wish to bring to light. Because human beliefs and actions are expressive of contingent contexts of meaning, the imposition of a nucleus of essential features eclipses the true object of study. Rather than helping describe the social world, this search for a logic of commonality instead leads to problems such as anachronism, ethnocentrism, and other such forms of misunderstanding. The strongly essentialist formation of concepts like contentious politics thus clashes with and occludes empirical reality. The process by which the essentialist core is articulated by political scientists is itself part of the stream of history. So, the historically contingent beliefs of political scientists run the risk of being mistaken for universal meanings. One limited set of meanings (those of the political scientist) are imposed. In the case of the study of radically alien cultures, this means that the social scientist’s own beliefs disfigure that of the actual life-world being investigated. Strong essentialism almost inevitably sets up social scientists for misinterpretations in which their own views are being studied and imposed upon others. Of course, social scientists of a naturalist persuasion might follow Collier and respond to the above problems by adopting a weak rather than a strong form of essentialism. So, where strong essentialism struggles to account for the sheer diversity and complexity of political reality, weak essentialism tries to fashion concepts that allow for stretching across a spectrum. Such a weak essentialism plays a key role in democratic peace theory, which is often touted as one of modern political science’s most solidly scientific findings. This (p.75) theory argues that two democratic regimes are far less likely to engage in warfare with one another than other pairs of regimes. Bruce Russett and Zeev Maoz advanced

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Concept formation a seminal defense of this thesis by employing weak essentialist concepts in order to differentiate democratic from authoritarian regimes. Adopting a numeric grading scale, Russett and Maoz allowed for a spectrum of how democratic versus authoritarian actual regimes might be. The regimes in question were then to be graded on the basis of certain essential core criteria, like competitiveness of political participation and constraints on the chief executive. On one extreme, a score of minus 100 represented the most authoritarian regime, while on another a plus 100 represented the most democratic. The lower threshold for classing regimes as democratic was plus 30 and the upper threshold for judging them authoritarian was minus 25. As Russett and Maoz observed, such a grading scale allowed that in empirical reality “a state can have mixed characteristics” where “some features may be democratic at the same time that others are highly autocratic.”31 Nevertheless, these conceptualizations of democratic versus authoritarian regimes were also essentialist insofar as they remained defined by core features considered to migrate from context to context.32 In this way, democratic peace theorists attempted to stretch their concepts across the sheer complexity and nuance of the actual empirical world, without giving up on the basic essentialist logic of commonality. Yet it is precisely the retention of a logic of commonality that renders weak essentialism vulnerable to the same objections that face strong essentialism. Namely, what drops out of weak essentialism is the particularity of historical context. Essentialist concepts hide the actual historical contexts that are constitutive of the social world. Concepts that are meant to make social and political reality more readily visible actually end up doing the opposite, creating blind spots. By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy reveals that democracy, authoritarianism, and other features of social reality are never natural or essential types, with recurring nuclei of features. Rather, both democracy and authoritarianism are the result of historically contingent meanings expressed in the beliefs, actions, and practices of particular individuals and their societies. Whether a given regime of populist, ultranationalist rhetoric and racial hatred is authoritarian cannot be established by identifying ahistorical core features. Rather, it requires engagement with the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. Social scientists must consider particular beliefs within a wider web that forms a historical context. Ultimately, the answer to the question: “Was this or that ultranationalist movement authoritarian/fascist or not?” cannot be removed from the domain of interpretive disputes. This does not mean that objectively better or worse answers are unavailable (to the contrary, we already argued that objectivity is still very much possible in comparative terms). But it does mean that social scientists cannot attain the sort of descriptive core of (p.76) uncontroversial features that is sometimes fancied to exist in the natural sciences. Rather than Page 12 of 25

Concept formation pretending to a sphere of absolute scientific vocabulary, political scientists need to locate themselves in the same medium of meanings, contested traditions, and concepts employed by ordinary political actors who make no claims to an expert science.

Linguistic instrumentalism This last line of thought brings us to a final form of naturalist concept formation: linguistic instrumentalism. Linguistic instrumentalism occurs whenever social scientists divorce their concepts from their own language and from the language of those they study. Rather than letting the concepts of social science arise in dialogue (through a process of textual, archival, or empirical research), linguistic instrumentalism attempts to impose a formal language that has been constructed beforehand.33 This formal language is meant to be shielded from the life-worlds of both researcher and subject, serving as a neutral instrument or tool. The tendency to instrumentalize language once again follows clearly from the basic ambitions of naturalist philosophy. Naturalism suggests that theory building in the social sciences is detached and descriptive. Scientific language is transparent and yields a universal picture of the world. In this view, the task of the scientist is to carefully build this neutral conceptual language. The more the language of science can disburden itself of particular viewpoints, the better. There are two major kinds of linguistic instrumentalism. The first is subject-side instrumentalism, which results from social scientists blocking out their own historical situatedness from the construction of concepts. Subject-side instrumentalism encourages social scientists to purge their concepts of personal traces of their home culture or life-world, rendering the speech anonymous and supposedly universal. This kind of instrumentalism is evident in the writings of Sartori. Specifically, Sartori’s essays focus on the internal dynamics of social science concepts as an analytic tool. He thus explores the relationship between term, meaning, and referent; between intension and extension; between declarative, denotative, precising, operational, and ostensive definitions; between “accompanying properties” and “defining properties”; and between homonymy and synonymy.34 But in all of this, Sartori’s analysis of social science concepts remains completely internalist. That is, he leaves no room for his readers to consider how the place of the scholar within a particular historical and cultural world might affect the internal aspects of social science concepts. In this way, Sartori seems to imply that social scientists occupy a space outside of any particular historical and cultural context. (p.77) But Sartori’s subject-side instrumentalism also appears more explicitly in the way he treats concepts as tools over which social scientists should exercise not only control, but also separation from their home culture. So, Sartori seeks to overcome the two “defects” he associates with “natural Page 13 of 25

Concept formation language”: the defect of “ambiguity” in the relationship of a concept’s meaning to the word that expresses it, and the defect of “vagueness” in the relationship of a concept’s meaning to its referents.35 These are clear attempts by Sartori to keep social scientists away from their situatedness within the social world. By contrast, some methodologists accept that social scientists’ language is historically situated. For instance, Collier and Adcock affirm that social scientists are situated in at least two ways: first, they recognize that the meanings of social science concepts can change from one research agenda or tradition to another, and, second, they note that normative factors often inform choices of method.36 In this regard, Collier and Adcock once again present a substantial advance over Sartori. Unfortunately, however, Collier and Adcock slip into a second kind of linguistic instrumentalism, which we will refer to as object-side. Object-side instrumentalism occurs when social scientists treat the social world as a more or less mute object, on which the conceptual language of social science can be superimposed. Object-side instrumentalism neglects the fact that human beings always have their own language and concepts for explaining beliefs, actions, and practices. Rather than a dialogue, object-side instrumentalism encourages social scientists to exclude or at least neglect the self-interpretations of those studied from an active role within concept formation. Such object-side instrumentalism is apparent in the following example from Collier and Adcock’s article. According to Collier and Adcock, social scientists choosing between dichotomous and graded conceptualizations of democracy can sometimes justify their choice on the basis of normative concerns.37 In order to demonstrate how such normative justification works, Collier and Adcock explore the case of O’Donnell and Schmitter who adopted a dichotomous concept of democracy in order to capture “what they saw as appropriate targets (neither too low nor too high) at which political actors should aim in pursuing democratization.”38 While this example displays Collier and Adcock’s acknowledgment of the situatedness of the researcher, it also reveals the way in which they neglect a dialogical form of social science. Collier and Adcock do not even consider whether O’Donnell and Schmitter adopted their concept of democracy as a result of taking any account of the beliefs of political actors. Instead, this normative process of concept formation is presented as selfreferential, with the language of those studied not given a major role or extended engagement and analysis. In this regard, Collier and Adcock avoid subject-side instrumentalism but slide into object-side instrumentalism. These instrumental tendencies within social science concept formation are far from limited to the methodological writings of Collier and Sartori. Rather, (p. 78) they are found in prominent examples of empirical research. Consider, in this light, the concepts of so-called “selectorate theory.” Selectorate theory Page 14 of 25

Concept formation adopts rational choice theory’s view of humans as self-interested, preferencemaximizers, in order to explain the organization of political life. The major advocates of this theory are Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow.39 These theorists begin from the assumption that “the self-interested calculations and actions of rulers are the driving force of all politics.”40 Politics is then analyzed in terms of three constituent groups said to face all leaders. The first group is what these theorists call the “nominal selectorate,” or “interchangeables,” who have the legal right to select the leader but are not essential to his or her maintaining power. The second group consists of the “real selectorate,” or “influentials,” whose support is important to the attainment of power. The final group is what these authors dub the “winning coalition” or “essentials,” and is composed of those individuals without whose support it would be impossible to remain leader. Out of these three constituencies, selectorate theory then endeavors to explain how politics is chiefly organized around the rational calculations of self-interested leaders. Of course, readers might well wish to raise a number of objections to this selectorate theory of politics (and anti-naturalism implies a number of criticisms, including the slide into an ahistorical, transcendental subject that is the fiction of a particular intellectual and ideological tradition). But our purpose at present is to limit ourselves to seeing how selectorate theory is an example of linguistic instrumentalism. First, consider the way in which selectorate theory’s concepts are a form of subject-side instrumentalism, which bars the language and lifeworld of the researcher from shaping key concepts. Bueno de Mesquita and Smith are particularly explicit in this regard, insisting that researchers avoid the entire “modern vernacular of politics” including all dependence on concepts arising from ideology, nationality, and culture, in favor of supposedly scientific concepts like nominal selectorate, interchangeables, influentials, and so on.41 The authors acknowledge that such a self-purging of language is not easy, requiring thinkers to “step outside of well-entrenched habits of mind, out of conventional labels” and “into a more precise world of self-interested thinking.”42 But such a stripping of language is also, they believe, necessary to the attainment of science. Indeed, selectorate theory insists upon the adoption of this purportedly neutral language as a clean tool with which to study the social world. We have already noted how anti-naturalist philosophy maintains that all human belief formation occurs against the background of inherited traditions, which bear particular linguistic, historical, and normative content.43 Social scientists are no exception to this. Therefore, the attempt to devise an ahistorical language, free of all tradition, is ultimately self-defeating. Instead, researchers are better served by reflecting thoughtfully on the sources of (p.79) their own thought, identifying the traditions they have inherited, and considering the ways Page 15 of 25

Concept formation in which this might be reflected in the construction of their concepts. The point is not to avoid all jargon or neologisms, but to be consciously self-aware of one’s own linguistic, philosophical, ideological, and other inheritances. The construction of an ideal scientific language outside all of history is simply not possible. Social scientists need to become more comfortable embracing and reflecting critically on the natural languages of their own communities and how these will inevitably color their concept formation. This once again implies that interpretive disputes cannot be eliminated from the social sciences. The language of the social scientist can be contested by relating it hermeneutically to other beliefs and meanings. The apparent neutral, universal prestige of scientific language is not available. As with ordinary citizens, the language of politics is itself subject to political criticisms. Yet at this point the objection might be raised that Bueno de Mesquita and Smith do in fact allow the language of their own home culture to shape at least some key concepts. After all, their work makes heavy use of concepts like democracy, dictatorship, and other such distinctions between regimes. The problem here, however, is that selectorate theory largely vacates these terms of their traditional meanings. In a telling passage, these authors emphasize the difficulty of fully purging language of ordinary meanings, but nonetheless encourage those who study politics to do so to the greatest extent possible: it is tough to break the habit of talking about democracies and dictatorships as if either of these terms is sufficient to convey the differences across regimes…In fact, it is so hard to break that habit that we will continue to use these terms…but it is important to emphasize that the term “dictatorship” really means a government based on a particularly small number of essentials drawn from a very large group of interchangeables…On the other hand, if we talk about democracy, we really mean a government founded on a very large number of essentials and a very large number of interchangeables.44 In other words, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith concede that a complete subjectside instrumentalism may not actually be attainable. But they do so only on the strict understanding that they have done their best to completely redefine the meaning of these terms, granting their normal understanding of this language only the thinnest “heuristic” value.45 Perhaps readers will not be surprised to find that selectorate theory is also engaged in object-side instrumentalism insofar as it discounts the specific beliefs and viewpoints of the very leaders that are the focal point of its inquiries. For example, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith admit they do not care very much what particular leaders think because this is “not terribly important.”46 Instead of

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Concept formation giving the language of those studied an active role within concept formation, the concepts of selectorate theory exclude these self-understandings. (p.80) By contrast, anti-naturalism makes clear that social scientists ought to seek a “fusion of horizons” when constructing their concepts.47 Such a fusion requires confronting the beliefs and meanings of the individuals being studied, and has the power to modify or even deeply change a researcher’s own concepts. This implies that social science researchers should build their concepts through a process of active dialogue—whether this dialogue is the live discussion of interviews or the careful checking of interpretations in relation to texts, archives, or surveys. Far from fixing their formal conceptual language beforehand, they should not be afraid to see their concepts continually change and grow throughout the research process. And this is because concept formation in the social sciences does not begin from a blank slate, but always builds and elaborates upon the interpretations and understandings already tacit to human social life. Concept formation is part of the process of research, and persistently iterative, not something completely settled before research has even begun.

Anti-naturalist concept formation We have seen the various ways in which reification, essentialism, and linguistic instrumentalism appear not only in the writings of key methodologists but also in the concepts employed by renowned social scientists. We have also noted how these erroneous types of concept formation are tied to the naturalist quest for ahistorical, causal explanations. But what is the anti-naturalist alternative to concept formation? And what philosophical considerations should social scientists keep in mind while molding their concepts? After all, if objectivity is comparative (as we argued before), then criticism, no matter how valid, is never enough. A better alternative must always be offered as well. Anti-naturalist philosophy draws a distinction between two main kinds of social science concepts: the first descriptive and the second explanatory. Descriptive concepts can be understood in light of Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist notion of a “family resemblance,” already touched upon above. Properly understood, a family resemblance is a feature of the world that is not defined by some commonality or essential attribute. Instead, a family resemblance is a play of similarities and mutable relations that crisscross a group. Therefore, although a pattern can be found, no core of essential properties can be said to exist across the entire subset. As Wittgenstein puts it: I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all—but that they are related to one another in many different ways…we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,

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Concept formation sometimes similarities of detail. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances.”48 (p.81) In the same passage, Wittgenstein famously shifts to the metaphor of a rope, made of many different fibers, and with no one strand spanning its entire length. As we already noted above, political scientists like Collier have not entirely retained the radicalism of Wittgenstein’s insight in this regard. But antinaturalism can draw off of Wittgenstein to help social scientists build concepts that are not marred by naturalism. An approach to building social science concepts that seeks family resemblances has much to recommend it. First of all, family resemblances are better at capturing a world of meanings, which themselves have no fixed core. We have already seen that the social world is constructed out of contingent, historical meanings of self-interpreting actors, and is not an assemblage of natural kinds, reified things, or eternal essences. The meanings that compose social reality are not amenable to reification and essentialism. To the contrary, they exist in the world like the very family resemblances Wittgenstein was trying to evoke with his various metaphors. Social scientists must therefore think of their descriptive concepts as constructed to capture such anti-essentialist resemblances and not naturalist types. Second, and related, concepts built on family resemblances encourage social scientists to be in continual dialogue with the social world. Empirical diversity and variation are not enemies to an anti-naturalist social science in the same way they threaten naturalist projects. Because anti-naturalists are not tied to a model of explanation that seeks a common cause, they also are free of the pressure to discover some uniform or common attribute across phenomena. To the contrary, anti-naturalist social scientists expect to see continual variation and flux. They expect to continually recalibrate and remold their concepts as a response to the self-interpreting language of the actors who build that social reality. Anti-naturalist concepts are therefore oriented toward the astonishing empirical diversity that is the result of self-interpretation. Instead of fleeing from this reality, anti-naturalists enter into a continual dialogue with the social world, in which concepts arise out of a fusion of horizons between researcher and world. Finally, because concepts fashioned in terms of family resemblances are not bound to some reified or essential core of properties, social scientists are free to build their concepts according to the pragmatic purposes of their research. They can isolate one particular theme rather than another. They are free to concentrate on one dimension of meaning in one study and another dimension of meaning in another. Description, from the anti-naturalist viewpoint, can serve any number of wider purposes including classification, criticism, drawing out similarities or differences, alerting a readership to a little-known fact, and so on. Page 18 of 25

Concept formation Different purposes will often lead to different descriptive foci. The hermeneutic circle allows any one part in a web of meaning to be related in new and creative ways to other aspects of the whole. This dynamic of playful insight is deeply familiar to literary scholars and other sensitive readers in the (p.82) humanities; it also represents one of many places social scientists could learn a great deal from others in humanities disciplines like art history, literature, film, drama, classics, and so on. In social reality, as in a work of art, there is no single, officially scientifically sanctioned description. The only rule from an antinaturalist perspective is that family resemblance concepts must remain answerable to the particular contexts of meaning they purport to capture. In this way, social scientists remain free to tackle whatever aspect of social life fits their wider aims and curiosities. By contrast, we have seen that philosophical naturalism often creates the impression that social science is the search for the one absolute level of analysis. So, while phenomena like ideologies or cultures might appear important, selectorate theorists claim that the true bedrock of scientific description consists in concepts like nominal selectorate, real selectorate, influentials, and essentials. In this way, social scientists influenced by naturalism assume that some basic stratum of social reality must be privileged over others. Other dimensions of social reality might be of interest in our ordinary lives, but they have no active or essential role in science. Built on the notion of family resemblances, anti-naturalist descriptive concepts liberate social scientists from this arid and reductive approach. Far from consisting of a single level of supposedly privileged or absolute analysis, there are potentially innumerable ways of describing and thinking about the meanings that comprise the social world. Indeed, anti-naturalism maintains that new and different conceptualizations of social reality may open up neglected or unnoticed aspects of phenomena. This contrast between naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches also arises in the case of explanatory concepts. Where descriptive concepts can be justified in terms of any number of aims and purposes, explanatory concepts must ultimately be justified in terms of their ability to explain. We have seen that naturalist explanations seek general causal laws, or at the very least correlations between variables that one day might yield a mechanistic causal inference. In stark contrast to this, we have argued that an anti-naturalist social science should adopt a historicist form of explanation. Anti-naturalist social scientists should explain the world in terms of narratives that capture the contingency and creativity of human actions, practices, and beliefs. In other words, an antinaturalist social science should replace naturalist explanatory concepts (laws, necessary causes, variables) with historicist concepts (traditions, contingent beliefs, dilemmas).

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Concept formation At the same time, in contrast to naturalism, narrative explanation also retains a certain playfulness. For there are multiple true stories that can be told about social reality as opposed to simply one privileged and exhaustive set of laws. Although explanatory concepts are necessarily limited by the goal of explanation, one narrative need not be considered exhaustive of the subject matter of, say, political organization or voter behavior. Rather, social reality (p. 83) might be treated as a composite of many (perhaps infinite) stories to be told. This is once again due to the holistic nature of beliefs. One set of meanings can be related to the wider web or whole in different ways that are fruitful for different reasons. This anti-naturalist approach to concepts will become more concrete by looking to an example from the interpretive social science literature. Consider, in this vein, the sociologist Robert Bellah’s widely cited concept of an American “civil religion.” Based on extensive research of the history of American political rhetoric, Bellah came to believe that there “exists alongside of and rather clearly differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil religion in America.”49 This civil religion was differentiated from the Christian churches not only by its systematic omission of such orthodoxies as the person of Jesus, the trinity, and the resurrection, but also by the fact that it was centrally concerned with legitimizing American political power. As Bellah described American civil religion: “though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity…the God of [American] civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love.”50 Indeed, Bellah argued that one central tenet of American civil religion that contrasted with orthodox Christian faith was the conviction that the United States was under “obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.”51 The point, of course, is not whether Bellah’s ideas about American civil religion are justified. Rather, the point is the way that Bellah’s concept gives us a prominent example of how anti-naturalist social scientists might construct their own concepts—and this in at least four ways. First, Bellah’s notion of an American civil religion is self-consciously constructed to capture contingent, historical meanings (using our earlier language, one might say family resemblances) rather than ahistorical, essential, reified, or natural types.52 Thus, Bellah reconstructs what he variously calls a “tradition” or “theme” of American civil religion, which he claims is evidenced in various forms of meaning, including the rhetoric that accompanies American inauguration addresses, state funerals, and other official acts of government.53 But Bellah’s social theory is not presented as capturing some essential nucleus, or commonality, that requires stretching across cases. Rather, his descriptive concept is simply meant to reflect a play of meanings within context.

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Concept formation Second, civil religion emerges for Bellah out of a dialogic rather than linguistic instrumentalist approach to language. Specifically, Bellah goes to some lengths to argue that the very idea of a civil religion is part of “the self-conception” of Americans, and can be traced back to the nation’s founding and the “cultural climate of the late eighteenth century.”54 Bellah’s use of the concept of a civil religion therefore emerges out of his own fieldwork, and is (p.84) the result of a kind of collaborative dialogue with the language of those he studies, and not simply imposed from the outside. This means that unlike many of the social scientists we criticized above, Bellah’s concepts are not built beforehand and then kept as clean of contamination from other meanings as possible (as if they were tools kept clean for surgery). Rather, Bellah understands that the explanations of the social scientist must always begin from the language and self-interpretations of those studied. In this respect, Bellah avoids an object-side linguistic instrumentalism, which mutes or ignores people’s language and selfunderstanding. Third, Bellah’s analysis is self-consciously situated within particular linguistic, historical, and normative traditions. Rather than blocking out his own viewpoint in the name of science, Bellah instead carefully reflects upon, locates, and articulates his own perspective. So Bellah recognizes that, as an American, he speaks from within these traditions and practices. Specifically, he argues that American civil religion presents citizens such as himself with both dangers and opportunities. This is because American civil religion has been both prone to certain abuses (such as jingoism, imperialism, and bellicosity), as well as serving some salutary political functions (such as the advancement of democratic social reforms and providing a shared standard of political criticism).55 Here we see that Bellah does not conceive of the role of the social scientist as either ahistorical or free of normative evaluation. To the contrary, part of Bellah’s formulation of the concept of American civil religion involves an evaluation of its potential uses and abuses, and thus extends an explicitly normative line of thought.56 In this way, Bellah avoids the error of subject-side linguistic instrumentalism, which attempts to ignore the fact that social scientists are always situated within particular traditions of thought. Social science is no less within history than its subjects of study are. Finally, Bellah’s analysis embodies the pragmatic playfulness of an antinaturalist approach. He presents fellow social scientists with one possible narrative or theme within American political life. But he does not claim that this is an absolute level of analysis upon which all further inquiries into politics must be based (as advocates of selectorate theory and other naturalists sometimes intone). Instead, the implication is quite clear that different stories might be told about different individuals and new insights might be won by focusing not on civil religion, but on some other set of concepts. Bellah recognizes that social science is a field for creative insights, and continually new ways of looking into social reality, and not the quest for a final scientific vocabulary that will liberate Page 21 of 25

Concept formation us from the need for further thought, innovation, and open-ended dialogue. The goal of social science is not a final set of explanatory laws, but always better and better explanatory stories and descriptive insights. In sum, social scientists must form concepts in order to study the social world. This is an inescapable need for anyone conducting empirical research. Yet what kinds of concepts they will craft depends largely on the philosophical (p.85) assumptions and intuitions they bring to the task. The foregoing philosophical analysis is offered in the hope that an anti-naturalist framework helps to sharpen and hone social scientific approaches to concept formation. Rather than uncritically slipping into forms of naturalism, social scientists should remain alert to the philosophical aspects inherent in their choice of concepts. Otherwise, they run the risk of detracting from what are often highly valuable contributions to our knowledge of the social world. That such distortions might be taken on board by social scientists “as if” they were true for heuristic purposes is an argument we will consider at greater length in our treatment of rational choice theory and even more so in Chapter 9 on public policy.57 For now it is important to see that practicing social scientists ignore certain philosophical controversies at their own peril. Part of what this chapter has established are the high amounts of distortion that come along with any shift toward naturalist concepts. But concepts are only one small area where this is apparent. The effects on the debates over methods and the approaches to empirical topics are no less dramatic. The time has ended when social scientists could afford to be oblivious to philosophy—itself another vestige of naturalism, which looked upon the natural sciences and imagined a domain finally free of philosophical controversy. Notes:

(1.) This chapter draws significantly on: Mark Bevir and Asaf Kedar, “Concept Formation in Political Science: An Anti-Naturalist Critique of Qualitative Methodology,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2008): 503–17. Although substantially altered from the original article, we heartily thank Asaf for his permission to build on that earlier work. (2.) For an example of such an attempt see: Steven Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York: Macmillan, 1993). (3.) Giovanni Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 3:3 (1991): 250. (4.) Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” 247. (5.) Giovanni Sartori, ed., Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984) 17.

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Concept formation (6.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 24. (7.) Glenda Patrick, “Political Culture,” in Social Science Concepts, 297. (8.) Patrick, “Political Culture,” 265. (9.) David Collier, “The Comparative Method: Two Decades of Change,” in Comparative Political Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives, ed. D. A. Rustow and K. P. Erickson (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) 15. (10.) David Collier and Jason Seawright, “Glossary,” in Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, ed. Henry Brady and Collier (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) 292; see also: 288. (11.) David Collier and Robert Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices About Concepts,” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 544–5. (12.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 544. (13.) David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49:3 (1997): 434, 443. (14.) S. Kernell, G. Jacobson, and T. Kousser, eds., The Logic of American Politics, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011) 496–7. (15.) Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, 128. (16.) Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, 136–7. (17.) Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, 137. (18.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 44. (19.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 45. (20.) David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87:4 (1993): 845. (21.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 846. (22.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 846. (23.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 848. (24.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 847. (25.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 847. Page 23 of 25

Concept formation (26.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001) §§68–9. (27.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 847, 848. (28.) Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and Doug McAdam, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 5. (29.) McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly express skepticism at the possibility of general laws but preserve the naturalist hope that identifying the essential properties of political contention will help them discover the recurring causal sequences behind political phenomena. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 345–6. (30.) McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 5. (31.) Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986,” American Political Science Review 87:3 (1993): 624–38, 628. (32.) This weak essentialist approach is repeated by Russett in his influential book with John Oneal, Triangulating Peace (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) 45. (33.) Many interpretivists have criticized this tendency to cut off dialogue by creating concepts beforehand. See: Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge, 2012) 17–18. (34.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts. (35.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 26–8. (36.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 539, 562. (37.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 554, 556. (38.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 557. (39.) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). (40.) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics(New York: Public Affairs, 2011) xxiii, xxiv. (41.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, xxii; see also: ix, xix, 113, 135, 137, 253. Page 24 of 25

Concept formation (42.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, xxv. (43.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004) 265–307. (44.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, 8. (45.) Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, 72, 55. (46.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, 135; see also: 253. (47.) Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302–7. (48.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 65–7. (49.) Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991) 168. (50.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 175. (51.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 172. (52.) Indeed, Bellah even worries that if his research fails to be sensitive enough to history, it risks distortion precisely by “reifying” the meaning of civil religion. This serves to emphasize the way in which interpretive social scientists must always be wary of the ongoing risk of slipping into distorted concept formation. Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 179. (53.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 172. (54.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 172–4. (55.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 179–86. (56.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 168. (57.) For an insightful example of such an argument, which we will engage later, see: Colin Hay, “Neither Real Nor Fictitious but ‘As If Real’? A Political Ontology of the State,” The British Journal of Sociology 65:3 (2014): 459–80.

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Methods

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Methods Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords This chapter draws on the latest methodological literature in order to show how an anti-naturalist framework justifies multi-methods in social science research. Contrary to the widespread debate that pits “quantitative” versus “qualitative” methods, researchers are free to use methods from across the social sciences provided they remain aware of anti-naturalist concepts and concerns. Leading methods are analyzed in light of the latest social science, including: mass surveys, random sampling, regression analysis, statistics, rational choice modeling, ethnography, archival research, and long-form interviewing. A fullblown interpretive approach to the social sciences can make use of all the major methods and techniques for studying human behavior, while also avoiding the scientism that too often plagues their current deployment. Keywords:   multi-methods, random sampling, regression analysis, rational choice, ethnography, qualitative versus quantitative

Social science today has largely reduced the interpretive turn to a commitment to “qualitative” methods. Unfortunately, this narrow and mistaken view of the interpretive turn is widespread among many of the most influential practitioners of social science. For example, three of the most eminent methodologists working in political science today equate interpretivism with deep immersion in the customs, practices, and institutions of a particular group of people.1 In this way, interpretive research becomes synonymous with ethnography and immersive, onsite fieldwork.2 Viewed from this perspective, the opposite of “interpretive” is quantitative methods like mass surveys, statistics, and various Page 1 of 29

Methods forms of modeling. The interpretive turn is then thought of as little more than an attempt to have qualitative methodologies reign supreme. The entire methodological debate becomes limited to a highly polarized discussion about “quantitative” versus “qualitative” research. So widespread is this confusion today that even those who defend the interpretive turn in social science often do so in the name of qualitative methods.3 Here our anti-naturalist framework can dispel confusions, pointing to a more viable way forward past the gridlock of a method dispute between “qualies” and “quants.” Anti-naturalist premises help show how the interpretive turn does not bind social scientists by logical chains to either qualitative or quantitative methods. To the contrary, social scientists are free to employ the full range of methods from the “soft” qualitative to the “hard” quantitative so long as they keep clear of certain naturalist malformations. This is because the primary methods used by social scientists today are philosophically compatible.4 Ethnography may be combined with statistical analysis, rational choice mixed and matched with long-form interviews, mass surveys carried out side by side with immersive field research. Methodology, properly conceived, is nothing more than forms of data collection, data analysis, and heuristics. Methods are instrumental, much like a hammer or nail, and whether they are put in the service of building a naturalist or an anti-naturalist edifice depends on how they are employed. This means social scientists can stop worrying about whether two methods are incompatible and leave the debate between “qualitative” versus “quantitative” behind. As instruments, methods are always subordinate to the wider purposes of the researcher and do not dictate the philosophical commitments of the work. Instead, the primary form of incompatibility social scientists do need to worry about is philosophical—especially the naturalist versus anti-naturalist divide. Our hope is to turn attention away from supposed methodological divisions, to the deeper and (p.89) more important strata of philosophical dispute. Clearly, then, our use of the term “methodology” emerges out of philosophical concerns, and although it is used this way by a wide number of social scientists, it is also at odds with other uses of the term that consider methodology and philosophy to be more synonymous.5 Methods can be distinguished philosophically into three general, not entirely mutually exclusive categories. First, methods can be used for data collection or to generate information about the world (as in the case of ethnography, longform and semi-structured interviews, and mass surveys). Second, they may be used to find patterns in data or what we call data analysis (as in the case of random sampling, statistical inference, case studies, grounded theory, and Q methodology). Finally, they can serve as heuristics that, although not chiefly concerned with either data collection or analysis, help inspire insights about social reality (as is the case with certain kinds of formal modeling, especially rational choice theory). While anti-naturalist philosophy prescribes clear parameters about how social scientists should treat data generation, data Page 2 of 29

Methods analysis, and heuristics, it does nothing to prohibit the use of any one particular technique. Social scientists determine what method is best for their research goals by exercising their experienced judgment within context. Provided social scientists steer clear of naturalism, they are free to creatively make use of whatever method best serves their research goals and purposes. Anti-naturalism makes clear the way in which multi-methods is fully compatible with the interpretive turn.

Data collection: ethnography, interviews, and mass surveys Social science research is impossible to conduct without some way of grasping what social reality actually looks like on the ground. This means social scientists need tools for generating information about the world—what we will refer to as “data collection.” Data collection involves collecting information about a particular group’s beliefs, actions, practices, and way of life. Such data collection can take a number of forms—from the techniques of ethnography to mass surveys and census data. We will look at each of various techniques in turn to clarify how social scientists should use these methods while also remaining cautious of the possibility of naturalist vitiation. However, first a brief clarification in our use of the word “data” may be necessary. By “data” we do not mean to reintroduce some naturalist notion of empiricism or brute verification. In prior chapters we have already argued that no such immediate sense data is available in the social sciences. This is because the (p.90) social sciences are engaged in trying to interpret webs of meanings and beliefs. Social reality is expressive of these holistic webs and so must be studied through a hermeneutic circle of relating part to whole. In other words, our use of the word “data” here has nothing to do with a naturalist claim to foundationalism or brute empiricism in the social sciences (a connotation it too often takes in naturalist-dominated disciplines). We mean something very different by data here—simply information about the meanings, beliefs, actions, practices, and so on that comprise social reality. In other words, data is information about the social world that respects the holistic and interpretive nature of human agency. Because of the dominance of the qualitative versus quantitative debate, ethnography has become the method most commonly associated with the interpretive turn. Indeed, many people believe that interpretive research is little more than a movement advocating the spread of ethnography and other such qualitative research methods. But anti-naturalism makes clear how this view is mistaken. Like any other form of data collection, ethnography can be put to either anti-naturalist or naturalist uses. Largely developed by anthropologists and sociologists, ethnography is a method defined by immersion in the way of life of a particular group or culture. This is normally accomplished by onsite research and observation. The goal of ethnography is the construction of “thick descriptions.”6 Thick descriptions are detailed accounts of human belief and action within their surrounding webs of Page 3 of 29

Methods meaning. The most common way to conduct ethnography is through observerparticipation, in which a social scientist scrutinizes a given group in its daily life, developing a sense for its patterns and rhythms. Observer-participation can take the form of “researcher alone,” in which the social scientist never departs from his or her role as a detached observer, or “situational participant,” in which the social scientist directly partakes in the customs, rituals, and other aspects of social life.7 Ethnographers often combine observer-participation with in-depth interviews. In-depth interviewing allows researchers to pursue the complexities and nuances of an individual’s or group’s beliefs through conversation. Unlike mass surveying, in-depth interviewing gives the researcher the chance to extemporize: following unexpected leads and other unforeseen elements of dialogue and exchange. This approach contrasts with “fixed-format” interviews that follow a single, preordained track and “forbid researchers from digging in areas that emerge as promising during the course of an interview.”8 Like the immersive practices of observer-participation, long-form interviews allow social scientists to arrive at thick descriptions—or highly nuanced, complex accounts of the meanings constituting social reality. Ethnography is clearly an extremely powerful tool for the study of social science. The vast and diverse body of successful research that currently employs ethnographic techniques confirms the strength and fruitfulness of (p.91) this method. To choose only a few of many examples, the sociologist Kenneth MacLeish has used ethnographic techniques to track the effects of the Iraq war on military communities far beyond the frontlines of the battlefield. He accomplished this through the use of both observer-participation and long-form interviewing at Fort Hood, Texas. What MacLeish found is that the violence of war extends into the life of the communities far beyond the battlefield and mixes into the ordinary lives of military families. The otherwise invisible tolls of war are therefore made concrete.9 In a different vein, Alice Goffman made a much-discussed contribution to urban ethnography by immersing herself in the world of young African American men living in the ghettos of Philadelphia.10 Goffman used thick descriptions to challenge the standard narrative which holds that racial equality was achieved with the civil rights movement, instead arguing that poor black men are “enveloped in intensive penal supervision” that is “the latest chapter in a long history of black exclusion and civic diminishment.”11 Yet another example are the deep insights into the political and economic despair of white working-class conservative voters in rural Louisiana offered by Arlie Russell Hochschild; or Matthew Desmond’s masterful ethnographic work on the pressures of urban poverty and eviction.12

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Methods Regardless of the final assessment of these respective studies, they stand as examples of the effective use of ethnographic methods in an anti-naturalist study of society. Indeed, ethnography is a highly attractive and powerful tool for antinaturalist research in particular for at least three related reasons. First, ethnography is especially helpful for crafting concepts that emerge out of dialogue with the social actors studied. Rather than concepts crafted “a priori by the researcher,” the ethnographer can form concepts from “the bottom up” in a way that is “context-situated.”13 Done correctly, this helps social scientists steer clear of the naturalist error of instrumental concept formation and instead form concepts that are dialogical. This averts the instrumentalist errors we discussed in Chapter 4 on concept formation. A second reason ethnography is attractive for anti-naturalist inquiry is because thick descriptions are particularly useful for making the unnoticed meanings and beliefs structuring social reality come to light. Ellen Pader emphasizes the power of ethnography in this regard by recounting the case of a single, working-class mother in New York City who, although she struggled to pay for food and rent, spent some of her meager salary on two luxury goods—an air-conditioning unit and a videogame for her children. Pader notes that many social science students, when presented with this poor mother’s purchases, polarize into two groups: one decrying the fiscal irresponsibility of the lower classes, the other defending the purchases as another case of a poor woman succumbing to the nefarious pressures of commercial society. Neither group comes close to seeing what ethnography revealed about this tragic case of human poverty. Namely, this single mother purchased (p.92) the videogame and air-conditioning unit in a desperate attempt at childcare. Unable to afford a babysitter or daycare during the hot summer months when her children were out of school, the mother purchased these two items to try to keep her children off the rough streets of their New York City neighborhood.14 In this way, ethnographies of New York City’s public housing projects have made the motives driving particular residents more intelligible in a way that otherwise would have remained undetected. Ethnography offers the opportunity for thick descriptions that grasp the meanings and beliefs informing agents’ particular actions. In this case the hard plights and no-win situations facing the poorest families would remain unintelligible without the help of ethnography. A final way ethnography helps advance anti-naturalist research is that it can be used to attack oversimplifications of social reality by generating greater sensitivity to the contextual nature of meaning and language. Frederic Schaffer, for example, has used ethnography to great effect in this way—correcting contemporary political science’s tendency to assume that the word “democracy” means the same thing everywhere. As discussed in Chapter 4 on concept formation, this essentialist error occurs frequently within the study of democratic theory. Schaffer’s extended study of the word “demokaraasi” in Senegal shows how deeply this term differs from the “English-language concept Page 5 of 29

Methods of democracy used by American social scientists.”15 In this need to grasp language, all social science depends (if only inchoately and implicitly) on an ethnographic background of knowledge. Yet ethnography need not exclusively be used in support of anti-naturalist research in the social sciences. Nothing about ethnography magically guarantees the right philosophical position. On the contrary, during the twentieth century ethnographic techniques were also often used to bolster naturalist research programs. For example, during the 1920s and 30s anthropologists like Margaret Mead used ethnography as a way to travel the globe in an effort to ascertain the “essential institutions and structures” of a culture.16 Mead and her students believed anthropologists could use short forms of observer-participation in order to identify the essential, abstract types that define all human social life. This effort at essentialist, synchronic, and ahistorical structures clearly shares in the philosophical attributes of naturalism and later came to be derisively referred to as “airplane ethnography.”17 But it also makes clear that there is nothing philosophical or logical barring the use of ethnographic tools for naturalist ends. Indeed, longer stays and intensive language training would not necessarily have freed this kind of ethnography from naturalist distortion. Many ethnographers spend their entire lives specializing in a few cultural subgroups and carry out forms of immersive observer-participation that last years and even decades. Such practices often make for good workmanship and generate important insights about social reality, but they do not guarantee an escape (p.93) from naturalist distortions. After all, a researcher could spend years mastering the appropriate language, and decades in the field engaged in observerparticipation, and still adopt essentialist, ahistorical structures of explanation. Arguably, many naturalist social scientists working across modern societies today live out de facto just such an immersive experience in their own home cultures. But while long-term exposure to a cultural group may enrich ethnographic data, it does not guarantee its freedom from naturalist conclusions. Naturalism is also evident in some of the earliest ethnographies ever conducted. Historically speaking, ethnography began in part as a colonial endeavor. The pioneers of ethnographic technique often sought to make far-flung and purportedly primitive cultures intelligible to European colonialists. What arose from this colonial approach to social science was too often essentialist and “orientalist” fictionalizations of the “natives.” Too often the native was stripped of the dignity of human agency by social scientists and treated as simply another representative of a monolithic cultural type.18 Where Mead sought ahistorical, universal structures shared by all global cultures, colonial anthropologists instead ethnocentrically assumed there was a particular, essential “spirit” defining a culture, which the ethnographer tapped.19 Once again, then, Page 6 of 29

Methods ethnography can clearly be put to naturalist uses—for the construction of monolithic natural types: essentialist and sometimes even racist conceptions of the core nuclei of cultural features that invariantly characterize a people. Ethnography need not take such misbegotten features, but there is nothing philosophically that necessitates it as a method pure of naturalist taint. The qualitative–quantitative debate and its insistence on methods as guaranteeing interpretive outcomes is therefore potentially misleading in this regard. Fortunately, ethnographers in our own time have developed a number of postcolonial strategies for avoiding naturalist pitfalls like that of essentialism. These strategies are important to keep in mind for anyone wishing to make use of ethnography. The first is making sure to disaggregate meanings and to guard against the creation of false monoliths. In its colonial phase, anthropologists sometimes favored the study of small, bounded locales like villages or a particular political institution and from this they would extrapolate the supposed overarching spirit of an entire people. However, today ethnographers are more apt to study all varieties of social organization, from the army to large multinational corporations, while also pursuing “multi-sited” studies, following communities across borders and into the different branches of an increasingly globalized society.20 Where ethnographers once spent much time trying to make the far-flung and strange familiar (e.g., Balinese cockfights), now they are as likely to focus on features of the nearby in an effort to make the familiar appear strange (e.g., American shopping habits). Ethnographers can avoid the error of essentialism by always searching for the heterogeneity and variances within cultures and not rushing to convert local meanings into (p.94) civilizational monoliths. As we already discussed at length, meanings are a series of family resemblances and not a fixed nucleus or core. One of the important antinaturalist lessons of post-colonial ethnography is to be alive to the sheer heterogeneity and variance in meaning. Similarly, the post-colonial turn in ethnography has inspired researchers to develop innovative dialogical approaches to their research. Rather than the monologue of the ethnocentric colonialist, ethnographers today have developed strategies of deeper dialogue, including lengthy quotation, various forms of coauthorship, and other such attempts to let the subject of the study speak in his or her own voice.21 Naturalist conceptual problems like essentialism and objectside instrumentalism can potentially be corrected by these more radically dialogical strategies. Ultimately, ethnography is not any more immune to naturalism than other forms of data collection. The fact that it can be classified as a “qualitative” method does not resolve the deeper philosophical issues of which social scientists must remain aware. Because naturalism and anti-naturalism are philosophies and not mere techniques, they can subordinate any number of methods into their service. Furthermore, because all methods are compatible with one another, Page 7 of 29

Methods ethnography is easily paired with other kinds of data generation that are less immersive. For example, ethnography and long-form interviewing are often used by social scientists in conjunction with mass surveys and questionnaires.22 So researchers conducting a mass census survey might supplement their work with in-depth interviews of particular subgroups within that population in order to gain a more nuanced sense of their beliefs. Similarly, a mass survey registering widespread dissatisfaction with a given public figure can be combined with indepth interviewing to uncover the specific and myriad reasons for this dissatisfaction. Thus, ethnography can be joined with other more “quantitative” methods in the social sciences by providing contextual, local knowledge that might otherwise remain inaccessible. How this mixing and matching can be realized will become clearer by briefly scrutinizing a second form of data collection—mass surveys. If ethnography is frequently mistaken as an exclusively interpretive method, mass surveys are too often thought of as inescapably naturalist. Again, this is due to the spell cast by the quantitative–qualitative debate, which assumes that social scientists must choose a side when it comes to methods. Yet mass surveys remain one of the most effective tools for collecting information about the social world. Such surveys can be used to describe individual beliefs and behaviors as well as to capture the attributes of particular social groupings—for instance, how many households own a firearm or how many cities run a public transportation system. In this way, surveys can describe both individuals and larger group organizations (churches, clubs, companies, cities, and nations). Mass surveys allow social scientists to sketch the social (p.95) world in broad strokes. Such sketches of social reality can either take the form of a single snapshot (“cross-sectional”) or else depict a population over an extended period of time (“longitudinal”).23 Any social science that could not make use of such a powerful tool would be greatly impoverished. One can hardly be surprised when well-meaning social scientists, taught that they must decide between qualitative and quantitative methods (and who therefore believe the interpretive turn is incompatible with the use of mass surveys), opt for quantitative methods and forgo anything they could learn from hermeneutic philosophy. Fortunately, anti-naturalism makes clear that no such exclusive choice between quantitative methods and the interpretive turn is necessary. Rather, the main naturalist threat that must be avoided in the use of surveys is atomization. In Chapter 4 on concept formation we argued at length that under the influence of naturalist philosophy, social scientists often try to atomize political reality in order to correlate one bit of reality with another. This is done in the hope of discovering general causal mechanisms or laws. For instance, naturalist social scientists might try to establish a link between one isolated feature discovered by a mass survey like a respondent’s race, age, class, or gender and another, like their voter preferences. In doing so they might try to explain voter behavior by appealing to some atomistic fact as in a necessary causal bond with another Page 8 of 29

Methods such fact. When one atomistic bit of social reality occurs, another bit is said to necessarily follow (or at least be correlated in some way). Indeed, often survey research is erroneously presented by naturalist methodologists as tied to just such “multivariate analysis.”24 When framed by such concepts and ambitions, mass surveys are thought to simply generate data for mechanistic, naturalist explanations. But there is no logical link binding mass surveys to such atomism and mechanism. Instead, social scientists may affirm the descriptive validity of particular mass survey research (for example, X percent of white female Christians voted for the rightwing candidate) while recognizing that any attempt at explaining these beliefs will require further exploration of the reasons and beliefs held by these agents. In other words, explanation requires placing beliefs in a wider web of meanings. In order to move from description to explanation, mass survey research might benefit from supplementing its findings with ethnographic research or panel studies that take a sample of respondents in order to delve into their reasons for holding the beliefs that they do.25 A similar point can be made about structured and semi-structured interview methodologies. Structuring an interview refers to “the degree to which the questions and other interventions made by the interviewer are in fact preprepared by the researcher”; thus, interviewing can vary in approach from “lightly structured to heavily structured…from the completely unstructured to the fully structured.”26 Heavily structured interviews can sometimes veer (p. 96) into naturalism by ignoring the contingent beliefs and meanings of those being interviewed. In these cases, interviewers can fall into the trap of having reified or brute, reductive notions of the answers given by interviewees (as if they were merely extracting readymade, interpretation-free data). When language and beliefs are treated this way, social reality is seriously disfigured. But there is nothing about the degree of structuring of an interview that forces researchers to treat reality in a naturalist way. To the contrary, staying aware of the interpretive features of the meanings gathered allows researchers to decide how much or how little to structure their interviews on a purely pragmatic basis. Thus, there is no need to make a hard choice between “quantitative” mass surveys or structured interviews and the insights of anti-naturalist philosophy. To the contrary, anti-naturalist philosophy shows that the descriptions of mass survey research and structured interviews can be accepted as valid while also insisting that explanation requires embedding these beliefs within some narrative. Both concept formation and explanatory forms must remain antinaturalist, but the method for generating information need not necessarily be rejected even if some caution of use is in order.

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Methods In short, data collection (be it in the form of immersive ethnography, long-form interviews, or mass surveys and questionnaires) may be mixed and matched by social scientists to best serve their research goals. But what about the use of statistics that are often paired with mass surveys? Surely such randomization and statistical inference are the mark of quantitative methods that are necessarily tied to the naturalist project? In order to grapple with this problem, we must consider methods that are not forms of information collection but of data analysis.

Data analysis: random sampling, statistical inference, case studies, grounded theory, and Q methodology Ethnography, interviewing, and mass surveys are all forms of data collection— that is, of gathering information about a given population’s beliefs, actions, and way of life. This is distinct from data analysis, in which such information is treated to a certain kind of organization in search of patterns. Yet similar to data collection, data analysis is also frequently subject to the widespread assumption that certain forms of it are either inescapably naturalist or inescapably interpretivist. For example, random sampling and statistical inference are often thought to be inherently naturalistic, while case studies are too often conceived as necessarily sensitive to meanings. Other methods like (p.97) grounded theory and Q methodology are often subject to considerable confusion and claimed as both scientistic and sensitive to meanings.27 Yet as was the case with data collection, these tools of analyses are largely instrumental and can take either naturalist or anti-naturalist forms. Social scientists are thus free to make use of whichever data analysis tools they choose so long as they guard themselves carefully against naturalist tendencies. Looking at each of these forms of data analysis will clarify how this is the case. Random sampling makes use of statistical theory in order to generalize about a large population while studying only a much smaller, more manageable subset. Without a technique like random sampling, social scientists would be unable to describe larger populations because such a project might be impractical, cost prohibitive, or in some other way unmanageable. Random sampling resolves this problem by allowing social scientists to conduct a rational form of guesswork when trying to infer the characteristics of a larger population by examining only a thin slice. This form of data analysis requires that every single member of a population has an equal chance of selection. Such randomization is an effort to eliminate bias in selecting the subset. The subset then gives a picture of how beliefs are distributed. This is not the place for an extended exposition on the statistical theory that supports the inference from the small subset to the total population—but in general terms, this inference is possible because a distribution of samples takes on a fixed, normal shape. For example, support for the Green Party in a given population may be 7 percent. A sample of the wider population might instead Page 10 of 29

Methods place the percentage of Green Party support at 4 percent, a second sample at 9 percent, a third at 6 percent. So long as the survey respondents are truly randomly selected, the more samples that are taken by researchers from a given larger population, the more there will be convergence around a mean. This then creates a standard distribution around a given number. In the use of random sampling, this number or mean always remains a guess or approximation. Because the population has not been exhaustively interviewed, the mean may be wrong. But the more samples that are taken, the more reliable this guesswork becomes. Indeed, statistical theory allows researchers to quantify the degree of their uncertainty. The sample mean allows researchers to build a “bridge” from what they know about the sample population to what they “believe, probabilistically to be true about the broader population.”28 This inference, from a small subset of a population to what is likely about a large population, is the very heart of what is called statistical inference. Thus, there is an ineliminable uncertainty in the method of random sampling and statistical inference. Randomization and statistical inference are a form of data analysis that allows for highly sophisticated guesswork. No researcher should ever forget this. Indeed, the guesswork can itself be subject to statistical description and analysis in terms of standard deviations that can be treated as “confidence” levels.29 As with mass surveys more generally, there (p.98) are many who mistakenly associate random sampling and statistical inference with an exclusively “scientific” and naturalist approach.30 But there is nothing inherent to this method that is philosophically incompatible with an interpretive approach. Guesswork, even of a highly sophisticated statistical form, is in no way out of bounds for anti-naturalists. Rather, as with mass surveys more generally, the real naturalist threat occurs in how social scientists use this information. If they tie this information to multivariate analysis that atomizes political reality in order to seek out general causal laws, then something has gone badly wrong. If, however, they use this descriptive guesswork to embed their findings in further webs of meaning and belief (perhaps with the aid of ethnography or other more immersive techniques), then they are on firm philosophical footing. Both the promise and the peril of random sampling statistical methods can be clarified with an example from the social science literature. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton conducted a deep analysis of the National Survey of Youth and Religion—a random-digital-dial sample of teens across the United States ages thirteen to seventeen.31 The fruit of this research was the single largest trove of statistical data on U.S. teen attitudes toward religion and spirituality at that time. Such a massive random sample survey can be embraced by anti-naturalists as providing an important descriptive map of certain features of social reality. For example, anti-naturalists can affirm Smith and Denton’s finding that contrary to widespread belief at that time, U.S. teens were not trending away from traditional churches and congregations; indeed, Page 11 of 29

Methods the “vast majority of U.S. teenagers profess to be theists.”32 This could be taken as a descriptively valid finding at the time of the survey research. However, anti-naturalists should also take note of an important caveat to this finding that was furnished by Smith and Denton’s own supplementary, more ethnographic research on this topic. Specifically, Smith and Denton used a randomized subsample of the survey respondents in order to conduct 267 indepth face-to-face interviews. Among other things, this in-depth investigation uncovered that “the de facto religion” among U.S. teens at that time was what the authors termed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” or the belief that traditional religion is primarily a tool for making people nice and generating good individual self-esteem (as opposed to, say, the more mystical, metaphysical, and political aims of various traditional forms of religious belief).33 In this respect, the in-depth interviewing revealed a deeper underlying complexity to the statistical survey research. While the majority of American teens continued to identify with the traditional churches, what they meant by “God” had changed significantly. God was an impersonal designer, a lawmaker whose primary concern was fostering self-esteem and kindness. He was not so much a real person, a teacher of sin and grace, or a redeemer of human history. In this way, mass surveys combined with in-depth interviews established that U.S. adolescents were both more and less religious than their contemporaries suspected. (p.99) The lesson for an anti-naturalist social science is clear: mass surveys, random sampling, and statistical inference are valuable for large-scale sketches of social reality but they do not replace an analysis of the deeper beliefs and traditions that create a given status quo. As Smith and Denton observe, mass statistical surveys provide an “overarching sense of our social world,” but they are also “oversimplifying” and must be supplemented with deeper engagement of cultural meanings and textures.34 In this respect Smith and Denton’s work serves as a model to anti-naturalist researchers—expertly employing both mass survey statistics and ethnographic inquiry. In doing so, they also make clear our point that all methods are compatible and can be effectively mixed and matched. The move from so-called “quantitative” to “qualitative” methods presents no impassable boundaries to the working social scientist. However, Smith and Denton’s research also serves as a cautionary tale insofar as it occasionally creeps toward naturalism. To pick just one example, Smith and Denton propose possible “empirical correlations and causal relations” between the intensity of religious belief and adolescent wellbeing or good life “outcomes.”35 Of course, the idea that there would be a mechanistic causal relationship between teenage belief in religion and wellbeing commits a number of the errors we have already discussed in prior chapters. Not only can such an explanation not cope with anomalies, but it also neglects the contingency of meanings and the basic narrative structure of human agency. Yet the point at Page 12 of 29

Methods present is not to rehash these arguments. Rather, the point is to make clear the way that statistical data can be both used and abused. Random sampling and statistical inference are powerful tools for anti-naturalist social science provided researchers keep clear of the temptation to impose mechanistic explanations between atomized, essentialized, or reified variables (here “religiosity” and “wellbeing”). Instead, social scientists should explore the inherited traditions and contingent reasons and beliefs that have helped create a particular distribution of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. They should connect a given set of findings to wider webs of belief and meaning. This means engaging in the hermeneutic circle, and explaining a particular pattern through the construction of a holistic narrative of meanings, not formulating mechanistic laws. Agents should be situated within traditions, and stories told about how they inherited or modified their beliefs, actions, and practices. For example, if religious U.S. adolescents are outperforming their peers in terms of “wellbeing,” the anti-naturalist social scientist should consider a whole battery of questions that remain obscured by the tacit naturalist assumptions of Smith and Denton. This means looking at questions like: Are certain religious traditions more likely to create certain kinds of wellbeing (for example, Max Weber’s famous link between Calvinist theology and capitalist prosperity)? Such cultural links might then reveal that the term “wellbeing” is not simply neutrally descriptive. Whose definition of “wellbeing” is being granted priority in such (p. 100) research? After all, varying traditions have starkly opposed conceptions of “wellbeing.” The term is not essentially or atomistically self-evident, but must be related to wider webs of meaning in ways that produce rival and contestable conceptions of wellbeing and not just one. In this vein, a reader of Smith and Denton’s study whose philosophical intuitions have been honed by antinaturalism might ask: Is the study neglecting rival definitions of “wellbeing” held by other religious traditions or teens who do not necessarily have religious beliefs? Perhaps atheistic and agnostic teens simply do not share the same conception of wellbeing (this would mean Smith and Denton might be committing conceptual errors like essentialism and object-side instrumentalism). Yet even if the concept of wellbeing is widely shared, the link is not mechanistic, but involves contingent belief formation and self-interpretation. An antinaturalist social science must be prepared to explore the complex matrices of meaning, belief, tradition, and practice that have created certain descriptive relationships and not move to the oversimplifying, distortive mechanistic explanatory forms of naturalism. As with mass surveys more generally, data analysis like random sampling and statistical inference can be accepted as a powerful tool provided social scientists do not mistakenly begin to atomize and correlate such findings into mechanistic forms of explanation.

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Methods A parallel set of problems arises with tools of analysis like case studies, which are often conversely thought to be a guarantee of more historically and interpretively sensitive inquiry than statistical inference and random sampling. Case studies are employed across the social sciences, but in political science are most often identified with the more “qualitative” subfields, especially comparative politics. One of the most widely cited methodologists of case studies is the political scientist, John Gerring. Briefly scrutinizing his influential claims will help clarify the naturalist dangers and anti-naturalist potential of this tool of analysis. Gerring defines a “case” as a single instance of a phenomenon (e.g., a nationstate, a city, a prison, a voter) within a wider class of that phenomenon (e.g., nation-states, cities, prisons, voters). Studying particular cases is thus a strategy for analyzing political reality by intensively drilling down on a single historical instance of it (or perhaps a cross-case study of a handful of cases) with the goal of better understanding something about the larger series or class.36 In comparative politics the case study is often presented as imminently historical, sensitive to context, and anti-scientistic. Yet as with the other two forms of data analysis, there is nothing logically binding this method of inquiry to either naturalism or anti-naturalism. What is crucial from a philosophical perspective is that researchers retain a strong sense of the holistic, historical, contingent, and narrative nature of social and political reality. So cases can be fruitfully analyzed by interpretive social scientists to search for analogies or wider patterns of meaning and belief. But these must always be (p.101) conceptualized in terms of narratives about contingent features of reality and not ahistorical, formal, atomistic, or mechanistic applications. Unfortunately, Gerring’s own treatment of case studies slides into a naturalist direction, not only through his atomizing of ahistorical units (as if a nation-state or prison were a reified chunk of reality that could be moved from context to context) but also through his extended analysis of case studies as tools for finding causal pathways and relationships between formal variables. For example, Gerring argues that one of the primary virtues of case-study analyses is that they can be used to test either strong or weak causal bonds between ahistorical variables. In the case of strong causal bonds, “X is assumed to be necessary and/or sufficient for Y’s occurrence,” whereas in weak causal bonds, the “mechanisms” are “more tenuous,” “highly irregular,” and “probabilistic.”37 When the former is the case a single case study can be used to disprove a claim to a strong causal bond, but when a claim is being made to probabilistic causal bonds, Gerring recommends social scientists use a cluster of cases (or “crosscase” studies) to test the hypothesis. In both scenarios, the problem is that Gerring is fitting case-study forms of analysis to a naturalist schema of mechanistic explanation between ahistorical, atomized variables.

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Methods For instance, in the case of weak, probabilistic causal bonds between variables Gerring writes of “democracy” and “the economy” as if they were formal, ahistorical variables: “democracy, if it has any effect on economic growth at all, probably has only a slight effect over the near-to-medium term, and this effect is probably characterized by many exceptions.”38 What this passage reveals is Gerring’s naturalist tendency to treat political reality as reified, essentialized, and atomistic units. Gerring’s defense and articulation of case-study analysis is certainly not without merit but needs to be disentangled from these naturalist tendencies. By contrast, interpretive social scientists analyze cases not for the sake of setting up mechanistic and ahistorical causal bonds, but for the construction of contingent narratives, family resemblances, and patterns of meaning. So the case study, far from being inherently interpretive or historical, is (like the other methods of data analysis) subsumable under either one of the competing philosophical paradigms. That methods can be bent to either naturalist or anti-naturalist ends is something that more methodologists have begun to recognize. For instance, the latest methodological work on “grounded theory” or coding notes that this tool can be put to either more interpretively sensitive or more scientistic uses.39 Grounded theory is a method of data analysis that draws on in-depth interviewing in order to formulate abstract categories. The building of these abstract categories is called “coding” and “involves constructing short labels that describe, dissect, and distill” meanings from the interviewing process with the goal of sorting and synthesizing large troves of beliefs and actions.40 Researchers can use the coding system they have devised to think more (p.102) broadly about the tacit meanings and beliefs of a group of people; coding also allows researchers to creatively conceptualize and draw comparisons. Of course, all this can be taken in a very naturalist direction if meanings are treated as self-evident, brute bits of empirical reality in little need of context or interpretation. Indeed, under the philosophical sway of naturalism there is a serious danger that the coding categories or labels will become completely exogenous to the social world supposedly being studied. When this happens researchers will be more likely to ignore the holistic, contingent, and historical dimensions of meanings. Instead, under the spell of naturalism, researchers might start treating coded terms like reified, essentialist, or atomistic objects ready to be plugged into mechanistic explanations. Researchers can correct this mistake by always remaining aware of the way their coded categories should be derived from the contingent beliefs and meanings of the interview subjects. Antinaturalism implies that coded concepts should be the fruit of a dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee—as such, the concepts should have a bottom-up sensitivity to agent language and self-understandings. Coded concepts that fail to capture the contingent meanings and beliefs of the subjects in question are philosophically defective. For this reason, the most recent handbooks on grounded theory have rightly stressed the need for an “iterative” process in Page 15 of 29

Methods which the coded concepts are continually refined, modified, scrapped, reformulated, and changed in light of ongoing discussions with the subjects of study.41 Provided this is the case, there is nothing philosophically barring interpretive social scientists from making careful use of the abstraction, labeling, and conceptualization involved in coding meanings. A final method that combines both elements of data collection and data analysis is Q methodology. Q methodology has mostly been developed and employed by psychologists in order to study configurations of opinions and beliefs within a group. Carrying out this method involves several steps, beginning with selecting a sample collection of items (these can be pictures, objects, or statements) for participants in the study to then rank along a continuum. The continuum can be devised along any number of scales like “most agree to most disagree, most characteristic to most uncharacteristic, most attractive to most unattractive.”42 The participants then assign the series of items selected by the researchers a number along the scale (for example, +5 or “I strongly agree” with this statement). The significance of statements on a given theme (like love or crime or moods) can in this way be organized and studied by researchers across a group of participants. A key feature of Q methods is the exit interview in which “open-ended comments” are requested to discover “how the participant has interpreted the items.”43 The results of the various rankings can then be mathematically sorted, ordered, and analyzed into various patterns that are subject by researchers to interpretation. In light of the discussion of other methods, it should be clear that Q methodology can either be pulled in interpretive or naturalist directions. (p.103) The risk with Q methodology is that it be fitted to naturalist aims that neglect meanings, intentions, and historical contingency. In current discussions of Q methodology this often happens when researchers begin to treat aggregate configurations or rankings among a group like a reified “gestalt” viewpoint floating above any one participant. For instance, two prominent methodologists slide in this naturalist direction when they write that the findings of Q methodology are “designed to communicate a ‘shared’ viewpoint, and hence…they need not provide a veridical representation of a participant’s own opinion.”44 By contrast, interpretive philosophy shows that meanings are always the product of the contingent reasons and intentions of particular agents. Reification happens when features of social reality are stripped and disconnected from agent intentions, purposes, reasons, and beliefs. Researchers should never be mystified into treating meanings as objects ascribable to a group “gestalt” that hovers above any one participant. For this involves a basic naturalist philosophical confusion over the nature of meanings. Fortunately, the same methodological writers provide the antidote to bring Q methods in a more interpretively sound direction. This can be done by keeping the rankings and configurations of Q methods embedded within the reasons and beliefs that Page 16 of 29

Methods participants gave in their interviews. This can be used to “fill out” the various competing meanings and reasons that have led to certain rankings of items.45 The formal configurations must not be allowed to turn into formal, ahistorical features of social reality that have no connection to the thought-world, beliefs, meanings, and practices of the participants in the study. In sum, the various methods of data analysis offer highly valuable research tools for working social scientists. A social science without the tools of random sampling, statistical inference, and case studies would be deeply impaired. Moreover, there is no reason why interpretive social scientists cannot make careful and selective use of Q methodology if it helps them answer a particular research question or explore the meanings and beliefs of those they are studying. However, when using these tools social scientists must also be philosophically cautious and resist the temptation to atomize, reify, or mechanize political reality. The task of the social scientist is not to hunt down correlations that might yield the holy grail of ahistorical causal bonds, but rather to historicize findings by placing them within the scope of a particular narrative and world of meaning.

Heuristics: formal modeling and the case of rational choice theory So far we have argued that social scientists wishing to follow the interpretive turn may make use of methods of data collection that generate information (p. 104) about a way of life (ethnography, interviews, mass surveys) and data analysis that finds patterns in that information (random sampling and statistical inference). Yet a third and final category of methods that deserve careful attention are “heuristics.” A heuristic is a potentially fruitful way to reach a valid conclusion about social reality. This is distinct from an explanation or description of social reality itself. Explanations, as we saw in prior chapters, must consider the actual reasons and beliefs that led particular individuals or groups to specific actions or meanings. Explanations, therefore, have a narrative form and engage the social world. Data analysis and collection meanwhile are foremost concerned with describing some feature of that social reality. By contrast, heuristics often deal in formal or ideal models that initially put aside the question of how well they actually describe or explain social reality. A heuristic is a way to think about or consider social reality that may potentially lead to further insights. Anti-naturalist philosophy makes clear that, like the other methods we have studied so far, heuristics can be used by social scientists provided they remain cautious and vigilant when it comes to concept formation and explanation. In the social sciences, heuristics most often take the shape of formal modeling and rational choice theory. Of all the heuristics used by social scientists today, perhaps none is more often thought to be the antithesis to an interpretive approach than rational choice theory. After all, what could be more contrary to interpretive philosophy than creating a model of rationality completely divorced Page 17 of 29

Methods from the actual beliefs of individuals in their life-worlds? And we already saw that scholars like Colin Hay have insightfully linked this kind of project to a deterministic view of social reality as fixed by certain option or incentive environments. Yet, like the other methods we have examined in this chapter, rational choice theory can be put to either naturalist or anti-naturalist uses. Antinaturalist social scientists will be able to appreciate this once they view rational choice theory as a heuristic and not foremost an attempt to conduct data collection or analysis. Once social scientists realize that rational choice theory is a heuristic, they are free to playfully make use of this method within certain limited contexts and as suits their purposes—again, they must steer clear of naturalist snags. This series of points will become clearer by taking a closer look at the specifics of rational choice. Rational choice theory does not begin by looking at the actual social world but instead by building an ideal conception of human rationality. Like randomization and statistical inference, rational choice is a way of organizing and reasoning about certain features of social reality. But unlike data analysis, rational choice does not begin by paying very much attention to the actual features of social reality. Instead, rational choice proposes an ideal theory of decision-making and strategic game scenarios. In the case of rational choice, this is achieved by formulating axioms about how a certain kind of rational agent makes decisions— a process known as “axiomatization.”46 Two key (p.105) axioms of rational choice modeling are the assumptions that individual preferences are complete and transitive. Completeness assumes that a rational actor will always be able to compare and rank preferences (though ties and indifference are both allowed). What is not allowed by the completeness axiom is that a rational actor will be unable to compare and rank two preferences. In addition, the transitivity axiom assumes that a rational actor can transfer the preference of one object over another to other objects. So, a rational actor who prefers x to y and y to z must also prefer x to z. Completeness and transitivity are two of the most important (though by no means the only) axioms of rational choice theory. The idealized picture of decision-making that rational choice generates is the basis for game theory and social choice theory, and has also been central to the development of neoclassical economics.47 Rational choice constructs a thin or minimalist view of human rationality—as is widely acknowledged today, this ideal of rationality is at wide variance with the actual empirical workings of human psychology (actual human beings do not uniformly arrive at their beliefs in compliance with this idealized pattern).48 However, in building an ideal model, rational choice has nonetheless proven a powerful tool for modeling how idealized strategic and rational decision-making scenarios might play out, casting light on scenarios as diverse as economic exchange, geopolitical strategy, voter behavior, and other game-like scenarios. Indeed, as Hay (who has been particularly helpful on the uses and abuses of this method) has noted, rational choice theorists have made Page 18 of 29

Methods significant contributions to social science and public policy debates. For instance, using these theories to model social reality, they have drawn “attention to the often perverse and collectively irrational effects of individually rational action” in cases like the so-called free-rider problem or the “tragedy of the commons” in which the devastation of some shared good is motivated by shortterm individual gains.49 If enough people really follow a “self-serving, utility maximizing behavior,” then rational choice models can show how this “translates into collectively irrational outcomes.”50 What does anti-naturalist philosophy make of such formal models built before researchers have even had a chance to consider the actual self-understandings and webs of meaning of particular individuals out in the social world? First, antinaturalism stresses the way in which rational choice theory’s axiomatization and idealization of social reality is effective only within a very limited domain.51 The biggest naturalist pitfall for rational choice theory is to mistakenly assume that it offers a universal, historically transcendent account of the human subject. Indeed, many rational choice theorists have themselves begun to affirm that this kind of formal model can in no way be taken as a universal theory of human agency. The best way to see this, and avoid naturalist pitfalls, is by understanding some of the limits of axiomatization—many of which have been mapped out by rational choice theorists and their (p.106) critics. We will focus on only a couple of examples of such limits in order to impress upon readers the importance of treating rational choice as a heuristic and not as a universal theory explaining human action. We will then turn to possible anti-naturalist uses of rational choice as a heuristic. The completeness axiom assumes that any two objects can be compared or else are simply objects of indifference. Pairs of objects, in other words, no matter how different, are comparable and susceptible to ranking. But this excludes from the outset all goods that are incommensurable or unable to be compared to one another. Critics of rational choice have attempted to establish the existence of incommensurable goods in various ways. One influential way is the “small improvements” argument.52 The small improvements argument asks us to imagine a person who is unable to decide between two preferences—say, seriously endangering the life of a loved one versus saving his small bankrupt country one trillion dollars. The completeness axiom holds that all goods are comparable, granted there may be ties. This means that if one million dollars were added to the one trillion then the individual, so long as he or she is a rational decision-maker under this definition, should at that point prefer the money to keeping the loved one safe. Yet because such incremental changes might not break the stalemate, this shows that the goods in question are not in fact comparable. And yet neither can it be said that the individual was indifferent to the economic fate of his country or the wellbeing of this person.53 The completeness axiom is therefore not a psychologically valid description of human attachment to certain goods, which individuals can resist subordinating Page 19 of 29

Methods to a calculative rationality. Indeed, for many individuals, subordinating such goods to calculation is itself potentially corruptive or demeaning of those goods.54 This is a larger problem than it may at first appear because human life abounds in incommensurable goods. For example, can we compare one person we love dearly to another? What of competing political and ethical goods like security and freedom, justice and mercy? Utilitarian philosophers often argue that all goods are subject to completeness and ordering. What is certain is that society is not made up exclusively of utilitarian philosophers. Individuals daily deal with what they perceive as incommensurable goods that comprise their distinctive ethical outlooks. Moreover, what counts as an incommensurable good will depend on the self-understandings of the individual or group. Social scientists cannot legislate this beforehand. In one culture newborns, totems, and the land will be incomparable goods; in another a particular species of animal, a tabernacle, a piece of bread. From a sociological perspective, completeness of preference is simply not always an accurate or even useful way to look at human decision-making.55 Thus, the basic axioms of rational choice should not be taken as universal descriptions or explanations of human action. The idealization of one kind of formal rational structure is not a successful or universal human anthropology. In fact, in a (p.107) very different way, it veers back into the problematic universal, ahistorical, and autonomous subject critically examined earlier in the debates between old-school phenomenologists and Foucault. Foucault’s radically historicist critique applies here as well. This dilemma with completeness and an ahistorical subject is closely related to another naturalist problem with rational choice. Namely, by its very nature, rational choice begins by bracketing the actually psychological beliefs and motives that explain why individuals act the way they do. Instead, rational choice simply posits an order of preferences. The assumption is that an individual is involved in some form of preference maximizing. However, research has shown that in many scenarios individuals do not respond rationally to risk, but tend to inflate small probabilities “as if they were larger than they are known to be.”56 This failure of individuals to actually carry out the ideal of a rational assessment of probable risks is called “prospect theory.” Once again, there is a gap between the formal model of rational choice and the thick psychological reality of human belief formation. The idea that rational choice is a universal or imperial theory of human behavior is untenable because actual human beliefs and actions are frequently incompatible with its basic assumptions. The bracketing of human beliefs and self-interpretations thus comes at a significant cost to rational choice theory. It cannot be adopted as explanatory or descriptive of the human social and political world.

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Methods Because rational choice theory begins by intentionally bracketing the beliefs of individuals in order to construct an ideal of rationality, it is highly limited in its legitimate application.57 Rational choice is a heuristic that can within some contexts help shed light on the analysis of social dynamics. But social scientists must always consider whether rational choice is the proper tool based on an assessment of the social actors in question. Are the goods involved complete and transitive? Is the actor through repeated practice, education, or other forms of socialization adept at strategic reasoning and calculation? As with mass surveys, proper use of rational choice requires a grasp of the ethnographic background of the actors involved. This is necessary in order to determine whether the individuals involved are in fact interpreting themselves as the sorts of strategic actors posited by rational choice axioms. In cases where individuals are dealing with incommensurable goods (for instance, as is often the case in politics and many domains of psychology), then rational choice will most likely not be as helpful a heuristic. Indeed, in such cases rational choice might be downright harmful, generating a completely ahistorical subjectivity that actually occludes what is happening in the social world that social scientists wish to understand and explain. The above line of reasoning makes clear why the domain in which rational choice has met with the greatest success is contemporary economics. This is because economic actors often aspire to approximate the type of decision-maker offered by neoclassicism and rational choice. The practices of modern (p.108) consumer capitalism have habituated individuals to the treatment of goods as complete and transitive. Likewise, the discourses of rational choice have seeped into the self-understandings of many in market societies who learned these discourses in economics and business schools. By contrast, rational choice and modern economics have been much less successful in domains that deal with incommensurable goods and non-strategic, non-calculative self-understandings and practices. But economics is only an autonomous domain in academia. The actual economic world is always embedded in values, practices, and institutions that extend beyond the market and its calculative practices.58 Human social, economic, and political reality are permeated by incommensurable goods as well as non-strategic forms of reasoning that can make the assumed axioms a stumbling block to effective social research. This perhaps goes a long way toward explaining the intense combination of successes and disappointments that is the modern discipline of economics. The anti-naturalist upshot of all of this is clear: rational choice is an effective but also highly limited tool. Social scientists should employ rational choice when there is some approximate fit between the actual self-understandings of the agents involved and the idealized model. They must never mistake what is a heuristic for actual explanation or description. The thin or minimalist sociology generated by rational choice must be evaluated in light of thick understandings and descriptions. And even in those limited cases where rational choice is found Page 21 of 29

Methods to be useful, the model remains an abstraction and idealization that needs serious re-embedding in the fabric of agent self-understandings. This process can once again be aided by multi-methods and the compatibility of the entire scope of techniques. Rational choice should thus be used in tandem with other methods like ethnography and interviewing. Far from being rivals, these qualitative and quantitative methods might often come to complement one another. In addition to this domain-limited use of rational choice theory, Hay has drawn attention to the ways in which rational choice can be employed to illuminate hypothetical, what-if scenarios. The purpose of the rational choice method in this case would be “hypothetical thought experiments” that ask the question “what if the world were like this?”59 If social scientists are careful to not mistake rational choice theories as naturalistic and explanatory, then these models might “provide timely and powerful warnings about the likely consequences of existing political trajectories.”60 Vicious cycles and perverse incentives that encourage the squandering of shared goods in the environment (like water and climate) might be clarified using rational choice models. Similarly, the consequences of neoliberalizing or marketizing goods like public education or welfare might be explored in this way—not as “predictive hypotheses” but as “precautionary political warnings.”61 These are what Hay dubs “as-if” uses of naturalist assumptions and theories, and we will return to them at length in our treatment of public policy. For now the point is that Hay adds (p.109) another important sense in which rational choice may be employed as a heuristic method, divorced from naturalist philosophical assumptions. Unfortunately, at present very few practitioners of rational choice heed antinaturalist and interpretive insights. Recent studies show that the bulk of rational choice research today woefully neglects interpretive evidence and instead treats its models as quasi-universal explanations of social reality.62 Interpretive social scientists using rational choice and game theory must correct this tendency by always asking themselves questions like: Are the real-life participants playing this game and strategizing in a way that approximates the structure of the idealized axioms or not? Will simplifying through formal modeling produce useful insight into a given social reality or rather occlude the actual social dynamics? What actual reasons do the people involved have for specific beliefs and actions? What are the limits of modeling a strategic or market scenario in this way? What forms of ethical reasoning, irrationality, or non-calculative thinking become invisible when this particular piece of social reality is modeled in this way? Does employing rational choice in this way provide a useful thought experiment or political warning? What dangerous biases might the as-if uses of rational choice and the focus on strategic rationality and game scenarios create? Failure to weigh such considerations will perpetuate what several critics of rational choice have diagnosed as a “flight from reality”—or the neglect of social and political reality in favor of complex models of high precision and little Page 22 of 29

Methods relationship to political life.63 Such uses of rational choice are more explicable in terms of the insularity of much of modern scholarship than a genuine effort to respond to social reality.64 But advocates of the interpretive turn and qualitative methods should also take note. Social scientists should not squeamishly cut themselves off from the uses of rational choice analysis. Such models can and have generated insights into the ramifications of strategic and calculative reasoning within human practices, particularly in market scenarios where individuals are highly habituated to thinking in this way. The successes of modern economics as a discipline are often tied to the strength of rational choice as a heuristic. Once again, antinaturalism is uniquely placed to identify both the strengths and the weaknesses of this tool. Anti-naturalism rejects the overblown antagonism between rational choice scholars and their opponents. Instead, anti-naturalism is able to absorb and integrate rational choice into a vast array of social science methods. This is accomplished, moreover, without ever giving way to the naturalist myth that rational choice is anything like an adequate philosophical anthropology. Indeed, rational choice must never be mistaken for an actual anthropology or even a very good account of how humans across history form their beliefs (a mistake made all too frequently by neoclassical economists).65 But even economists need anti-naturalists concepts like traditions, beliefs, practices, and the social background. This will tune them into whether a (p.110) particular actor or set of actors within a context might be more given to rational choice strategic thinking because they themselves were instructed in this heuristic or learned approximations of it through long iterative decisions in the marketplace. In sum, anti-naturalism gives back to social scientists the freedom to consider and judge within context which method is best for their particular research goals. Social scientists need not sit behind artificial methodological walls defensively committing to either quantitative or qualitative methods. Instead, they can make use of the full range of social science tools. They must only learn to use these toward anti-naturalist and not naturalist ends. In other words, social scientists must stop neglecting philosophy. We have seen that data collection, data analysis, and heuristics can all be reconciled. This means tools as diverse as observer-participation, in-depth interviews, mass surveys, random sampling, statistical inference, case studies, Q methodology, grounded theory, and rational choice modeling can all be either used or abused. Anti-naturalism is uniquely placed to create a vast synthesis of the data collection, data analysis, and heuristics that have been developed by social scientists in the last two centuries. Of course, within the limits of a single research project, mixing methods (like advanced econometric analysis and ethnography) could be difficult because of the practical unlikelihood of finding this kind of knowledge in a single Page 23 of 29

Methods researcher. Indeed, the disciplinary demands of graduate school and modern scholarship make it difficult for any one person to master and apply highly diverse methods. Moreover, the intense specialized training often serves to limit and not broaden the kind of research that is conducted by contemporary scholars. One way to resolve this is to begin to enact a far more cooperative form of social science—one in which anti-naturalist scholars do not expect to find all the requisite methodological expertise embodied in a single researcher or discipline.66 The anti-naturalist case for multi-methods does in this regard seem to imply a shift toward much greater levels of cooperation across research communities than has thus far been the case. Unfortunately, scholarly communities clustered tribalistically around method-expertise and technical wizardry currently serve as the norm. Each tribe claims for itself the one true path to social science via a particular method or methods. By contrast, future anti-naturalist ethnographers and statisticians might collaborate in the construction of a narrative social science. But even in lieu of this more cooperative future, current anti-naturalists working under intellectual isolation are free to learn from the research of both hard-nosed quants and linguistically adept qualies. Anti-naturalist social scientists can employ philosophy to help them sift through the mountains of empirical findings generated by current researchers. What is distorted by naturalism can be carefully separated out from what is valid and admirable but still in need of interpretive and historical (p.111) contextualization. The repurposing of existing findings into interpretive and narrative forms of explanation is arguably an enormous area of untapped research potential. An entire generation of social scientists could devote itself to taking the many bricks and isolated pieces of information generated by the naturalist focus on data and build them into narrative, sociological edifices. Notes:

(1.) The authors call this “soaking and poking.” Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) 38–9. For another widely used textbook that makes a similar assumption, see: John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009) 8. (2.) This is not necessarily an error made among ethnographers themselves: Edward Schatz, ed., Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). (3.) For example: Henry Brady and David Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,

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Methods 2010) 86; Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge, 2012). (4.) A similar point about a pluralist approach to methods has been echoed in the action research literature. For example: Davydd James Greenwood and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2007). (5.) For a usage similar to our own see: David Marsh and Gerry Stoker, eds., Theory and Methods in Political Science, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 3. (6.) The famous phrase is from Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 6. See also: John Van Maanen, “Ethnography as Work,” Journal of Management Studies 48:1 (2011): 219–20. (7.) Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design, 63–5. (8.) Joe Soss, “Talking Our Way to Meaningful Explanations: A Practice-Centered View of Interviewing for Interpretive Research,” in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, eds. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006) 135. (9.) Kenneth MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). (10.) Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For a recent overview of urban ethnography see: Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kasinitz, and Alexandra Murphy, eds., The Urban Ethnography Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). (11.) Goffman, On the Run, 203. (12.) Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016); Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016). (13.) Schwarz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design, 38. (14.) Ellen Pader, “Seeing With an Ethnographic Sensibility,” in Interpretation and Method, eds. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 167. (15.) Frederic C. Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) xi.

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Methods (16.) James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2 (1983): 124. (17.) Dvora Yanow, Sierk Ybema, and Merlijn van Hulst, “Practicing Organizational Ethnography,” in The Practice of Qualitative Organizational Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges, eds. Catherine Cassel and Gillian Symon (London: Sage, 2012) 331–50. See also: James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 125. (18.) Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 119. (19.) Van Maanen, “Ethnography as Work,” 225. (20.) Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design, 65–6. (21.) Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 139–40. (22.) See, for example, our extended discussion below of: Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 67. (23.) For further discussion see: Earl Babbie, Survey Research Methods, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998) 56–9; John W. Cresswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009) 146. (24.) Babbie, Survey Research Methods, 52. Another example of this naturalist error can be seen in: Arlene Fink, The Survey Handbook, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2003) 55–60. (25.) Even survey researchers who promote naturalist modes of explanation admit the efficacy of such supplementary study: Babbie, Survey Research Methods, 58. (26.) Tom Wengraf, Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative and Semi-Structured Methods (London: SAGE, 2001) 60. (27.) See: Simon Watts and Paul Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology: Theory, Method, and Interpretation,” Qualitative Research in Psychology 2 (2005): 67– 91. (28.) Paul M. Kellstedt and Guy D. Whitten, The Fundamentals of Political Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 121. (29.) For a more detailed discussion, see: Kellstedt and Whitten, The Fundamentals of Political Science Research, 126–7.

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Methods (30.) Lesley Andres, Designing and Doing Survey Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2012) 9. (31.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 292–3. (32.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 68. (33.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 163. (34.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 67. (35.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 263. (36.) John Gerring, “The Case Study: What It Is and What It Does,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 1137–8. (37.) Gerring, “The Case Study,” 1152–3. (38.) Gerring, “The Case Study,” 1153. (39.) Kathy Charmaz and Linda Liska Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and Grounded Theory Analysis,” in The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft, 2nd ed., eds. Jaber Gubrium, James Holstein, Amir Marvasti, and Karyn McKinney (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012) 349. (40.) Charmaz and Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and Grounded Theory Analysis,” 356. (41.) Charmaz and Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and Grounded Theory Analysis,” 348. (42.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 77. (43.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 78. (44.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 85. (45.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 76. (46.) Itzhak Gilboa, Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) 39–40. (47.) See: Julian Reiss, Philosophy of Economics (New York: Routledge, 2013) 6; Daniel M. Hausman, “Philosophy of Economics,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998) 211–22. (48.) This has been a key finding of behavioral economics. For famous early pieces disputing the transitivity of human preferences on psychological grounds, see: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Page 27 of 29

Methods Psychology of Choice,” Science 211 (1981): 453–8; Kenneth O. May, “Intransitivity, Utility, and the Aggregation of Preference Patterns,” Econometrica 22:1 (1954): 1–13; Amos Tversky, “Intransitivity of Preferences,” Psychological Review 76:1 (1969): 31–48. (49.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 9. (50.) Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public Administration 82:1 (2004): 42. (51.) See Donald Green and Ian Shapiro’s important critique of rational choice’s pretensions toward “universalism.” Green and Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) 54. (52.) Martin Peterson, An Introduction to Decision Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 170. (53.) Some rational choice theorists have responded to the problem of incommensurable goods with the theory of revealed preferences, which simply holds that whatever decision individuals in fact make reveals their comparison. Yet the theory of revealed preference, which is by no means held by all rational choice theorists, runs completely afoul of an interpretive conception of actions as expressive of beliefs. Social scientists must be sensitive to the meaning of actions by interpreting them in light of the beliefs of the actors involved. To unilaterally impose a meaning on actions from the outside is a clear form of naturalist distortion. Decision theorists have also argued that the “revealed preference dogma” is negated by the existence of “probabilistic preferences” or preferences that are only held a percentage of the time without vacillating back and forth. In the case of probabilistic preferences, one does not always prefer A to B or B to A. Peterson, An Introduction to Decision Theory, 292. (54.) For one extended account of goods not susceptible to rational calculation, see: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Part I. (55.) Rational choice theorists have similarly found that individuals do not always hold transitive preferences but in some contexts hold cyclical preferences. Peterson, An Introduction to Decision Theory, 290. (56.) Gilboa, Rational Choice, 43. (57.) Gilboa, Rational Choice, 22–3.

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Methods (58.) For an extended historical account of markets and market rationality as culturally embedded, see: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). (59.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 55. (60.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 56. (61.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 57. (62.) Iain Hampsher-Monk and Andrew Hindmoor, “Rational Choice and Interpretive Evidence: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place?”, Political Studies 58 (2010): 49. (63.) Ian Shapiro, The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). (64.) Because of our concern with rational choice as a social science method, we have intentionally avoided the related debate over whether rational choice ought to be normative for decision-making. (65.) For a famous articulation of this erroneous view see Nobel laureate, Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). (66.) These issues have been extensively and provocatively discussed in action research literature: Morten Levin and Davydd Greenwood, “Revitalizing Universities by Reinventing the Social Sciences: Bildung and Action Research,” in The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011) 27–42.

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Synchronic empirical research

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Synchronic empirical research Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords Interpretive philosophy opens a novel range of empirical topics for researchers. This chapter focuses on synchronic research topics (or those pertaining to a single snapshot of time) and argues that anti-naturalism generates distinctive ways of studying beliefs, identities, cultural practices, traditions, and political resistance. Examples are drawn from cutting-edge interpretive research into subjects like the politics of Islam, race, globalization, and democratic civic engagement. In addition, some of the more controversial findings of mainstream social science are engaged, including Samuel Huntington’s thesis that global politics consists of a “clash of civilizations”; Michelle Alexander’s argument that the United States is experiencing a new Jim Crow; and Robert Putnam’s view that American democracy is suffering a decline in civic engagement. Keywords:   interpretive empirical research, culture, identity, political resistance, Islam, Race, globalization

Ignoring philosophy does not spare social science from philosophy. It only means that choices are made without proper critical reflection. In the case of tacit naturalist philosophical assumptions, this can cause problems with explanation and concept formation that distort otherwise highly valuable research efforts. Anti-naturalist critique of much of the mainstream in social science today makes clear that in the future social scientists need to become more conversant in certain philosophical issues. Graduate schools in social science should emphasize philosophical education as much as methodological skills like numeracy, fluency in native languages, and the ability to take random samples or Page 1 of 22

Synchronic empirical research model strategic rationality. The latter remain important, but they are never substitutes for philosophical training. To the contrary, whether social scientists know it or not, philosophy is what allows for a coherent treatment and execution of those very methodologies. Earlier we argued that an anti-naturalist form of objectivity should not be conceived in foundationalist terms as an appeal to theory-neutral facts, but rather as a comparative practice. Competing theories are evaluated by their ability to resolve dilemmas or open new areas of research that are more fruitful and less self-defeating than their rivals. This adoption of a notion of objectivity that is anti-foundationalist and comparative also applies to our own overarching argument in this book and the dispute with naturalism. This means that our defense of anti-naturalism, if it is to be considered superior to naturalism, must not only best it philosophically but also offer a viable, fruitful, and less selfdefeating option for empirical research in the social sciences. It must open up new and promising vistas for inquiry into social and political reality. But then what does a specifically anti-naturalist empirical research agenda look like? The next two chapters seek to give a philosophically informed answer to this question. Anti-naturalism is a completely alternative paradigm of research in the social sciences. It conceptualizes empirical reality in a way that breaks away from naturalism’s essentialism, atomism, and instrumentalism. In what follows we will argue that the topics that have been taken up by researchers who are hostile to naturalism are not purely accidental or random, but actually flow out of basic philosophical commitments. Anti-naturalist philosophy does not merely serve as an approach to topics, but helps shape the topics themselves. While undoubtedly the entire world of phenomena is open to anti-naturalist social science research, the way this research is conducted is expressive of particular philosophical assumptions and commitments. (p.116) The present chapter explores the relationship between philosophical concepts and actual research by looking into synchronic empirical topic areas, while Chapter 7 delves into the diachronic, historical sociologies and genealogies developed by interpretive and anti-naturalist theorists. Synchronic research limits itself to a single period in time while diachronic research considers the evolution, development, and change of social and political life. Synchronic antinaturalist research employs such concepts as beliefs, identities, cultural practices, traditions, and resistance. As we shall see, each of these topic areas is shaped by anti-naturalist assumptions in such a way that it dramatically distinguishes empirical discovery from research conducted by naturalists. In some of the age’s most controversial areas of social scientific debate—politics and Islam, race and crime, globalization and democratic civic engagement—antinaturalist and interpretive philosophical commitments are generating critiques of the naturalist mainstream while also offering radically new theories. The

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Synchronic empirical research following topics thus represent some of the most promising research areas in the social sciences, whose potential remains largely untapped.

Beliefs and identities Anti-naturalist philosophy assumes that humans are self-interpreting animals, whose beliefs structure everything about their social and political worlds, from their actions to their practices, from their identities to their institutions. As we have already noted at length, the actions that comprise social and political reality are every bit as expressive of meaning as texts or poems are—only in the case of actions, the meanings are often embodied within flesh and bone, concrete and institutions, practices and rituals, as opposed to ink and paper. In this way, human agency is capable of signifying meaning by conveying certain beliefs and identities. Such beliefs, as we have already discussed, always occur in contingent webs or networks of belief, which serve to fill in meaning—that is, they are holistic and not atomized. Grasping these realities therefore involves considering single beliefs and clusters of beliefs in light of larger streams of meaning. Thus, one way in which anti-naturalist philosophy generates empirical topics is by conceptualizing social reality as composed of holistic webs of contingent beliefs and identities. Anti-naturalist concepts promote sensitivity to the expressive diversity, contingency, and holistic nature of human belief and identity. This sensitivity has given much of the research of interpretive and antinaturalist social scientists the power to radically alter particular debates within both social science and the public discourse more generally. Some examples will help clarify this point. Consider, for instance, the current debates raging in both academia and American society over the role (p.117) of Islam in politics. This has become one of the most intense areas of argument since the attack in New York City on the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Yet what is rarely appreciated is the way these debates can be seriously compromised and distorted by naturalist philosophical assumptions, which lead to particular conceptualizations of empirical reality. In this vein, consider the influential work of Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, whose work on Islam and global conflict was taken up by many after the September 11 attacks. Writing well before 2001, Huntington argued that the major source of global conflict post-Cold War would be what he referred to as “civilizations.” In particular, Huntington argued that the twentyfirst century would be characterized by a violent “clash” between nine essential civilizational types—including very prominently the “West” versus “Islam.”1 No more would the competing secular ideologies of Marxism and liberal democracy fuel global wars. Instead, civilizational identity rifts would determine the frontiers of human warfare, and fighting would be particularly intense between Islamic civilization and secular Western civilization. Page 3 of 22

Synchronic empirical research Clearly Huntington’s theory resonates within certain developments in politics in the post-9/11 world—which have undoubtedly contributed to its popularity. But what makes Huntington’s theory so problematic is that his concept of a “civilization” very clearly follows a naturalist logic of essentialism (a logic discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 on concept formation). Specifically, Huntington argues that the nine civilizations comprising the world today are defined by a common core of “objective elements such as language, history, religion, customs, [and] institutions.”2 He also claims that although people have different “levels of identity,” civilizations are “the broadest level of identification with which [an individual] intensely identifies.”3 In this way, essentialism generates the extremely tendentious and influential picture of global politics propounded by Huntington: one in which nine completely discrete civilizational identities are pitted against one another in a violent struggle for power. From an anti-naturalist perspective there are many problems with the essentialism that Huntington uses to carve up global politics. For one thing, it is not at all clear that the world has any (let alone nine) “civilizations” in Huntington’s essentialist usage of the word. The problem is that Huntington’s essentialist conception seriously neglects the historical contingency of individual belief formation. No complex, heterogeneous cross-pollinations are politically significant within Huntington’s picture. Instead, human beliefs about political identity automatically fall into one of nine buckets. For example, the possibility of a large-scale variant of Islam that is at once both piously faithful and politically committed to the institutions of, say, the United States or Great Britain is treated as either impossible or irrelevant to global dynamics. Huntington’s civilizations are instead mutually exclusive monoliths of meaning, with the viewpoints of actual individuals in the world supposedly (p.118) reducible to certain core elements, and absolutely binding on their moral identities. This presents deep problems given that humans can creatively reason through their beliefs in any number of ways. For instance, a Muslim might strongly identify as, say, an American liberal. Likewise, someone from Athens, Greece might find no common cause whatsoever with someone from Athens, Georgia, U.S.A. Indeed, this Greek might find more solidarity with his Muslim neighbor from Morocco. There is simply nothing that compels or shapes individual human belief into conformity with the preset civilizational types set out by Huntington—let alone anything that makes them fit the pattern and become objects of intense psychological connection as Huntington implies. In this regard, Huntington’s concept formation shows a clear tendency toward object-side instrumentalism, in which dialogues with actual individuals within the myriad communities that comprise the globe are neglected in favor of concepts formed a priori by the social scientist and without serious empirical engagement with actual beliefs and meanings in the world.

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Synchronic empirical research Indeed, the more prominent anti-naturalist critiques of Huntington have also taken issue with his essentialism by drawing on an alternative view of beliefs that insists on the complex, contingent, and empirically diverse nature of the meanings informing human identity. These interpretive social researchers have insisted that social scientists need to attend much more closely to the constitutive role between beliefs and identities if they are to really understand what is happening with Islam and geopolitics. The work of Edward Said was a leading early voice in the effort to overcome these naturalist distortions of Islam and replace them with interpretive sensitivity. Said argued that Huntington’s views of the “West” versus “Islam” were not only false but also politically dangerous. Ironically, Islamophobes and anti-Americanists alike shared Huntington’s vision of massive, monolithic, homogeneous identities battling each other on the world stage. As Said put it: “Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make ‘civilizations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not: shutdown, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and counter-currents.”4 What was needed, according to Said, was an interpretive disaggregation of monolithic identities like “Islam” and the “West” to see the many underlying versions. Paying attention to the particular beliefs of Muslims and liberaldemocratic societies means carefully disaggregating them in all their empirical diversity. What Huntington failed to see is that identities are in fact the product of intentional states of particular individuals who can creatively modify and generate new variations and hybrids. Such interpretive analysis reveals that all of Huntington’s so-called civilizations are in fact multicultural composites. Empirical reality is far more complex than Huntington’s naturalist concepts allow. Islam in particular is made up of a diverse set of rival sub-groupings. Said thus called for a rejection of “Orientalist” ideological fictions (p.119) that turned Islam into a unitary, essential other.5 Said’s sensitivity to anti-naturalist notions of belief and identity made this critique possible. Anti-naturalist philosophy emphasizes the creative contingency of human belief and identity formation. Recently more interpretive assumptions about beliefs and identities have helped inspire empirically detailed and rich accounts of the post-9/11 world. For example, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane Smith, and Kathleen Moore have done extensive work to unearth the beliefs of particular Muslim women in America and disaggregate the many possible identities hiding under the label “Islam.” As they put it, an “Orientalizing gaze” envisions Islamic women as “passive victims of masculine dominance” and “fully shrouded.”6 Thus “saving the women of Islam became part of the post 9/11 Western agenda” and has been “used by more than one American administration to engender emotional support overseas.”7 The problem is that such conceptions of Islamic women are too clunky and one-dimensional—they are not sensitive enough to the rival meanings informing identity practices like wearing the hijab (headscarf) or reading the Qur’an. An object-side instrumentalism silences the actual meanings Page 5 of 22

Synchronic empirical research constituting various identities and actions. A monolithic essentialism reduces the meaning of being a Muslim woman to a single (and often tacitly Islamophobic) core. In reality, scholars like Haddad, Smith, and Moore show that there are an enormous number of ways of being a Muslim woman today—including not only all the rival varieties of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi theology but also creative new self-interpretations in terms of feminism, Qur’anic interpretation, Islamic women’s roles in public life, dress, education, and gender. There is no single way of being a Muslim woman. For this reason “Muslim women in the West should not be subsumed under any such stereotypes” but instead recognized as “members of American society who act in conformity neither with Western assumptions nor, necessarily, with the dictates of Islamic traditionalism.”8 In this way, interpretive sensitivity to the constitutive role of particular webs of belief has generated a much different picture of our current geopolitical situation than the image offered by Huntington’s naturalistic research paradigm. This more anti-naturalist picture is one in which there are family resemblances between certain groups of Muslims and other citizens in liberal democracies that they may not share with Muslims in other parts of the world. In other words, there are Muslims who are every bit as American or British in their political commitments as the stereotype of the traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Yet Huntington’s analysis makes this reality of complex family resemblances—of differences and similarities across groups—invisible and irrelevant. Antinaturalism’s philosophical commitment to conceptualizing beliefs and identities as contingent products of self-interpretive behavior thus allows researchers to understand social reality in its empirical diversity. By contrast, the conceptualization of social reality in terms of a naturalist essentialism bewitches researchers into seeing reality through a highly (p.120) distorted lens. Suddenly the geopolitical stage consists of colossi in a world-civilizational battle for existence. This social scientific conceptualization of empirical reality has serious ideological and ethical implications. An interpretive sensibility concerning political beliefs and identities has also led scholars like Mary Habeck to wrestle with the specific ideologies and beliefs behind politically radicalized variants of Islam like al-Qaida. According to Habeck, Americans after September 11 did not adequately consider the identity of the attackers: “Not all Muslims chose to carry out the attacks,” but rather the advocates of a very specific minority and militant tradition within Islam, with its own particular concepts, political theology, and lineage.9 Habeck refers to this minority view as “jihadi” and argues that it has conducted a hostile takeover of key Muslim theological concepts like jihad and tawhid in order to pursue the overthrow of the current international system in the hope of establishing an Islamic state.10 One of the key motives animating Habeck’s research is her belief that knowing the identity of those who conducted the September 11 attacks is Page 6 of 22

Synchronic empirical research vital to forming an adequate response. There is a strong political need to “differentiate the extremists from other Muslims” and “work with moderate and liberal Muslims to prevent extremists from taking over mosques.”11 Thus, an anti-naturalist sensitivity to the contingent way in which beliefs and identities form is superior even when trying to understand the politically hostile branches of Islam that preoccupy Huntington. In short, there is good reason to believe that research into the threat posed by certain heterodox offshoots of Islam is far better served by anti-naturalist assumptions than by Huntington’s naturalism. In comparative terms, an antinaturalist research agenda is able to steer clear of dilemmas besetting naturalist rivals. Of course, such social scientific research is also of urgent political importance because failure to properly ascertain this reality will leave governments, policy makers, and citizens shadowboxing with cartoon versions of reality (enemies will be created unnecessarily and opportunities for vital alliances missed). Anti-naturalism is thus able to overcome dilemmas facing Huntington’s naturalism both at the theoretical level and as concepts for guiding public policy. The anti-naturalist philosophical conception of beliefs and identities thus helps both academics and elite political actors move past Huntington’s shortcomings. Yet anti-naturalist research into these topic areas corrects not merely “high” academic theory but also distorted forms of naturalism that circulate popularly among laypeople and within civil society. Indeed, the naturalist worldview has been so pervasive in the last century that even people far outside of academia today often hold naturalist intuitions about what counts as a good explanation of political and social life and how concepts should be formed. These popularly held intuitions are what might be termed “folk naturalisms.” Folk naturalisms have an enormous scope in all kinds of areas of political life and so anti-naturalist research can have a political effect in such instances. (p.121) For example, although racism has certainly been around for centuries, more recently various forms of folk naturalism are used to prop up racist worldviews, which attempt to essentialize a kind of inferiority into the biology of non-whites. Such folk naturalisms view races analogously to the way Huntington views civilizations—self-contained entities or natural types that do not allow for politically significant mixtures or variations. To be black, white, Hispanic, or Asian is said to necessarily entail certain essentialized features of belief and identity. A biological feature of skin tone supposedly signals a necessary pattern of beliefs and certain kind of identity when it comes to areas like criminality, politics, intellectuality, sexual drive, aggression, and so on. By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy insists on the contingency of human belief and identity formation. There is no preset, necessary pattern of beliefs that essentially identifies a particular individual or group. Instead, anti-naturalism’s Page 7 of 22

Synchronic empirical research notion of contingency makes clear the ways in which race is a socially, culturally, and politically interpreted category. Far from reducing human identity to biological features of skin tone, anti-naturalism asks those who wish to understand race in the modern world to wrestle with the effects of contingently formed beliefs and identities about what it means to be black, white, Hispanic, etc. Racial identities are in fact traditions of inherited beliefs and practice. As such they are continually being creatively modified by those who inherent them. This means that, for example, assumptions that Hispanic identity must necessarily be characterized by an essential core set of features like sensuality, passion, and musicality prove to be the results of particular histories and not biological necessity. This focus on racial identity as a product of historically contingent formed beliefs is clearly employed in the burgeoning branch of antinaturalist social science research that critically investigates the political role of race in America. Consider, for example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Alexander notes that while the sale and use of drugs occur at remarkably similar rates across racial groups in America, blacks have been subject to far more punishment (including incarceration rates twenty to fifty times higher than whites).12 This massive discrepancy between crime and punishment, violation and enforcement, leads Alexander to delve into the types of identity formation that have made this possible. Here Alexander offers an extensive historical account and interpretation of the role of beliefs and racial biases that shape the perception of black identity among police officers, prosecutors, the courts, and the wider public. In the public imagination, young African American males from the ghetto have been envisioned as the main culprits in the War on Drugs. Indeed, black youth have been so identified with illicit drug use that their dress, communication, music, and even hairstyles have come to be falsely identified as necessarily related to criminality and illegal drug activity. This false essentialization of young African American identity as necessarily delinquent or disordered is one of the most destructive ideological fictions within (p.122) contemporary American life. Yet, as Alexander helps us see, this essentialist way of looking at race also has concrete consequences for political reality: “from the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelming white suburbs or on college campuses” (since usage rates among these groups are comparable) but this would have been seen as misdirected because drug use among whites is often, paradoxically, not viewed as really criminal.13 In fact, the War on Drugs—while officially colorblind—is largely driven by a particular set of beliefs about who the “real” criminals within society are. Alexander goes on to show how beliefs that criminalize black identity in turn shape Supreme Court jurisprudence, congressional legislation, and police and incarceration tactics.14 The overall effect of this racially biased notion of identity has been the historically unprecedented round-up of racial minorities into America’s prisons—a phenomenon known as mass incarceration. What look to be Page 8 of 22

Synchronic empirical research colorblind policies upon closer interpretive inspection turn out to be part of a larger historical narrative of American racial exclusion. This argument has in turn been elaborated by recent urban ethnographies conducted in America’s ghettos by Victor Rios and Alice Goffman. These ethnographers have found that mass imprisonment and surveillance have led to a “hypercriminalization” of the poor and blocked out thousands of black and Latino youth from normal civic life —including from jobs, hospital care, schooling, and even stable residency.15 Rios discusses at length how members of civil society and the police conceptualized certain “everyday styles and behaviors” as essentially “deviant, threatening, risky, and criminal.”16 In this way, wearing your hat in a particular style, listening to rap music, or talking in a given dialect are essentialized as part of a criminal or deviant identity. The point once again is not whether the reader agrees or disagrees with this line of research into race per se, but to see that an anti-naturalist philosophical conception of identities and beliefs generates a critique of naturalist concept formation and explanation. At the same time, anti-naturalist conceptions of belief and identity as contingently formed entities open up what would otherwise have gone unnoticed by both other social scientists and the wider public. A new kind of research program into identities and beliefs becomes possible. Suddenly sociologists and political scientists have historical and cultural histories as part of the depth of meanings they engage when investigating beliefs and identities. By comparison, ahistorical, essentialized notions of identity appear both intellectually and politically inadequate.

Cultural practices Another empirical topic made possible by anti-naturalist philosophical commitments is a focus on cultural practices. Practices are defined as any stable patterns of action—from particular forms of marriage and worship to (p.123) education and political procedures. Studying practices is one way that antinaturalist social science can move from the micro-level examination of human beliefs to mid- and macro-level analysis of institutions, structures, and systems. As was the case with identities, interpretive social scientists treat practices as historically contingent and expressive of a holistic web of meanings. Because these meanings are the fruit of creative human intentionality, practices are in a continual state of change and modification. Although practices are relatively stable, a history of a given practice oftentimes reveals various iterations and even ruptures in meaning. As we discussed in Chapter 4 on concept formation, naturalists often strip human actions of any intentional meanings, thereby reifying them. Where antinaturalists see practices as constituted by historically contingent and complex networks of meaning, naturalists instead often conceptualize the world through what they call “institutions.” When naturalists talk of “institutions” they often mean something very similar to practices, only they have stripped them of the Page 9 of 22

Synchronic empirical research intentional meanings of those participating in them. In doing so, they grant institutions an exaggerated power in determining individual human action. The meanings of institutions are then too often conceived as ahistorical and fixed, as if existing outside and beyond any one of the individuals participating in them. Take, for example, the big social scientific debate over civic participation in the United States and other liberal democracies. There is now widespread agreement among social scientists that Western electoral democracies are experiencing a steep decline in voting.17 The question is what this means for democracy more generally. Robert Putnam has argued for a thesis of complex but general civic decline in America. He has added to the findings on voter turnout a sophisticated empirical analysis of the decline in engagement in informal civic institutions (like bowling leagues, neighborhood associations, and charitable groups).18 Now there is undoubtedly much that is of tremendous value in Putnam’s findings about growing disengagement in America. But for the sake of this discussion it is important to see how Putnam’s treatment of civic institutions drifts toward naturalism. The main problem is his concept of “social capital” which he defines as a kind of reciprocal networking power that is resident in virtually all types of formal and informal institutional participation.19 When people engage in civic institutions, a kind of cooperative, networking power is conferred upon them. Thus, for Putnam, the sociological meaning of participating in groups as diverse as charity organizations, meeting informally at bars for drinks, joining unions, and playing in softball leagues is largely reducible to forms of social capital. The meaning of the institutions has been fixed as if it were an object separate from a consideration of their significance for the various participants who engage them. For this reason Putnam interprets people dropping out of these organizations in large numbers as a clear sign of decline in American civic engagement.20 (p.124) The problem is that this concept of “social capital” reifies the meaning of America’s informal civic institutions, creating a kind of naturalist neglect of the beliefs and intentions of actual individuals. Specifically, Putnam is reifying social capital as a form of networking power as the meaning of institutions and informal practices. What individuals actually believe becomes less important. The meaning of social capital floats above all their actions like a cloud they almost never touch (this cloud is what naturalists call “institutions”). To avoid this mistake, social scientists need to keep in mind the way practices are the result of human self-interpretive activity and therefore capable of constant changes and gradations of meaning. Practices are generated by human actions and not the other way around. A question thus arises: What happens if social scientists actually focus on the self-interpretations, beliefs, and practices of individual agents when investigating all these recent dropouts from voting and bowling leagues? Does an anti-naturalist sensitivity to practices at all Page 10 of 22

Synchronic empirical research change or complicate Putnam’s picture of modern democracies and the decline of civic associations? Here the interpretive work of Pierre Rosanvallon on democratic practices shows how an anti-naturalist conception of the social world can make an enormous difference in our understanding. Rosanvallon begins by noting that the focus on certain institutions as absolute signifiers of civic engagement has led to a neglect of the meanings of actions by citizens who adopt new, more disperse practices. Indeed, citing the empirical investigations of Pippa Norris and others, Rosanvallon observes that far from civic decline, there has been a proliferation of alternative political practices in the wake of the demise of the traditional civic institutions. So, for example, since the 1980s newer forms of political expression such as protests, petitions, consumer boycotts, and demonstrations have been on the rise. As Norris puts this: “Indicators point more strongly toward the evolution, transformation, and reinvention of civic engagement than to its premature death.”21 Drawing on these findings, Rosanvallon argues that although “electoral democracy has undoubtedly eroded,” signaling an age of increasing political distrust, nonetheless, “democratic expression, involvement, and intervention have developed and gained strength.”22 This means that the widespread idea of the “‘passive citizen’ is a myth” and this is not an age of “political apathy” but one in which “citizenship has changed in nature.”23 Rosanvallon’s sensitivity to the contingent beliefs of particular people as they create new patterns of action is what makes this line of argumentative inquiry possible. The drop-out rates from civic associations observed by Putnam mark the rise of a new set of informal practices of engagement that Rosanvallon dubs “counter-democracy.” Counter-democracy is a set of informal practices—existing alongside the well-known formal, institutionalized channels—that hold political elites accountable to the populace in times of increasing distrust. For example, democratic populations today avidly carry (p.125) out the practices of what Rosanvallon calls “surveillance” and “judgment” which are informal types of oversight exercised through the formation of public opinion and discourse. Such surveillance turns citizens into an active, watchful presence within democratic societies, able to “inspect, monitor, investigate, and evaluate the actions of government.”24 And although informal, these practices have the potential to sanction and censure elites by doling out reputation and legitimacy. This does not mean the old participatory model of civic, direct democracy is healthy or even intact. To the contrary, Putnam is right to see the decline of one set of participatory forms—and he may be right to rue them as well. But, if Rosanvallon is correct, his mistake in terms of empirical inquiry is to not be sensitive enough to the practices of civic engagement that have emerged in its place. Putnam’s reified notion of dropping rates of civic association blinds him to the more complex picture. This is a classic case of naturalist forms of empirical

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Synchronic empirical research inquiry inadvertently creating limits on coming to terms with the actual empirical reality of the world. Rosanvallon also argues that citizens today frequently carry out the counterdemocratic practice of “prevention” or a form of “negative sovereignty” that is capable of blocking or thwarting elite representative action.25 Naturalist social science with its reified notion of civic institutions thus misses the rise in informal ways that a “democracy of rejection” emerges in which “increasingly…popular sovereignty manifests itself as a power to refuse.”26 In this way, surveillance, judgment, and prevention together encompass a plethora of counter-democratic practices that comprise the “invisible institutions” of democracy that have been neglected by other social science researchers because of insensitivity to meanings.27 Much more could be said about Rosanvallon’s work on counter-democratic practices. But for our purposes, enough has been outlined to suggest how empirical breakthroughs are made possible by having a more anti-naturalist sense of patterned action within social reality. By remaining alive to the intentionality and contingency of the agents participating in practices, social scientists and theorists are able to make empirical breakthroughs that the reified notion of institutions blocks. This important point about the empirical advantages of anti-naturalist philosophy applies to at least one other conceptual feature of practices. We saw in Chapter 4 that naturalism tends to create the impression of a single, absolute level of analysis and description of political life. The study of politics becomes all about, say, voting behavior or elite strategy or some other political institution that is deemed absolutely central to comprehending political life. A major reduction of political reality at the hands of social science occurs when only certain institutions are deemed worthy of truly extensive study. Yet antinaturalism’s concept of a practice opens the possibility of empirical inquiry into the strange and often neglected minutiae of political and social life. Where generation after generation of naturalists focuses on one (p.126) supposedly privileged set of institutions (e.g., voter behavior or Congress), the antinaturalist conception of practice allows for the discovery of whole new worlds of relevant political meanings. Consider, for example, the surprising findings of interpretive social scientists focusing on the subtle political meanings that inform today’s practices of standardization and quantification. Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star have noted the way standardization modeled on the natural sciences has penetrated all kinds of everyday practices. Indeed, the practice of standardization is now reshaping a wide assortment of human patterns of action including: schooling, policing, dieting, shopping, insurance markets, journalism, and bureaucratic management, to name only a few. The nearly ubiquitous spread of this practice Page 12 of 22

Synchronic empirical research of standardization has unexpected political significance. Lampland and Star note that standardization is almost always introduced unevenly, meaning that some individuals and institutions have the power to opt out of standardization while others must conform. So, for instance, elite private boarding schools can avoid much of the trend toward standardization in testing while life in public schools is increasingly governed by the imposition of standardized norms (that are in turn tied to the funding outcomes and the enforcement of government fiscal austerity among especially poorer communities).28 In such cases standardization can create the false impression of fairness and uniformity in public discourse when in fact at the level of practice the imposition of the standard is ensuring that the exact opposite is true—namely, the weaker and more disadvantaged are subject to standards that the rich and powerful are free to bypass, while existing inequality is enforced and even increased. Too often mainstream political science deems this kind of minute phenomenon to be primarily of sociological interest and bear no real political significance. Practices like the spread of standardization are ignored in favor of studying certain institutions almost exclusively: interest groups, lobbying, the presidency, Congress, the courts, and so on. Anti-naturalist philosophical concepts, by contrast, help social scientists see that politics is a far more complex, sprawling, and even confusing phenomenon than something merely limited to a few canonized institutions. Indeed, inquiry into neglected micro-practices of this kind can in turn shed fresh light on the practices of traditional public and private sector institutions (for example, why certain congressional actors who otherwise disfavor federal regulation might favor the imposition of standardized norms on public schools). Anti-naturalism thus makes possible an interpretively enriched perspective on institutions that otherwise gain the appearance of overly straightforward entities that are easy to grasp and describe. Another example of the interpretive alternative is the work of Theodore Porter who has explored the spread of the practice of quantification inspired by the natural sciences into non-expert and political domains. Porter’s work takes off from the observation that practices of quantification have become (p.127) nearly ubiquitous. Institutions both public and private continually ask for precise quantification or numbers in order to resolve controversies in decision-making. Such precision is distinct from accuracy in that the former is the “quality of being definite and unambiguous” but “need not signify correctness.”29 And yet modern societies have developed elaborate practices around precision even though we know they have nothing to do with accuracy. For example, in the tabulation of national census polls we know that “the last four or five digits of a population figure are probably meaningless”; yet while “scientifically those numbers may be meaningless…politically they play a role in the allocation of electoral power and of public funds.”30 Similar practices of precise (but not

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Synchronic empirical research necessarily accurate) quantification drive the cost-benefit analyses of private firms and insurance companies. In this context, Porter notes that quantification is being used as a political practice in modern democratic societies in order to help individuals cope with disagreement through a form of quasi-objectivity. Thus he studies practices like the use of “numbers, graphs, and formulas” as “strategies of communication” that “minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust.”31 Indeed, Porter notes that oftentimes the insistent use of quantitative metrics in social life loosens and even disappears in more intimate group settings where social trust is still high. Yet in public domains (including the institutions that are of such intense interest to naturalist social scientists) practices of quantification have become ways of generating agreed-upon criteria for decision-making. In other words, practices of quantification are often political and not what they appear to be on the surface—namely, straightforward scientific description. In this way, Porter’s study of minute practices and meanings opens up surprising insights into central economic and political patterns of action in government and private sector corporations. These patterns of action are not reducible to ahistorical, reified institutions, but rather are continually being modified by the introduction and development of new meanings. Porter’s investigation into the politics of standardization and quantification can help social scientists come to grips with much broader phenomena like the spread of public policies of neoliberalism and networks in the modern state and corporations (a topic we return to at length in our discussion of democratic governance and public policy). Quantification, auditing, benchmarks, and standardization are all part of a deeper politics that has transformed the major political institutions of modernity. The point again is to see how anti-naturalist philosophical concepts (in this case practices) make this empirical discovery possible. By contrast, naturalism has devoted too many talented researchers to a narrowed study of institutions. No doubt much of this work is valuable. But the de facto treatment of these institutions as the totality of the study of modern politics betrays a naturalist reduction. In reality, there is an entire subterranean world of human political (p. 128) activity in need of illumination. The work of anti-naturalist social scientists has already yielded surprising insights about seemingly mundane and uncontroversial patterns of action like standardization and measurement by numbers. These in turn might come to radically reshape how we think of quantification and standardization in major political institutions like state legislatures or international federations. Yet without an anti-naturalist philosophical sensibility, such insights go unseen.

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Synchronic empirical research Traditions and resistance A final area of synchronic empirical inquiry opened up by anti-naturalist philosophical concepts is the study of traditions. We saw in prior chapters that anti-naturalist philosophy assumes that humans are always historically situated against a background of inherited beliefs or traditions. Traditions are how meanings, beliefs, and practices are extended and transmitted through time, often across many centuries. Traditions thus explain continuities in belief, identities, and practices. But traditions are also a major topic of empirical study in their own right. Generally speaking, because of an emphasis on the historical contingency of belief formation, anti-naturalist social scientists tend to focus on both the multiple and contested nature of traditions. This means they often disaggregate what appear to be single, monolithic traditions into rival strains. As part of this, anti-naturalist social scientists are able to focus their research on the way individuals creatively subvert, resist, or modify hegemonic traditions. This means resistance to traditions opens as a further and related area for empirical investigation. In stark contrast to this, naturalists often inadvertently de-historicize inherited human beliefs and conceptualize them as homogenous or else monolithic starting points for human action. That is to say, naturalists often neglect the actual empirical diversity of traditions—sometimes overextending one tradition or other times mistaking the background and inherited beliefs of a given time and place for the background and inherited beliefs of all times and places. When this happens, beliefs are treated as somehow causally necessary to a given social milieu as opposed to historically contingent. This illusion of the naturalness and necessity of certain beliefs can lead to enormous confusions when trying to empirically decipher the political and social world. In this vein, consider the famous work of American political scientist Louis Hartz who argued that the liberal tradition in the United States has been completely dominant since the country’s inception. Hartz drew inspiration for this thesis from reading Alexis de Tocqueville, who implied that Americans shared a kind of uniform ideological consensus or what is commonly referred to as an American “creed.” This creed consisted of the affirmation of certain (p.129) basic tenets of liberal ideology like the primacy of the individual to pursue his or her preferences, the contractual nature of society, and the canonization of certain basic rights. As Hartz put it, liberalism is so dominant in the United States that “there has never been a ‘liberal movement’ or a real ‘liberal party’” but only “the American Way of Life, a nationalist articulation of Locke.”32 Indeed, in this view, even when anti-liberal ideologies form in the United States like Edmund Burke’s conservatism, Karl Marx’s socialism, or various populist kinds of racist or authoritarian ideology, they have in fact been liberalized in terms of their fundamental assumptions about individual rights and the source of the government’s legitimacy. Thus, in Hartz’s view the liberal tradition is the uniform, homogenous starting point for American political ideology—a kind of Page 15 of 22

Synchronic empirical research inescapable, necessary meta-tradition. Hartz thus treats liberalism as an essentialist concept. Liberalism is a set of beliefs that are found at the core of all of the U.S.A.’s major ideological movements. A kind of tacit naturalist conceptualization of social reality informs Hartz’s empirical research. By contrast, researchers with more anti-naturalistic and interpretive intuitions have conceptualized the American ideological landscape in a very different way. Chief among those who have challenged Hartz’s essentialized view of American political thought is Rogers M. Smith. Smith employs the notion of “multiple traditions” to disaggregate American ideology into various rival and competing strains.33 What drops out of Hartz’s notion of an American Way of Life is not merely the importance of rival traditions like republicanism, but also a persistent history of inegalitarian racial and gender hierarchies—which Smith dubs the “ascriptive” traditions of American political thought. Through extensive interpretive studies of federal statutes from 1798 to 1912, Smith is able to show that racist and other hierarchical, ascriptive traditions have played a consistent role in American political life and thought. Hartz’s mistake is to reduce all of American political thought to a kind of benign liberal innocence. But this erases the more complex political reality.34 What Smith’s research shows is that inherited beliefs are not necessary and invariant across a given political community. Rather, the contingency of beliefs means that researchers inspired by anti-naturalist approaches are able to discern the contours of the historical contestability of rival traditions. The United States itself appears a far more empirically complex and diverse landscape for inquiry when employing an antinaturalist sense of the contingency of traditions as opposed to Hartz’s essentialist notion of the American Way of Life. The anti-naturalist philosophical conception of a tradition thus allows social scientists to disaggregate social reality and do justice to the actual empirical diversity. For example, the political theorist John Gray has made a similar move in the debates over globalization. There the most famous naturalist thesis is Francis Fukuyama’s well-known claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, American-style capitalism would create a uniform global (p.130) economy. Indeed, Fukuyama went so far as to proclaim that with the end of the Cold War the world might be reaching the “end of history as such…the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”35 Not unlike Hartz, Fukuyama assumes that political beliefs will necessarily have a certain structure. In this case, modern societies will be characterized by a necessary progression or development toward a final set of ideas or goals. In response to this extremely influential thesis, Gray notes that Fukuyama’s views in this regard are an example of the wider naturalist, Enlightenment assumption that “a diversity of cultures” is “not a permanent condition of human life” but “a stage on the way to a universal civilization.”36 Like Smith’s critique Page 16 of 22

Synchronic empirical research of Hartz, the force of Gray’s rebuke of Fukuyama comes from being able to philosophically grasp the contingency of human-inherited beliefs and traditions. Where Fukuyama sees a necessary growing convergence, Gray is able to observe empirical countercurrents. Specifically, Gray saw very early on that globalization involved not convergence but the formation of conflicting indigenous capitalisms—to varying degrees illiberal—in Russia, Japan, China, and Singapore, to name only a few. For example, Japan developed an indigenous capitalism and path to modernization that confounded the widespread Western assumption that individualism and capitalism must necessarily go hand in hand. Japan accomplished this through a culture of firms that “grafts on institutions inherited from its medieval age” such that “Japanese market institutions rely on networks of trust rather than upon a culture of contract.”37 Gray argues that Japanese stances toward employment, career security, and the role of firms within civic life are capitalist without being individualist. Similarly, in Russia, Gray analyzes the emergence after communism of an “anarcho-capitalism” with an “enfeebled, corrupt and, in some regions and contexts, virtually non-existent state” together with “the pervasive presence throughout economic life of organized crime.”38 This has itself developed into a “state-led Russian capitalism” that draws on the tradition of economics from the “last decades of the Tsarist regime.”39 In this way, an anti-naturalist sensitivity to multiple traditions reveals the error in Fukuyama’s view of modernization as necessarily developing toward a single set of beliefs that match North Atlantic liberal democracies. Anti-naturalist philosophy makes clear that the reason such multiplication and diversification of traditions is possible is because humans can modify and resist their inherited traditions.40 This notion of “resistance”—or the ability to change and subvert even the most long-held inherited beliefs—is a further antinaturalist concept that is able to aid empirical inquiry. A few examples will help illustrate how this philosophical concept proves empirically fruitful in ways that elude naturalism. (p.131) Consider, for instance, the work of social theorists like E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and other members of the First British New Left who insisted on a humanistic brand of socialism against the naturalist, structural determinism of mainstream Marxism. Thompson focused on history from below, and studied the lived experiences of various subordinate groups including peasants, women, racial minorities, and especially the English working class. In his famous study, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson argued that nineteenth-century Luddites, croppers, handloom weavers, and utopian artisans all played a part in the emergence of a modern English working-class tradition of popular resistance to the dominant political ideologies of the age.41 In this way Thompson brought attention to neglected streams of meaning and practice that helped shape English political life.

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Synchronic empirical research Williams meanwhile developed a theory of culture that criticized its reduction to high culture. There was nothing that made the movements of culture essentially elitist or top down. To the contrary, Williams conceived of mass culture as a site for rebellion. For example, in The Long Revolution, he argued that political conflict was carried out within the popular sphere of ideas. In this way, popular culture was a possible arena for subordinate groups to rebel against hegemonic political traditions.42 As with Thompson, a view of political society was made empirically possible by giving attention to the human capacity for resistance. Traditions need not be monolithic or imposed from above. What determined Englishness was not only for elites to determine. What Williams and Thompson shared was a view of human agency as able to modify and resist inherited and even hegemonic beliefs. This empirical study of resistance fueled by certain philosophical commitments has gone on to inspire a number of very fruitful research programs in the social sciences. Two in particular are worth mentioning. First, Stuart Hall formed a school of cultural studies, which focuses on questions of race and gender and also made significant contributions to the debates over Thatcherism and New Labor in England. Hall drew on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to claim that popular culture can also reinforce dominant ideas and identities, at the same time that resistance is still possible. Thatcherism in 1980s England was an example of one such hegemonic tradition that managed to present neoliberal economic ideas as a kind of populist movement. This was accompanied, however, by an authoritarian style of government, which according to Hall was met with popular resistance.43 Hall was thus able to bring attention to the way that ruling ideologies almost inevitably meet with some form of resistance in modern societies—whether planned or ad hoc, conservative or radical. Culture, Hall showed, should not be mistaken for a uniform entity spreading evenly and unchanging over the whole of society like a blanket. (p.132) In addition to inspiring Hall, Thompson’s philosophical notion of agents capable of resisting structures and inherited systems also helped set in motion anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott’s influential research program on peasants in Southeast Asia. According to Scott, the peasants of lower Burma and Vietnam developed a complex set of subsistence practices to stave off the continual threat of starvation and scarcity. Practices like common lands, reciprocity, and various forms of redistribution were central to the lives of these peasants in pre-capitalist agrarian societies. However, during Burma’s and Vietnam’s periods of colonization, these grassroots traditions of subsistence ran into conflict with the dominant and opposed modernizing traditions of nationalism and colonialism. Both nationalists and colonizers in South East Asia sought to impose the modern practices of the free market, private property

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Synchronic empirical research enclosure, and state enforcement and taxation on the peasants, thereby eliminating the feudal arrangements. The backlash to these dominant modernizing trends is what Scott calls “the peasantry’s ‘little tradition’ of moral dissent and resistance.”44 Although largescale action like peasant revolts is thwarted more often than not, peasants have developed tenacious “everyday forms of resistance,” including “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on.”45 Such tiny techniques of resistance may seem insignificant but have the potential to “in the end make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-be superiors in the capital.”46 Although Scott’s work is not entirely free of naturalism (as when he slides into discussing peasant psychology and identity as if it were a more ahistorical form of subjectivity), nonetheless his work helps show how an anti-naturalist philosophical conception of human agency as capable of resistance in turn can generate a tremendously dynamic field of empirical research.47 Again, where naturalist social scientists see only an overarching system or structure of beliefs, anti-naturalist researchers can focus on the actual empirical complexity that comprises the world. Synchronic study of the political and social world is therefore best served by anti-naturalist philosophical concepts like beliefs, identities, practices, traditions, and resistance. Indeed, in addition to freeing research from errors like reification, essentialism, instrumentalism, and reductivism, anti-naturalist concepts actually open new domains for inquiry. Far too often social scientists led by naturalist intuitions view empirical diversity as an enemy that must be vanquished on the road to true universal science. Naturalists are thus continually haunted by the inevitable anomalies and empirical diversity that spoil their attempts at a uniform and ahistorical treatment of society. By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy allows social scientists to embrace the deep complexity and multidimensional meanings of social and political life. What was once the bane of scientific theory (empirical diversity) becomes another avenue into renewed discovery. Notes:

(1.) Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72:3 (1993): 22–49. (2.) Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, 24. (3.) Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, 24. (4.) Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation 273:12 (2001): 12.

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Synchronic empirical research (5.) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). (6.) Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane Smith, and Kathleen Moore, Muslim Women in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 22. (7.) Haddad, Smith, and Moore, Muslim Women in America, 4. (8.) Haddad, Smith, and Moore, Muslim Women in America, 40. (9.) Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) 2. (10.) Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, 4, 107–9, 161–2, 175. (11.) Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, 175, 173. (12.) This figure cannot be accounted for by differences in violent crime: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2011) 7, 99–101. (13.) Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 124. (14.) For example, see: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 108, 112, 115–17, 119–23, 139. (15.) Victor Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011) xiv; Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). (16.) Rios, Punished, xiv. (17.) Although much of the literature on voter turnout is awash in naturalist assumptions, nevertheless the statistical descriptions of rates of practice are extremely valuable for an anti-naturalist social science. See, for example: Mark N. Franklin, Diana Evans, and Michael Fotos, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). (18.) Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) 27. (19.) Robert Putnam, “Social Capital: Measurement and Consequences,” Isuma: Canadian Journal of Policy Research 2 (Spring 2001): 41–2. (20.) Again it should be emphasized that in spite of a creeping naturalism, Putnam’s statistical descriptions of declining participation are extremely valuable contributions to social science. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19–24. (21.) Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 4. Page 20 of 22

Synchronic empirical research (22.) Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 21. (23.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 21, 19. (24.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 13. (25.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 14. (26.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 15. (27.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 13. (28.) Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, eds., Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classsifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) 6. (29.) Theodore Porter, “Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Role of Social Science,” Social Research 73:4 (2006): 1282. (30.) Porter, “Speaking Precision to Power,” 1283. (31.) Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) xiii–ix. (32.) Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955) 11. (33.) Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) 6, 8–9. (34.) Smith, Civic Ideals, 38, 37. This is not to say that Smith’s social scientific work is completely free of naturalist influences. It is worth noting that unfortunately Smith sometimes flirts with naturalistic concepts such as the deployment of “dependent variables” (p. 8). In addition, critics have noted that Smith missed an opportunity to complicate the history of liberalism itself. Thus, in Smith’s book: “it is an idealized and purified, even essentialized, liberalism that makes an appearance. Whenever racism rears its ugly head, this showing is taken as confirmation of a nonliberal strand rather than as a commentary on the liberal tradition itself.” See: Ira Katznelson, “Review: Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History,” Political Theory 27:4 (1999): 568. None of this negates the virtue in Smith’s basic shift toward multiple traditions and away from an essentialized picture of American ideological belief. (35.) Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 4.

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Synchronic empirical research (36.) John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: The New Press, 1998) 2. (37.) Gray, False Dawn, 169. (38.) Gray, False Dawn, 152. (39.) Gray, False Dawn, 152. (40.) There are some important affinities here with: Steven Griggs, Aletta J. Norval, and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds., Practices of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). (41.) E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1964) 12. (42.) Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961). (43.) Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, eds., The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983). (44.) James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976) viii. (45.) James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) xvi. (46.) Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvii. (47.) For example: Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 4, 7.

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Historical sociologies

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Historical sociologies Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter continues the examination of interpretive empirical research topics with a focus on large-scale, diachronic studies (or phenomena developing across time). Contrary to widespread belief, an interpretive approach to social science is not limited to the small-scale study of single cases. Anti-naturalism makes possible sweeping forms of historical sociology, meta-narrative, and genealogy that explore some of the most urgent domains of social scientific research today (including topics such as violence, religion, secularism, nationalism, economic history, and the state). As part of this analysis this chapter critically engages the work of top social scientists and theorists like Steven Pinker, Charles Taylor, E. O. Wilson, and Steven Levitt. Keywords:   interpretive sociology, genealogy, secularism, nationalism, the state

Even those who concede the validity of anti-naturalist critiques often question whether this form of social science really offers a full-blown alternative. After all, how can a philosophy that emphasizes individual beliefs as central to understanding social reality ever get beyond fine-grained, micro-level case studies? Don’t concepts like belief, identity, practice, and tradition require examining meanings at a very local and limited level? Naturalism may have its shortcomings, this line of reasoning goes, but at least it is able to make largescale generalizations by transcending particular historical contexts. Yet this objection to hermeneutics, as we now hope to show, is seriously mistaken. The interpretive turn, understood in anti-naturalist terms, is capable of large-scale

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Historical sociologies explanations and historical sociologies that rival naturalism—moreover, these are achieved free of the unacceptable intellectual costs. In Chapter 6 we argued that anti-naturalist philosophy substantively shapes synchronic, small-scale empirical investigations through the use of certain concepts. We now want to make apparent how anti-naturalist philosophy can generate large-scale and diachronic historical sociologies that comprise a unique conceptual and empirical agenda. Specifically, when anti-naturalist social scientists want to construct general theories, they develop genealogies and meta-narratives, shunning naturalist attempts to reduce explanation to mechanistic classifications, formal modeling, or ahistorical causes. As was the case with synchronic research, social scientists neglect philosophy at the risk of compromising the enduring value of their own work. We live in an age that abounds in pseudoscience, such that today’s ultra-prestigious research program may very well be tomorrow’s phrenology. What we must first do is consider the conceptual features of anti-naturalist, diachronic explanations. The diachronic study of empirical reality is concerned with the evolution, change, and development of social phenomena across time. Thus, we begin by briefly surveying the basic aspects of genealogy and metanarrative as general forms of anti-naturalist historical sociology. The remainder of the chapter then tries to show how genealogies and meta-narratives contrast with rival naturalist theories in some of the most urgent domains of social scientific research—including topics such as violence, religion, secularism, nationalism, economic history, and the state. In each of these cases, social scientists with an anti-naturalist bent have employed genealogies and metanarratives as large-scale explanations that make evident their conceptual and empirical superiority to naturalist rivals. Thus, we will show not only how antinaturalist historical sociologies work in action (helping put to (p.136) rest the fear of a hobbled interpretive social science incapable of explanatory generalizations) but also how naturalist attempts to explain the same phenomenon are seriously flawed. Once again, the philosophical and the empirical cannot be entirely dichotomized in the study of social and political reality. This is because the formation of concepts and the attempt to construct explanations are in large part philosophical problems that no social scientist can avoid. This intersection between philosophy and large-scale, diachronic empirical inquiry proves to be another domain in which an anti-naturalist framework establishes its usefulness within the wider interpretive turn.

Meta-narratives and genealogies: basic features Moving beyond the small-scale narratives of single individuals to place them in larger webs and streams of historical meaning is vital to how anti-naturalists develop more comprehensive theories about social reality. Naturalist social scientists often try to cover cases across diverse historical contexts by excavating a kind of universal underlying mechanics. Naturalism in this way Page 2 of 23

Historical sociologies subtracts, brackets, or re-conceptualizes individual beliefs to make them fit into universal causal generalizations. By contrast, anti-naturalists never seek to subtract or eliminate context, but can gain a sense of the greater whole by identifying a particular series of historical, cultural, or even civilizational events within larger or smaller frames of meaning. For this reason Charles Taylor has argued that one way that anti-naturalist social science pursues objective knowledge of political reality is by constructing the “most comprehensive” narrative possible (and not by positing explanatory laws like those found in the natural sciences).1 In other words, in the social sciences, the most comprehensive and accurate narrative is part of establishing the superiority of a particular social theory or research paradigm. Thus, we should not be surprised to see that Taylor exhorts fellow researchers to not share “the post modern aversion to grand narratives.”2 To the contrary, such meta-narratives are hugely important to establishing the superiority of anti-naturalist research to naturalism’s tendency to subtract away context and contingent meaning. In addition, other social constructivists and interpretivists have also persuasively argued that radical post-modernists (like Jean-Francois Lyotard) cannot reject all meta-narratives without themselves subscribing to a meta-narrative about the “end [of] all metanarratives.”3 We have already explored at length in prior chapters the philosophical reasons why anti-naturalists insist that social reality must be explained through narratives or stories and not by constructing formal, mechanistic, or causal laws as preferred by naturalists. The key considerations for the current discussion were as follows. Because humans can creatively modify (p.137) their beliefs, no set of antecedent conditions is ever enough to lock in a necessary consequent set of beliefs or actions. Yet this necessary causal link is exactly what naturalism requires in order to establish causal laws analogous to the natural sciences. This points to a fundamentally different kind of contingent causality in the case of the human sciences, not the mechanistic causal bonds found conjoining inanimate objects. Narratives, moreover, are the form of explanation that captures contingent causal relations of this sort. Narratives always relay some sequence of events concerning a person or persons who acted in one way according to their purposes, beliefs, and aims but could have acted differently if they had reasoned otherwise. Social scientists are thus in search of the best narrative or story—not universal or formal causal laws. This much has been established by the foregoing analysis. What still requires further exploration, however, is the way that this commitment to narrative explanations opens up the capacity for anti-naturalist empirical research to make large-scale generalizations about nations, history, civilizations, and the seismic shifts in human culture and politics. There is nothing that philosophically limits anti-naturalist social scientists to telling stories about small groups or individuals. So long as social scientists’ narratives capture contingent formations of meaning, then they are free to paint on as large or small a canvas as they like. Page 3 of 23

Historical sociologies In this way, anti-naturalist social scientists are able to construct what might be called meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are interpretive stories about the contingent formation of meanings, practices, traditions, and social worlds that work at a large scale of generalization. Perhaps the most prestigious and widely recognized genre of large-scale historical narrative today is genealogy. Genealogy is driven by certain antinaturalist philosophical assumptions that make this unique empirical form of inquiry possible. The inventor of genealogy was the nineteenth-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his book On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche pioneered a historical form of inquiry that sought the contingent, discontinuous origins of particular beliefs and values—in this case, what he called the “unegoistic” values of Judaism, Christianity, and the egalitarian movements of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche tried to do this by returning to the conflict between what he called “slave” and “master” morality in ancient Rome.4 For our own purposes Nietzsche’s key discovery was of a new form of historical sociology—a form of historical narration that explains some aspect of social reality by showing how it came to be. What very few social scientists realize at present is how this opens up an entire research program with limitless possibilities for application. Two points about genealogical explanations as forms of anti-naturalist theorizing need to be clarified: first, their epistemic dimensions which derive from anti-naturalist commitments, and second, the way these have been employed by the principle advocates of genealogy (Nietzsche and Foucault) in order to generate sociological critique. (p.138) The first and most important philosophical feature of genealogy is its radical historicism. Genealogy emerged in the nineteenth century against the backdrop of the widespread belief that history was developing according to a natural set of organic stages (an intellectual paradigm discussed in Chapter 1 as a form of developmental historicism). Figures as diverse as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill all assumed history was unfolding according to a progressive logic with convergence upon a universal set of final world-historical institutions and societal forms. In other words, the historicism of the nineteenth century was what we might call developmental, assuming that all human societies passed through natural developmental phases akin to those of a life form passing through infancy, maturity, and old age. History on this view was locked into inescapable epochs or stages leading toward some final form. In this way, the developmental view of history was a type of naturalism that took inspiration from the biological sciences in order to try to causally predict the course of human societies and events. Nietzsche’s great genius was to reject this naturalist, developmental conception of history by drawing on the philosophical notion of contingency. Contingency (as we have developed at considerable length) is the view that human action, because it is creative, does not have to be bound by necessary causal sequences. Page 4 of 23

Historical sociologies A belief or action could always have transpired differently based on the human exercise of this creative faculty. This implies that collective human action is also contingent and need not follow a necessary, locked-in sequence. Where most of Nietzsche’s contemporaries saw history as a natural, developmental process, he saw that beliefs, practices, institutions, and the major features of human social reality emerged out of the contingent and even accidental reasoning of particular individuals and groups. His form of explaining historical changes thus ceased to be naturalist and developmental and instead became genealogical— seeking out narratives of contingency for the birth of specific features of social and political life. Following Nietzsche, today’s practitioners of genealogical narratives also emphasize the philosophical concept of rupture or discontinuity. Where naturalists and others conceptualize empirical reality in terms of necessary, ahistorical causal chains that are spatially and temporally uniform, genealogists instead organize empirical reality in terms of breaks in the reasons or meanings that motivate human belief and action. So, for example, Nietzsche notes that a “good” belief or action did not mean the same thing in Homeric Greece as it did later during Christianity or the Enlightenment. Whereas in the Homeric world “good” was understood in terms of a hero ethic of self-assertion, in later Christianity and the Enlightenment it is understood in terms of mercy and service of others.5 In this way, the meanings and beliefs driving human actions and the construction of the social world were radically discontinuous. As Michel Foucault (the second authoritative genealogist after Nietzsche) famously expressed this key point: “the development of (p.139) humanity is a series of interpretations [and] the role of genealogy is to record its history.”6 Genealogy thus investigates how history is characterized by radical breaks and not by the continuous unfolding of a single logic. But this also implies that the paths history takes are not destined or fixed but highly contestable. In other words, meanings and beliefs may have gone one way but they could very well have gone another. An anti-naturalist notion of contestability contrasts with naturalism’s tacit sense of scientific inevitability. For naturalists the existence of certain beliefs and actions often appears structurally built into the causal order of things (something we will explore in particular examples below), while for anti-naturalists any belief, value, meaning, action, institution, practice, tradition, or entire social reality is always fundamentally contestable. This is one way to interpret the subtitle to Nietzsche’s genealogy as a “A Polemic” or in German Eine Streitschrift, derived from the German word Streit meaning an argument or quarrel and Schrift meaning a piece of writing. In other words, genealogy is centrally concerned with contesting or quarrelling over meanings, beliefs, actions, values, and so on.

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Historical sociologies This emphasis on contingency, discontinuity, and contestability brings us to Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s insistence that genealogy as a form of narrative explanation is also capable of generating critique. That is, genealogical narratives denaturalize what some take as natural, given, universal, or inevitable. In this way genealogy’s emphasis on contingency reinforces antinaturalist insights about social ontology as constructed from meanings and beliefs. Naturalists often view social reality as populated by natural kinds and ahistorical mechanisms. But genealogical inquiry can reveal how supposed natural kinds are actually the result of contingent, self-interpretive activity. Social reality is constructed and historically variant, not natural and universally fixed. The latter is a central insight into why humans have the experience of history at all, and do not simply occupy an unchanging, uniform social space. Although not all genealogists are as emphatic in their avowals of metanarratives, Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s versions of genealogy fit as a sub-species or variant of what we are calling meta-narratives or grand historical sociologies. This does not mean that all practitioners of such anti-naturalist forms are otherwise in agreement. To the contrary, prior discussions have shown that Foucault’s post-structuralist notion of agency is not the same as ours; nor is Nietzsche’s conception of human anthropology and the will to power the same as, say, Charles Taylor’s notions of teleology and moral sources. But genealogies in the above sense can be thought of as anti-naturalist meta-narratives that focus on the discontinuous, accidental, and contingent origins of values, practices, beliefs, and institutions that are presented as natural and timeless. Historical narratives can be more or less genealogical in this respect. The emphasis can rest more heavily on some historical trajectory or emergence, without the critical genealogical aim of unmasking pretensions to (p.140) universality and naturalness. Genealogies in this sense may, as Bernard Williams points out, be “vindicatory” or affirmative of the birth of some value or practice within historical contingency.7 Yet, it is important to see in what follows that all anti-naturalist historical sociologies (be they genealogical or some other kind of meta-narrative) have at least an implicit critical potential. This is because they are tacitly critical of naturalist philosophical assumptions that render social reality mechanistic or fixed. In what follows we hope to show how these genealogical and metanarrative historical sociologies work by turning to some of the most salient topics of interest in social science research today and showing how antinaturalistic narratives have bested naturalist efforts in the same domain. What will become evident is the way anti-naturalist historical sociologies work in action—as well as the unacceptable costs of continuing with naturalist philosophical assumptions in the realm of large-scale diachronic explanations.

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Historical sociologies Discontinuity and contestability: studies of violence, religion, and secularization What does anti-naturalist philosophy look like when making large-scale generalizations? And how does it compare with naturalist attempts to explain change? Anti-naturalist assumptions are manifestly less problematic in major areas of social scientific research like the relationship between violence, religion, and secularization. We will begin by briefly considering what historicalsociological analysis looks like when anti-naturalist philosophy and concepts are ignored and instead a naturalistic mindset prevails. We will then turn our attention to how anti-naturalist inquiry avoids these dilemmas. One pitfall of naturalist concepts is they tend to create a false mechanistic necessity to the developments of human history. A good example of this is Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s work on the decline of human violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature. In this book, Pinker unabashedly declares: “human history contains an arrow…[an] alignment of so many historical forces in a beneficial direction.”8 To substantiate this claim, Pinker offers a sprawling historical sociology of several millennia, arguing that human violence is on a continual downward slope, culminating in a present age of unprecedented peace. Pinker explains this alleged “arrow” by arguing that the human decision-making environment has been modified. Drawing on rational choice theory (specifically a version of prisoner’s dilemma), Pinker links this decline in violence to a teleological claim about human history more generally. The argument is worth looking at in some detail to see how genealogical approaches challenge and displace Pinker’s account. (p.141) According to Pinker, for the early centuries of human experience violent action was simply the rational thing to do given certain strategic pay-offs. Indeed, the pay-offs of violent action meant it was “irrational to be a pacifist” and “aggression [was] the rational choice.”9 What made us less violent was that the calculus of the rational choice game-scenario changed. Although this is not the place to go into Pinker’s full analysis, a few details will give readers a sense of the argument. Notably, Pinker argues that the development in European societies of the nation-state with a monopoly on violence changed “the rationalactor arithmetic” in favor of pacifistic forms of action instead of aggression.10 Likewise, Pinker argues that the development of modern markets and trade eliminated “the adversary’s incentive to attack since he benefits from peaceful exchange…[and] the profitability of mutual cooperation.”11 Pinker’s findings have been strenuously contested at various points, beginning with his highly tendentious empirical claim that violence has in fact decreased in the first place.12 Moreover, many of the same critics have rightly noted that Pinker’s argument grants Western state-capitalism a salvific status within world history, battling against the many supposedly inescapably violent primitivisms of the past, and enforcing homogeneous development toward a single political Page 7 of 23

Historical sociologies form. In the imagined rational choice world of Pinker’s theory it is only when the modern state and markets come on the scene that violence is finally beaten back into the caves of the primitive past. There is here a neo-Fukuyaman end-ofhistory faith in a certain set of Anglo-European institutions as the end-goal or telos of rational human development. Once the thesis is in place, the violence of the modern state and the inevitability of market capitalism is leveraged against communities and peoples resisting its authority. But these lines of criticism (though certainly worth pursuing) are not necessarily where an anti-naturalist critique begins. From an anti-naturalist perspective, Pinker’s initial error is his misuse of rational choice theory. Rather than treating it as a hypothetical thought experiment that does no actual explaining, Pinker seems to be turning rational choice into a descriptive, quasi-universal human anthropology. His entire analysis seems to tacitly assume that human beliefs necessarily have a certain calculative and preference-maximizing structure. And the latter runs afoul of the philosophical contingency of human beliefs and actions as self-interpreting animals. Yet Pinker’s entire explanatory argument depends on positing this very ahistorical, transcendental human subjectivity that more or less makes decisions via the same method of rational-actor arithmetic (be she a Lakota-Sioux, a Latin American campesino, or a New York stockbroker). Pinker tries to prove his claims that this form of strategic, rational choice reasoning actually motivated the key transition in history to the modern peaceful period by offering evidence of correlations between the market and declining violence, as well as the advent of the state and purported declines in aggression.13 But Pinker seems unaware of the fact that this does not at all (p. 142) establish his explanatory thesis for the alleged decline in violence. Instead, what Pinker needs to show is that actual historical actors (across many varying cultural contexts and in huge numbers) did in fact reason in this prisoner’s dilemma-type way. The structural exposition of a particular ahistorical, rational choice subjectivity needs to be linked up with the actual contingent reasoning and concrete psychologies of historical actors. Otherwise Pinker is simply left with an idealized model floating in the air. There is no reason to believe this idealized model has anything to do with empirical history and the actual causality driving it. In other words, Pinker’s theoretical generalizations are not at all properly linked up to human beliefs, reasons, meanings, and motives, which anti-naturalism shows are necessary for any true social science explanation. Pinker seems fundamentally philosophically confused about what counts as a social science explanation. He also seems confused about the status of rational choice theory as a method that idealizes certain features of human rationality and thereby puts considerable distance between itself and actual empirical reality. Does Pinker realize that his major explanatory thesis for the

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Historical sociologies decline of violence is premised on demonstrably false generalizations about human rationality? Pinker would have benefited from meditating on Foucault’s famous dictum that the work of historical sociology must be “gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.”14 Instead, Pinker makes no effort to ground the meta-psychology of rational choice theory within the contingent causes of beliefs and reasons of key actors—let alone the mass-scale changes he has burdened himself with explaining. Thus, at a philosophical level, Pinker’s ahistorical, transcendental subjectivity does not in fact explain the empirical historical particulars that it claims to. He fails at his own task because he does not understand what is philosophically at stake in social science explanation. Instead, history becomes the unfolding of a particular set of institutions that correspond to humanity’s basic predicament vis-à-vis violence. Naturalism here becomes an engine for oversimplification, obscurantism, and befuddlement as to what actually does explanatory work. Once human beliefs are assumed to have a certain necessary pattern or structure, history itself is treated as having a linear, developmental arrow. The fact that rational choice is a heuristic with hypothetical insights into social reality and not descriptive power is lost from view. By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy highlights how no less than any other human action, violence is expressive of contingent beliefs that are contested and situated within particular traditions of meaning. It follows that what qualifies as a case of “violence” is highly contestable. Does the use of racially charged language (“hate speech”) count as violence or only racist action against someone’s physical person? Is punishment by a judicial system violent? Or can only those who violate the law be considered perpetrators of violence? What about spanking a child or the socialization of gender roles or (p.143) the isolation of an individual or group? Is a woman who is not allowed into certain professions being done violence or not? Is psychiatric surveillance and heavy medication an act of violence or purely curative? The point of such questions is to evoke how what is meant by “violence” is always subject to competing interpretations. Indeed, violence is no less contestable in its meanings than any other human action and can never be simply treated as a brute datum without introducing serious confusion into a study (what we earlier termed “brute fact reification”). Social scientists must therefore be sensitive to the fact that the concept of “violence” is neither ethically nor culturally neutral. Any serious sociology of violence must grapple openly and self-consciously with the discontinuities and contestability of this concept, situating it within competing traditions. Underlying Pinker’s use of the term violence, of course, is a clear neoHobbesian liberalism (with an unacknowledged cultural paternalism) parading around as value-neutral science.

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Historical sociologies Foucault’s historical sociologies are an important corrective to Pinker’s decontextualized and naturalist view of violence in this respect. Specifically, a genealogist’s sensitivity to concepts like discontinuity and contestability allows Foucault to see that the phenomenon of human violence has a long discontinuous history that has passed through various rival meanings and iterations. As we saw above, genealogy’s explanatory concerns are normally with the genesis of a particular human value, belief, or practice with the rupture of past meanings. In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how the ancient regime of medieval Europe had a different interpretive grid upon which it understood violence as a form of spectacle needed to restore the legitimacy of the king. The spectacles of medieval public torture—the unspeakably horrible violence inflicted on the accused regicide, Damiens, which famously opens Discipline and Punish—reflected a particular interpretation of violence. A regicide, Foucault recounts, was someone who through their violence had put the entirety of society and the cosmic order itself into jeopardy by attacking the divine and mystic elements of the king’s physical and political body. The violation of the law was in this way an assault on the king’s second “body” (the laws).15 The idea that one could do violence to the transcendent political or cosmic body of the king is very hard for us to render intelligible within our own conceptual schemes and paradigms. Thus, the meaning of violence in European societies at this time was expressed through various beliefs that are not continuously available but exist on the far side of a ruptured past. By contrast the modern world, according to Foucault, has a completely different constellation of meanings that conceptualize and fill in the web of meanings that classify “violence.” Part of this is a newer, subtler kind of “panoptic” correction and normalization of those who break the laws or deviate from established norms of social conduct. Of course, modern societies no longer have the medieval world’s public spectacles of ritualized torture. Instead they have developed forms of surveillance and vigilance that create (p.144) constant objects of observation out of criminality, delinquency, deviancy, and mental illness. There is a science of restoration and normalization that thinks of violence as a quasi-scientific and disciplinary problem.16 Is modern panoptic, disciplinary control itself a violent system or not? Whatever one’s view on this question, it undoubtedly needs to be answered by anyone trying to give an account of violence on a world-historical scale. Unfortunately, Pinker neglects the genealogical dimensions of this history. Instead, rational choice is ontologized into a transcendental subjectivity, leading Pinker to ignore the contingent beliefs and meanings of the actual historical actors. Foucault’s genealogical account of differing senses of self and the attendant view of violence draws attention to just how problematically reductive Pinker’s conception of “violence” is. For example, during the time Pinker describes as the most peaceful in human history, there has also been the strange and widely documented phenomenon of “mass incarceration” of disproportionate numbers Page 10 of 23

Historical sociologies of African Americans in the United States.17 Why does mass incarceration as a phenomenon not figure more prominently within Pinker’s picture? Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the historical emergence of a carceral society can account for new conceptions of violence that virtually go unseen within Pinker’s naturalist analysis. This is the message of Foucault’s famous aphorism that “history becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being.”18 What leads Pinker down the wrong path in his research is an inadequate grasp of the philosophical issues at stake surrounding large-scale historical interpretation. Pinker needs to build a narrative of contestable and discontinuous beliefs, not ahistorical classifications and correlations that float above actual human history like clouds. Such cloud-building might make for effective intellectual gamesmanship today (while also flattering the ideological vanities of contemporaries), but it does not have enduring value as a serious empirical treatment of the past. We have been arguing that genealogical explanations are conceptually superior to naturalist approaches when it comes to accounting for mass social changes. Taylor has more recently used genealogical techniques to this end in his enormously influential sociology of religion, A Secular Age. In this book Taylor challenges the standard (naturalist) secularization thesis, which holds that modern societies are gradually converging on secular unbelief and the loss of religion.19 Taylor’s work draws off other sociologists like José Casanova who reject the naturalist view that correlations between decreased religious belief and increased urbanization, industrialization, and modernization point to an ironclad historical development.20 As with Pinker’s theory of violence, these theories betray a developmental historical logic, in which human beliefs follow a certain necessary path or set of phases. The assumption is that human beliefs about religion are necessarily structured in certain ways by the institutions and conditions of modernity. (p.145) Likewise, as with Pinker, the standard secularization thesis with its ahistorical, formal correlations tends to hide a much more complex reality of meanings, beliefs, and practices beneath the surface. Taylor recognizes this problem and turns to meta-narratives as a way to capture some of the contingent transformations in meanings. He begins his account with the medieval world in which religion imbued all aspects of life—political, economic, natural, and so forth—and then tries to make clear what kinds of ruptures in religious belief and practice have actually occurred between now and then. According to Taylor, the naturalist correlations between modernity and unbelief miss how the new social landscape of our time has not resulted in the disappearance of religion but instead in its multiplication and diversification. Engaging the contingent beliefs of actual people reveals that a secular age does not necessarily entail the breakdown of human spiritual life but instead has so far meant the spread of a vast array of options. New Age spiritualities have mushroomed (what Taylor calls “novas”) but there have also been returns to traditional sources of faith. The Page 11 of 23

Historical sociologies modern age is therefore not primarily defined as non-religious but as pluralistic. Secularization is not a story about implacable, relentless disbelief, but of exploding numbers of moral and spiritual possibilities such that belief in God is only “one option among others.”21 Taylor’s genealogy of secularity has revolutionized the debates over sociology of religion by being able to better grasp the contingencies of human meaning and belief formation across seismic historical shifts. In the process it has also unsettled one of the most deeply held naturalist, developmental histories of modern sociology. Ultimately, complicating simplistic “arrows” of history gives social scientists an enriched and more complex vision of the social world than naturalist categories offer. Anti-naturalist concepts therefore generate a more promising empirical research program in debates over modernity, religion, violence, and secularism.

Social imaginaries: studies of nationalism and economics We have seen that naturalists often begin from the mistaken assumption that the cultural conditions facing human beings are explicable in terms of structurally formal correlations or necessary causal logics of development. History disappears from sociology in favor of the search for the eternal structures or mechanisms behind the ever-changing pageantry. But what also vanishes from naturalism are what anti-naturalists refer to as “social imaginaries.” Social imaginaries are the background worlds of beliefs, meanings, and practices that (p.146) shape the horizon of a given society, civilization, epoch, or social world. These imaginaries are no less historical, holistic, and contingent in their meanings than individual practices or beliefs. As expansive as social imaginaries are, they ultimately derive from individual and group self-interpretation. Once again, anti-naturalists can deploy meta-narratives and genealogies to help them understand and explain the formation of such large-scale worlds of meaning. Anti-naturalist philosophy maintains that all individuals exist nested in a dense and complex fabric of meanings. These meanings are often inherited and tacitly present within practices or implied by other beliefs. Anti-naturalism also holds that this background of inherited beliefs is bounded by a historical horizon— always changing and being modified and thus creating the diverse worlds of meaning that distinguish human epochs from one another (e.g., the autarkic, enchanted world of European medievalism versus the post-industrial globalization of modern Los Angeles). The Hegelian preoccupation with worldconstruction and negation was an important insight. Yet these dense background imaginaries not only serve to give a philosophical account of human agency as situated; they are also a concept that helps guide diachronic empirical research. Social scientists have in social imaginaries a vast, untapped area of empirical inquiry to explore. Once again this becomes evident by critically comparing naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches to social science.

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Historical sociologies Consider first the way that naturalism often leads to a neglect of the historical contingency of social imaginaries, instead positing eternal, ahistorical background structures to human agency. A particularly dramatic example of this naturalist error is the entire research program known as “sociobiology.” Sociobiology was launched by the Harvard evolutionary biologist, E. O. Wilson. Wilson argued that those studying human social behavior ought to seek the general underlying biological structures that patterned beliefs and actions according to Darwinian fitness. Wilson referred to these structures as the “biogram.”22 For example, Wilson believed that modern nationalist passions were the result of primordial evolutionary forces like the human need for territory, breeding, shelter, and food. Nationalism, in Wilson’s sociobiological conception, is essentially a form of tribalism in which fear of “hostile groups” as well as “increases in real and imagined threats congeal the sense of group identity and mobilize the tribal members.”23 In this way, the background condition for modern nationalist ardors becomes biologically universal and ahistorical. Nationalism is reduced to tribalism and tribalism a perennial feature of human biology. Wilson’s views were later developed by other naturalist social scientists into a number of detailed research programs that hoped to explain modern ethnic strife and warfare.24 For example, R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong followed Wilson in rejecting the notion that nationalism is a modern phenomenon and (p.147) instead claimed it is the product of a universal biological mechanism. The specific biological and Darwinian structure fueling nationalist identity formation is what Shaw and Wong call the inclusive fitness logic. Inclusive fitness holds that individual humans act not only in terms of maximizing their own personal survival and reproduction, but also in light of sacrifice for a kinship group that shares common genetic roots.25 In the case of nationalism, this kinship mechanism becomes strongly identified with a much broader group: “Inclusive fitness and kin selection dictate the family unit as the center of love and solidarity throughout evolution…the nation is similarly conceived.”26 Although Shaw and Wong admit that modern communications are a necessary condition for the shift from family to nation, they nevertheless maintain that in essence ethnic violence and nationalism are explicable in terms of a primordial evolutionary motive for genetic fitness. So once again nationalism is naturalized into an eternal feature of human sociality. Lurking philosophically within naturalist research programs like sociobiology is what Clifford Geertz dubbed a “stratigraphic” or subtractive view of human nature in which the social scientist “peels off layer after layer” of cultural accretion to find the “subcultural…structural and functional regularities.”27 In other words, social scientific explanation becomes about subtracting back to necessary bedrock meanings, beliefs, motives, and desires (in this case a Darwinian urge whose needs must be met to fulfill evolutionary functions). Yet the problem with such subtractions away from human culture is that they do not Page 13 of 23

Historical sociologies actually successfully explain what was promised—namely, why specific individuals at particular times select nationalist consciousness as a form of community formation as opposed to remaining within older or alternative forms of group identification (e.g., peasant villager). Nor does it explain why particular individuals opt for, say, a rationalist Enlightenment ideology such as Marxist communism or Classical liberalism (which in many forms can be openly hostile to the politics of nationalism). Sociobiology presents itself as a universal explanation of the motives driving nationalist consciousness but actually never accomplishes this basic task. Instead the structural explanations neglect the contingent beliefs of particular agents and the meanings of their social worlds. The effort to subtract or bracket these meanings comes at a steep cost. What has gone wrong with the sociobiological reduction to a perennial biological motive will become clear if we consider anti-naturalist research into the phenomenon of nationalism. Instead of subtracting away meanings to try to find biograms and primordial urges, more interpretive-minded social scientists have studied the rise and emergence of nationalism through meta-narratives, seeking to capture the formation of social imaginaries. Probably the most important example of such a sensibility is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, which argues that nationalist consciousness is not simply reducible to primordial motives repackaged in a new modern form. Rather, (p.148) “nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts” that have “come into historical being…towards the end of the eighteenth century.”28 The motives structuring nationalism are part of a large-scale social imaginary—or background set of meanings which modern people inherit. Specifically, modern people have learned to imagine themselves as part of communities that “never know most of their fellow-members” within a secularized, “horizontal comradeship” which is understood as existing in an immanent, simultaneous present.29 Anderson narrates the way this represents a break with the enchanted, cosmic worldviews of the pre-modern age, whose social imaginaries were not horizontal and immanent within homogenous time. Instead, pre-modern social imaginaries often assumed a vertical dimension in the community (like the mystical doctrine of the king’s two bodies in Foucault’s work). Anderson also narrates the way the social imaginary that made nationalism possible also produced a unique conception of power—one in which this immanent, horizontal, bounded group conceives of itself as the ultimate and only source of legitimate political sovereignty. This leads Anderson to argue that nationalism is part of a social imaginary that only emerged in a democratic age. Anderson’s narrative of this shift is complex and far from uncontroversial— evoking the advent of print capitalism, broad literacy, the homogenization of linguistic communities, and massive reading publics.30 But at the center of his research is an anti-naturalist sensibility that the rise of nationalism requires a story—a meta-narrative of the contingent emergence of new background meanings that displace older ones. This keeps his work clear of the philosophical Page 14 of 23

Historical sociologies muddle and circularities of research programs like sociobiology. His research program is thereby able to engage the rich world of historical meanings that actually comprise the rise of nationalism. Rather than a sociobiological structure, nationalism is explained in light of particular meanings and beliefs that motivated a shift into new kinds of human community. More detailed historical and empirical studies of the rise of modernity corroborate Anderson’s thesis that there is a rupture between nationalist consciousness and earlier forms of community belonging. For example, Eugen Weber famously argued that rural France well into the nineteenth century was not composed of communities uniformly participating in a nationalist social imaginary. Rather, French peasant life in particular was made up of extreme linguistic, cultural, economic, and political diversity and isolation. The peasants of nineteenth-century France not only spoke no French but found their communal identity in the autarkic arrangements of a village (“village particularisms”) which had persisted since the medieval age.31 The abstract notion of “France” had to be taught and often coercively forced upon the peasant communities via schooling and state policing. The idea that “there is a moral entity to which [a man] must give all, sacrifice all, his life, his future, and that this entity…is France…had to be learned.”32 In other words, the nationalist social imaginary was not present in the medieval world. Indeed, (p.149) this massive shift in consciousness undergone by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marks the very birth and emergence of a nationalist social imaginary. And although both Anderson (with his emphasis on print capitalism) and Weber (with his emphasis on roads and railways) do sometimes slide into slightly reductive approaches, nevertheless the basic thrust of their arguments remains largely interpretive and anti-naturalist.33 What the meta-narratives constructed by Anderson and Weber demonstrate is just how problematic and inadequate naturalist approaches are when trying to offer explanations of the same phenomenon. By comparison, the sociobiological insistence on a primordial drive at worst ignores the actual beliefs and meanings of agents within the social world and at best remains a kind of abstract truism. Strangely, naturalism (normally thought of as an enthusiastically empirical philosophical movement) must neglect empirical reality and diversity. Social scientists faced with nationalism need to grapple with why an individual “X” or group “Y” joined or formed a nationalist movement. But the sociobiological assertion of a basic kin identification simply does not explain why medieval peasants became Frenchmen as opposed to simply remaining autarkic in their kin and ethnic identities. By contrast, with anti-naturalist meta-narratives social scientists gain the ability to begin accounting for the emergence of nationalist consciousness and consider what sorts of historically particular motives and beliefs might drive it (as well as resistance to it). But as long as the reductive

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Historical sociologies motive remains “evolutionary,” then sorting through the relevant contingent beliefs will be difficult, if not impossible. A similar sensitivity to the narrative emergence of social imaginaries can also help social scientists avoid the mistake of naturalizing a particular social imaginary as the universal background conditions of human agency. As we saw in the case of Pinker, this is a particularly common mistake in the abuse of rational choice theory. It is also evident in the work of neoclassical economists like the University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and his coauthor Steven Dubner, who have become enormously popular through the Freakonomics series. Among many other findings, Levitt and Dubner observe that because of informational asymmetries, most real estate agents in America today undersell their clients’ houses as compared to the sale of their own personal properties.34 Reflecting on the potential ethical dimensions of this self-serving economic behavior, Levitt and Dubner note: “The point here is not that real estate agents are bad people but that they simply are people—and people inevitably respond to incentives. The incentives of the real estate business, as currently configured, plainly encourage some agents to act against the best interests of their customers.”35 In other words, rational choice is ontologized into the structure of human consciousness. Humans are motivated by a calculative rationale of maximizing preference outcomes—the contingent belief formation of actual agents is ignored. (p.150) Such arguments by Levitt and Dubner mark nothing short of an attempt to universalize the old, discredited nineteenth-century concept of homo economicus. Yet their efforts to stretch the models of rational choice to a universal account of human anthropology are simply a crude example of a subtler mistake made by many in the economics profession today. Indeed, this very issue was at the center of the debate launched by Karl Polanyi in the 1950s against what he called “formal” economics. According to Polanyi, the economics profession at that time had already begun to mistake the “logic of rational action” in terms of means and scarcity with a universal anthropology.36 What dropped out entirely was the contingent institutional development of radically different forms of economy with different forms of human agency. Put differently, human economic activity is also subject to rival social imaginaries. One way of reading Polanyi’s classic historical sociology, The Great Transformation, is as a meta-narrative about how the market system and the vision of human agency associated with it was a completely historically contingent development. Indeed, market society involved the emergence of an entirely new social imaginary—a new way of conceiving of the practices of exchange and trade as well as a new vision of the human person. Polanyi traces in great detail how early theorists of capitalism like Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, and others propagated the historical myth of the “bartering savage” as a kind of universal “economic psychology.”37 These historically naïve Page 16 of 23

Historical sociologies speculations about bartering savages are undoubtedly the antecedent to Levitt and Dubner’s own cruder push for an imperial use of rational choice in the human sciences. By contrast, Polanyi draws on extensive anthropological and ethnographic research to show how various primitive societies functioned without bartering or haggling, but completely on the basis of reciprocity and other forms of social exchange.38 Polanyi’s work thus makes clear that the subjectivity of economic man is not a universal form of consciousness. Instead, it arose along with the social formation of the market system and early capitalism. Yet too many economists today mistake one social imaginary (which forms the background conditions for today’s economic practices) with the background conditions of human agency everywhere and at all times.39 What is in fact contingent is turned into something inescapable and necessary. The only antidote for these deep shortcomings is a turn to anti-naturalist largescale narrative sociologies that emphasize the historically contingent nature of the background social imaginary. Unlike the naturalist examples treated above, the anti-naturalist study of social imaginaries is able to offer broad explanations (of the rise and fall of entire civilizations and societies, for example) while remaining in good faith before the empirical diversity of the human past. The concept of a social imaginary thus facilitates research possibilities that are not available within a naturalist grid. The empirical and philosophical once again work in close tandem. Social scientists need not fear history and its overwhelming strangeness and diversity.

(p.151) Governmentalities: studies of the state An area of research that has remained particularly in the thrall of the naturalist mindset is the modern study of the state. Since the time of Thomas Hobbes, social theorists of a naturalist persuasion have treated the state as an essential, unitary, and inescapable political reality. So, for example, in his famous Leviathan Hobbes gave a unitary account of state power as emerging out of the very necessities of human psychology in a state of nature. According to Hobbes, without state power of this sort human life continually threatened to slide back into a condition of “war, where every man is enemy to every man.”40 For Hobbes, the violent and fearful psychological condition of human beings in nature generates a strategic problem in which the only solution becomes modern state sovereignty. The institutional build of the state was thus an extension of a natural, universal build of human motivation. In this way, Hobbes advanced one of the earlier ahistorical, subtraction stories—one that turns the state into a more or less inescapable consequent of the human psychological antecedent. By contrast, anti-naturalism and its commitments to contingency can correct Hobbesian and neo-Hobbesian studies of the state through the concept of “governmentalities.” Foucault and his followers famously developed the notion of “governmentality,” having applied their genealogical sensibilities to the way the heterogeneous practices comprising modern government can be Page 17 of 23

Historical sociologies disaggregated to construct an alternative sociology of the state and modern political power. In sharp opposition to Hobbesian naturalism, Foucault sought to upend conceptions of the state as a “cold monster” that is “absolutely essential,” rejecting a “mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we think.”41 Governmentality—informed by interpretive philosophical principles— views the state not as a single entity emerging out of ahistorical psychological features, but as a kind of historical, contingent, and disaggregated process. As the neo-Foucauldian Colin Gordon puts it, the central insight of governmental approaches to the state is that “the state has no essence” and is the result of historically contingent “practices of government.”42 The neo-Hobbesian view of the state as driven by a central hub of power—a single sovereign entity with its many hands on all the crucial levers of power—is simply false. The state is instead a countless series of sometimes cooperating, sometimes contending nodes of power. No single sovereign Leviathan agency could exist or ever has existed. What is needed is not a mechanistic account of the changeless features of the state, but narratives of the emergence of the state as a cultural practice. Once again, the grand naturalist generalization fails to explain what it proposes to clarify—the mechanistic appeal to psychology does not capture the many contingent vectors forming the multiple nodes of state power. After having criticized the monolithic fiction of the state as the object of study, governmentality shifts attention to diverse practices of power—or what (p.152) Foucault refers to as the “conduct of conduct.”43 Specifically, governmentality focuses on the practices by which subjects are normalized into stable patterns of rule. Modern governmentality, according to Foucault, emerged as part of practices of bio-power and pastoral power.44 In the seventeenth century, European societies developed a broad concept of “police” as a form of power that exerted disciplinary control over people and their everyday activities in school, work, family life, and the market economy. These disciplines had their origins in the pastoral practices of the ancient church. Yet European societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took these disciplines in novel directions—inculcating industry, efficiency, and orderliness into masses of citizens. In addition, Foucault argued that modern governmentality was the result of various practices of bio-power, developed contemporaneously to the disciplines: human sciences of health, longevity, and productivity that monitored populations for mortality rates, epidemics, fertility, and other signs of biological vitality. In other words, what we call the state is an aggregation of various cultural practices (with roots in religion, the human sciences, and the disciplines, among other places). Governmentality’s focus on contingency and a disaggregated picture of the state as a cultural form thus displaces the naturalist, essentialist vision of state institutions propounded in Hobbesian and neo-Hobbesian theories.

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Historical sociologies It is impossible to do justice to Foucault’s historical narrative of the emergence of these practices (indeed, much of the force of his analysis comes from conducting detailed genealogies of these governmental practices). But for our purposes it is clear how anti-naturalist philosophical concepts can free social science researchers from the monolithic view of the state and generate a more empirically sensitive approach to this area of study. Governmentality still considers the state worthy of study—but what is meant by the state is now a heterogeneous set of beliefs and practices. This pioneering shift of focus by Foucault has in turn inspired an entire research agenda of the state by so-called “Anglo-Foucauldians” who recognize that “the state now appears simply as one element—whose functionality is historically specific and contextually variable— in multiple circuits of power, connecting a diversity of authority and forces, within a wide variety of complex assemblages.”45 In other words, the monolithic, unitary view of state power has been replaced by an underlying plurality of agencies. In addition, Foucault and those he inspired have developed novel accounts of neoliberalism as one of the chief forms of contemporary governmentality. These scholars do not view neoliberalism so much as a rejection of state power as a positive set of state practices intended to manage emergent industrial societies. So, for example, the welfare state is not seen as the antagonist of neoliberalism, but rather as a set of strategies developed in order to address (p.153) new social problems. Public housing, public health, and unemployment programs are seen by governmentality scholars as practices of disciplining and normalizing subjects. In other words, they are seen as novel forms of pastoral disciplinary control and bio-power. This is not necessarily in contradiction to neoliberalism’s famous championing of competitive market relations that shift responsibility to individuals. Rather, both the market and neoliberal practices of statecraft were meant to “actively create the conditions within which entrepreneurial and competitive conduct is possible.”46 Once the state is no longer viewed as a monolithic power, the way in which certain state practices coincide with the push toward neoliberal marketization becomes clearer. The familiar and intellectually stale binary of the state versus the market must be parsed more carefully to see which state practices are in fact part of a wider neoliberal governmentality. In this way, Foucault’s novel genealogical approach to the state has created new insights and avenues of research concerning the major ideologies that often shape and seize upon modern state power. It should now be clear that the claim that anti-naturalist social science is unable to advance research on a large-scale level of generalization is not credible. In fact, the exact opposite is true. We have seen through various examples in the large-scale study of violence, religion, secularity, nationalism, markets, and the state that anti-naturalists are able to generalize through meta-narratives and genealogies in a way that remains explanatory while naturalist generalizations in these domains are plagued by certain problems. Indeed, naturalist Page 19 of 23

Historical sociologies generalizations often fail to meet the philosophical standards of explanation in the social sciences—unable to capture the contingent causality that produces human beliefs, practices, and social reality. Naturalists also often confer a false universality, necessity, or naturalness to features of social reality that are in fact culturally contingent and variant. Anti-naturalist concepts like contestability, discontinuity, social imaginaries, and governmentalities open up new domains of empirical research. Social scientists should thus shift their research into diachronic modes like meta-narrative and genealogy. Clearly anti-naturalist philosophical assumptions generate a completely novel way of looking at seismic shifts in human social and political reality. This research agenda, moreover, is capable of producing entire sociologies of modernity without succumbing to naturalist errors about a supposed “arrow” of history, or the universal, transcendental subject, or the inevitability of a particular set of institutions or social background. Unfortunately, as we must rue continually throughout these pages, philosophy has been sidelined and neglected by social scientists who believe real science has no use for philosophy. Fortunately, a number of very innovative scholars have already begun research in new, hermeneutic directions that do not display this philosophobia. Notes:

(1.) Charles Taylor, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) 32. (2.) Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Dilemmas and Connections, 214. (3.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 247. (4.) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) I, §16. (5.) Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I. (6.) Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) 152. (7.) Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 36–7. (8.) Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011) 694. (9.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 679. Page 20 of 23

Historical sociologies (10.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 680. (11.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 682–3. (12.) For examples of critics of Pinker’s empirical findings, see: John Gray, “Steven Pinker Is Wrong About Violence and War,” The Guardian, March 13, 2015, (accessed October 7, 2015); Jeff Lewis, Media, Culture and Human Violence: From Savage Lovers to Violent Complexity (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). (13.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 681, 683. (14.) Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 139. (15.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 28. (16.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–308. (17.) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012) 6. (18.) Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153–4. (19.) For a classic and seminal (if primitive) version of this thesis, see: Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 1, trans. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896). (20.) José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 214. (21.) Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007) 3. (22.) E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975) 547–51. (23.) Wilson, Sociobiology, 565. (24.) See, for example: Vernon Reynolds, Vincent Falger, and Ian Vine, eds., The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Discrimination, Racism and Nationalism (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1981) 11–12. (25.) R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong, Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evolution, Nationalism, and Patriotism (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 26–7. (26.) Shaw and Wong, Genetic Seeds, 143. Page 21 of 23

Historical sociologies (27.) Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 37. (28.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006) 4. (29.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. (30.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44, 82. (31.) Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976) 47; see also: 9, 67. (32.) Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen, 111, 114. (33.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37–46; Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen, 195–220, 291. (34.) Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: Harper Collins, 2011) 68–73. (35.) Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics, 73. (36.) Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, eds. K. Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg, and Harry Pearson (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957) 243. (37.) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011) 46. (38.) Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 50. (39.) As Polanyi puts this insight: “The relation between formal economics and the human economy is, in effect, contingent.” Polanyi, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” 247. (40.) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909– 1914) ch. XIII. (41.) Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2004) 109. (42.) Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). (43.) Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” 48.

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Historical sociologies (44.) See Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality: Vol. 1 An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). (45.) Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 5. (46.) Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, “Introduction,” in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (London: University College London Press, 1996) 5.

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Ethics and democracy

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Ethics and democracy Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords An anti-naturalist approach overcomes the strict dichotomy between facts and values. Social scientists are free to take up ethically engaged research projects if they are so inclined. This chapter shows how political scientists working within an interpretive, anti-naturalist framework can legitimately take an interest in ethical critique, critical sociologies, and democratic theory. Indeed, antinaturalist and interpretive philosophy offers social scientists: a better account of the status of values within social reality; an understanding of the ethical significance of the human past; and a critique of technocratic forms of political organization. Interpretive approaches are also linked to a more deliberative theory of democracy. All this implies social scientists have ethical and not just conceptual reasons for adopting an interpretive approach. Keywords:   fact–value dichotomy, normative inquiry, ethics, democratic theory, technocracy

We have been arguing that anti-naturalist philosophy has dramatic consequences for social scientific research as an empirical enterprise. From sociology to psychology, from political science to economics, the approaches and explanations currently employed by researchers are radically reconfigured by anti-naturalist philosophy. This reconfiguration makes a form of inquiry possible that houses a broad-tent of philosophers, theorists, social scientists, and laypeople. For example, our anti-naturalist philosophy is one way to ground the important work of hermeneutic psychologists like Philip Cushman and his antiscientistic notions of selfhood and therapeutic practice.1 Yet it also shares clear affinities with Jeffrey Alexander and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology who Page 1 of 25

Ethics and democracy see themselves as inheriting the legacy of Clifford Geertz and the “cultural approach.”2 In the study of race, we find common cause with the famous work of Stuart Hall and more recently Paul Spickard who insist on a constructivist approach to racial politics.3 In short, anti-naturalism offers philosophical resources to a diverse and dynamic range of research programs. Up to now the reasons we have given as to why social scientists and philosophers should turn to anti-naturalism have largely centered on problems of explanation, concept formation, and empirical inquiry. However, we now want to look at these claims from a different and perhaps surprising angle—namely, do social scientists and philosophers have ethical and political reasons for adopting anti-naturalism? This may seem strange because the modern division of disciplines implies that ethical and political considerations are normative and therefore logically distinct and separate from the empirical concerns of the social sciences. But it is our belief that this high wall separating the normative and the empirical is in fact one more feature of naturalism that is challenged by anti-naturalist philosophy. Indeed, the empirical and normative dimensions of human agency can be integrated in certain important ways by a turn toward the anti-naturalist paradigm. When this shift is made, channels of communication open between social science, ethics, and political theory that are normally shut off by the specialized and disciplinary nature of the modern university. At the most general level our claim is that because ethical and political theories often imply substantive anthropological conceptions of human agency, there is an overlap between the concerns of empirical and normative disciplines in the human sciences.4 However, we must be especially careful in the use of antinaturalist terminology when entering into such controversy. (p.157) Most ethicists today use the term “naturalism” to refer to the rejection of supernatural sources for ethical life.5 This is clearly not our sense of the term and we are not taking a position on those particular ethical debates in this chapter. Instead, we want to focus on the way social scientists have compelling ethical and political motives for turning to anti-naturalism. We will advance this argument in three interrelated parts. First, we argue that anti-naturalism gives social scientists a better account of the nature and role of values in human life. Social scientists at least extending as far back as Max Weber have struggled with the question of how to conceptualize values from a scientific perspective. Too often the result has been the extreme poles of either a naïve objectivism or a self-defeating subjectivism about values. But anti-naturalism gives social theorists a much more nuanced and philosophically tenable account of values in human life. Second, anti-naturalism reveals the ethical significance of history and the human past. History is not simply a massive data set or antiquarian archive of facts about the past. Rather, the past is generative of ethical and value sources within human life. Finally, anti-naturalism allows social scientists to develop a novel political theory of Page 2 of 25

Ethics and democracy modernity and democratic theory. Anti-naturalism in particular gives reasons why social scientists ought to favor deliberative democratic forms over technocratic ones, which rely on naturalist philosophy. In sum, while social scientists undoubtedly have empirical, conceptual, and explanatory reasons for turning to anti-naturalism, they also have ethical and political ones. But to say this is to cast doubt on one of the most fixed assumptions of modern social science—namely, that there is a strict dichotomy between description and prescription, empirical and normative, fact and value. Our views of anti-naturalist theory give philosophers, social scientists, and policymakers reasons for complicating these binaries. One caveat before beginning: our goal is to clarify the ways social scientists are free to engage in the critical and evaluative study of ethical and political life, but this does not mean we believe social science is the same thing as ethics or ethical critique. Social science, generally speaking, is concerned with the study and explanation of human behavior. This need not have overt ethical concerns. It is perfectly valid, for instance, for social scientists to simply set out to describe the economic features of globalization or rising authoritarian attitudes in North Atlantic societies. In other words, social scientists are free to concentrate their efforts on factual claims and explanations. However, anti-naturalism does give us a much subtler, more nuanced account of the distinction between facts and values in social scientific inquiry. But this does not imply that the distinction should be thrown out altogether. Rather, anti-naturalism shows how one of social science’s valid research concerns might be ethical and political critique. That is, social scientists who adopt anti-naturalism are able to critically engage and normatively evaluate human (p.158) ethical positions. This opens up a shared space of inquiry between political theory, ethics, and empirical social science.

Anti-naturalism and the nature of ethical values One of the reasons why social scientists ought to adopt anti-naturalism is because this framework makes more sense out of the nature of human ethical life and values. In particular, anti-naturalist theory helps social scientists avoid a false naturalist dichotomy in which values are either conceived of as an objective science or else as a completely relativistic, subjective phenomenon. Instead, anti-naturalist theory offers a conception of social science as having a critical role to play when it comes to studying values, while also affirming the inherent contestability of human ethical life. We will begin by scrutinizing the dual naturalist errors of objectivism and subjectivism when treating values, before turning to anti-naturalism’s alternative. Many modern accounts of ethics and values operate on the tacit assumption that human normative life will eventually reach some kind of objective, normal science akin to physics, chemistry, and the other hard sciences.6 In particular, under the sway of naturalism, those concerned with ethics are too often engaged Page 3 of 25

Ethics and democracy in a quest for what Thomas Kuhn dubbed a “normal science.” Kuhn defined normal science as “research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.”7 For example, in chemistry or physics today research is carried out within a wider accumulated set of theoretical assumptions and foundations that are taken as given. Introductory students can be taught from textbooks in which the foundations of the discipline are set for all practitioners. In the natural sciences such agreed-upon foundations are the norm. Those who study ethics, influenced by naturalism, have often expected or at least hope for a normal science of human values to develop analogous to the historical progress of the natural sciences. Then ethics too might have universal foundations that all students of human values and ethical life would master before inquiring any further into the subject. The naturalist drive for a normal science is evident in the founders of some of the most influential theories of modern ethics. For example, a central premise of the utilitarian account of ethical life is that the ultimate goal of human action is happiness defined as pleasure or utility-maximizing. One of the classical figures of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, implied that this crucial assumption could be established in the form of an empirical “proof” from the observation of “fact and experience.”8 A straightforward claim to empirically brute facts thus grounds Mill’s utilitarianism. There is the belief in Mill (and (p.159) much of utilitarianism thereafter) that ethics will begin from a set of completely stabilized assumptions. After all, if chemistry enjoys stability around the periodic table and physics around Newtonian mechanics, why shouldn’t ethics find a similar foundational core around utility? As is well known, this set of empirical assumptions in utilitarian ethics in turn had a massive influence on the social sciences through neoclassical economics. The conception of human agency developed by utilitarian philosophers helped create a later affinity for an idealized model of preference-maximizing rationality within the market. But utilitarian philosophers are not the only ones who try to ground a theory of human values on claims that are akin to a normal, objective science. Such naturalist tendencies are also found (albeit in much different form) in utilitarianism’s biggest rival in the Anglophone world, deontology. Deontology holds that all ethical actions comply with universal rules of conduct or duties as formulated by an ideally rational agent (the word deontology literally means the study of duty). The founder of deontology, Immanuel Kant, argued that any true duty could be universalized without contradiction. These duties were to “hold for every rational being as such” and do so “completely a priori and free from everything empirical in pure rational concepts only.”9 For example, famously Kant argued that lying was always morally wrong and that this could be determined by reason alone because this action could not be universalized. Ethics thus achieved foundations in what Kant called “apodictic” or absolutely Page 4 of 25

Ethics and democracy certain duties that every rational agent would know he or she had to follow. Where Mill argued the indisputable foundations of ethics were empirical, Kant claimed they were evident to reason. Yet the goal was remarkably similar: a normal science or knowledge achieved among all reasonable practitioners.10 The first move when studying human values thus becomes to recognize that they are objectively grounded in a universal framework. Social scientists might go on studying the empirical diversity of values in the world, but rational inquiry into ethics on its own terms demonstrates a quasi-scientific convergence. Such expectations can then fuel empirical expectations about the progress of history toward a unity of values as modernization and rationalization take place. Indeed, both Kant and Mill in their own ways expected a sociology of modernity to involve a kind of developmental logic. These developmental logics were critically scrutinized at length earlier, but they highlight the way that certain assumptions about the objective status of ethics can inspire particular visions of how modernity will develop. By contrast, anti-naturalism draws attention to the deep problem with the expectation that values will converge on a normal science. We argued above that anti-naturalism assumes that human meanings, beliefs, values, identities, and actions result from historically contingent processes. The natural sciences typically deal in a kind of Humean or sufficient form of causality, in which the appearance of a certain set of general antecedent conditions “X” necessitates (p.160) the occurrence of a consequent set of conditions “Y” (so long as there are no intervening factors). For instance, as long as the right chemicals, temperatures, pressures, etc., are in place, the star produces light; or the acid is neutralized; or the gas solidifies. The goal of the natural sciences in this capacity is to identify formal, ahistorical conditions that generate specific predictable outcomes that can be generalized into laws. But in the case of human beliefs and actions, an antecedent set of conditions “X” is never sufficient to produce a consequent belief or action “Y.” A person presented with a decision (say, whether to launch a missile that will harm civilians) can foil expectations and make unexpected choices because of a creative capacity. Antecedents are never fully determinative of consequents.11 The upshot of this set of anti-naturalist arguments is that the very stuff of ethics differs from the natural sciences because it is shaped by the creative use of language. For this reason anti-naturalism emphasizes the radical historicity of human belief and practice. Individual agents form their beliefs contingently and creatively against rival inherited traditions. There is an inherit contestability to meanings that does not allow for a more straightforward convergence of the kind found in the natural sciences. This is because ethical systems are the fruit of contingent forms of causality that can be contested. The model of a good life or a just society might be expressed in one way but it can be challenged by a rival set of contingent meanings. Thus, anti-naturalism teaches social scientists

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Ethics and democracy and ethicists to expect a certain amount of disagreement and debate as ineliminable. In particular, anti-naturalism is skeptical of claims to necessary sets of beliefs or desires. Are all human beings really at bottom pursuing utility as pleasure? Are all humans somehow necessarily bound to an abstract ideal of rationality (something often assumed not only by deontologists but also neoclassical economists and rational choice theorists)? The necessity of any one set of beliefs is incompatible with the creative contingency of human self-interpretation. Sensitivity to the historical contingency of human belief formation reveals the necessity of a certain model of rationality or the pursuit of utility to be false. As Nietzsche famously quipped regarding utilitarianism: “Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.”12 He equally could have quipped: “man does not strive to universalize all ethical actions, only Kantians do,” or “man does not hold all goods to be complete and transitive, only RAND scholars and neoclassical economists do.” The serious philosophical point behind Nietzsche’s quip is that the utilitarian definition of happiness as pleasure through maximizing preferences is peculiar to a particular historical time and place. In other words, the beliefs and desires that Mill took to be objectively necessary are in fact internal to a historical tradition. Indeed, Nietzsche is drawing on a pessimistic strain of German Romanticism that does not seek universalizing maxims or feelings of utilitarian pleasure or perhaps even rational consistency. Rather, Nietzsche (p.161) believed some Europeans might pursue a heroic life while renouncing the pleasures and perhaps even the wellbeing of the rest of humanity. The point is not whether there is something objectionable in Nietzsche’s elitist ethical vision (we believe that there is), but only that he is right to see the starting point for ethical theory is the field of contingent history and not Mill’s or Kant’s search for the stable objective assumptions of a normal science. The form of causality typical of human agency therefore has a massive effect on how social theorists should conceptualize human values. History and contingency are central to the proper conceptualization of human values; a normal science akin to the natural sciences is not. But there is another important way to draw this key distinction between the natural sciences and knowledge of human values. Where the facts of ethics are centrally concerned with phenomena that are part of a particular cultural and linguistic world, the natural sciences seek facts that exist outside any one of these worlds. In this vein, Bernard Williams has drawn attention to the difference between what he dubs the “absolute conception” of facts appropriate to the natural sciences and the kind of knowledge possible within ethics. The “absolute conception” of facts in the natural sciences refers to some feature of reality that exists independently of our experience of it.13 The circumference of the earth, the velocity of a falling object, and the temperature at which a Page 6 of 25

Ethics and democracy particular liquid turns into a gas all exist independently of our perceptions of these phenomena. The proper conception of ethical values also involves claims about facts. For example, as Williams argues, there is a fact of the matter as to what counts as a lie or being a coward or expressing gratitude or exercising brutality within a particular cultural context. These facts about values, moreover, are identifiable by outsiders to a particular culture so long as they are familiarized with the relevant criteria.14 This means that within the horizon of a particular social world there are facts of the matter as to whether a particular political leader is a habitual liar or acted like a coward (albeit like all facts, they can be disputed). However, apprehending these ethical facts requires what Williams—following a pioneer of interpretive social science, Clifford Geertz—dubs “thick” knowledge of the cultures in question.15 As we saw in our analysis of ethnography, thick knowledge is a grasp of beliefs and actions within their nuanced webs of meaning and significance within a life-world. It follows that there is a deep disanalogy between the natural sciences and the world of human values. Namely, ethical facts (unlike their counterparts in the natural sciences) cannot be construed in terms of an absolute conception of the world. Ethical facts can and do guide all human agents through particular social worlds—for example, the world of Japanese culinary if someone eats at a sushi shop in Tokyo or the realm of Latin American Catholicism if a traveler enters a cathedral in Bogota, Colombia. But these facts about values cannot orient us within the practices of every social-cultural world. (p.162) Indeed, even when highly homogenous societies exhibit a great deal of agreement about ethical facts (something which is not typically part of the experience of pluralistic modernity), they still do not attain a convergence of the kind achieved in the natural sciences because their ethical facts are dependent on meanings and beliefs, not necessary causal features of the physical universe.16 So facts about values need to be carefully conceptualized by social theorists and ethicists alike. They cannot be treated as universally objective or translatable across cultural contexts. Facts about values do not travel across deep cultural diversity the way luggage or some other brute objects do. One should not expect to find proto-Kantians or proto-utilitarians when studying different cultures and milieus. Nor should social scientists expect a logic of development through history to a final convergence on the underlying facts about values (the way we saw Fukuyama or Pinker assume earlier). Does it follow from these arguments that the proper way for social theorists and ethicists to conceptualize values is in terms of a full-blown relativism? Are values to be treated by those studying human ethical life as completely subjective? Ironically, this opposite extreme view is also often inspired by naturalism. In the modern social sciences it was popularized by Max Weber’s famous claim that Page 7 of 25

Ethics and democracy facts and values “are completely heterogeneous” such that “whenever a man of science brings in his own value-judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases.”17 Weber’s work was enormously influential in spreading the view that a true science of society requires treating values as purely subjective (although this is likely a misreading of Weber).18 Here the basic naturalist idea is that values are not part of the factual, mind-independent furniture of the universe but are completely mind-dependent. A firm logical distinction is therefore created between facts on one side and values on the other. Again, anti-naturalism moves beyond this impasse by conceptualizing the status of human values in a much different way than that sometimes ascribed to Weber. Indeed, too often when naturalist expectations are foiled, social scientists veer into an exaggerated skepticism about the possibility of any objectivity whatsoever. But this has to do with an exaggerated depreciation of forms of knowing beyond those typical of the hard sciences. As we argued at length in Chapters 2 and 3 on philosophy, progress can be made in ethics as in social science through comparative forms of objectivity and reasoning. In this conception of objectivity a superior theory or tradition is not selected in absolute terms by appeals to foundational facts, but instead through comparing which theory presents an epistemic gain and “error-correction in relation to an earlier view.”19 Ethical theories and social scientific theories share this form of objectivity. However, there is a further feature of anti-naturalist philosophy that breaks from a simple reduction of values to the subjective and nonfactual. Namely, antinaturalism clarifies how social scientific theories are unable to achieve (p.163) complete neutrality on ethical questions. The central point we want to develop here is that neither naturalism nor anti-naturalism can remain ethically or politically innocent because they are inherently evaluative of ethical forms that draw on their rival to understand human action. More needs to be said to clarify this crucial point. Anti-naturalism—although foremost a theory about how to study human behavior in the social sciences—is not ethically neutral. This can be seen both in its critical enterprise and in its inspiration of positive, substantive approaches to ethics and political theory. However, from the outset it is also crucial to state that anti-naturalism is not allied or fixed by logical chains to any one particular ethical tradition. Instead, it eliminates certain approaches or ways of thinking about ethics. In other words, anti-naturalism can tell us what a justifiable ethics is not. Specifically, anti-naturalist insight undermines ethical theories that rely on social scientific naturalism for their notions of human agency. Such theories of values are objectively worse than those that do not rely on naturalism.

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Ethics and democracy The insight that human beliefs are historically contingent does eliminative work in the field of ethics as to what sorts of selves we ought or ought not to pursue. Naturalist conceptions of selfhood and values are excluded from consideration. Definitely off the table are any ethical theories that rely in some essential way on naturalist social scientific knowledge to make good on their claims. This is almost certainly the case for some varieties of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism tries to maximize happiness or pleasure for the greatest number by calculating the consequences of particular actions.20 For this reason, utilitarianism is often entangled in making mass-scale predictions about cause and effect. For example, will enacting a particular educational policy on standardized testing maximize or minimize the pleasure of the greatest number within society? What about employing automated speed enforcement traps to keep drivers from surpassing the speed limit on streets and highways? Does launching something as complex as a war increase or decrease utility? Answering such questions requires having some strongly predictive knowledge of cause and effect in the realm of human actions and beliefs. The social reforms sought by utilitarians are thus closely tied to the ability to produce predictive scientific results in the social sciences.21 This is because for utilitarians the value of actions lies “in their causal properties of producing valuable states of affairs” as assumed by the utilitarian criterion of pleasure or utility-maximizing.22 Yet the contingency of causality in human agency entails that no observer, no matter how benevolent and disinterested, has available the strongly predictive knowledge of the natural sciences. This is because prediction in the natural sciences is based on our ability to identify certain antecedent conditions that necessarily generate a set of consequent results. But no such sufficient causal bond is available in the case of human beliefs and actions. (p.164) Indeed, no one—not even utilitarian philosophers—has such strongly predictive knowledge of human affairs. Of course, future utilitarians who understand the problems with naturalist social science might try to reform their tradition to disentangle it from these stronger predictive claims. We have singled out utilitarianism for the purposes of illustration, but in fact this critique would hold true for any ethical or political theory that depends upon social scientific naturalism to predict outcomes within the domain of human action (certain forms of Social Darwinism, for instance, supposedly scientific strains of Marxism, as well as Pinker’s neoHobbesian liberalism). So anti-naturalism gives us criteria for evaluating and choosing between ethical theories as objectively better and worse, without logically binding us to any one particular tradition of ethics. A further way in which anti-naturalist philosophy does this is by critiquing ethical systems that reduce beliefs, desires, motives, and preferences to an ahistorical, essentialist fixed core. We explained in Chapter 4 on concept formation that essentialism is a naturalist way of organizing social science that assumes there are bits of social reality that remain universally constant regardless of time or place. Under the influence of Page 9 of 25

Ethics and democracy naturalism, history and its empirical diversity becomes an obstacle to ethical and social scientific inquiry alike.23 Complex webs of belief, meaning, and significance come to appear as stumbling blocks on the road to achieving scientific and objective status. Once again, primary examples of this naturalist impairment come from two of the most influential schools of modern ethics, utilitarianism and deontology. We have already seen that utilitarianism bases itself on the assumption that human action should be guided by maximizing the greatest happiness/pleasure for the greatest number of individuals, while Kant proposed that the goal of ethical life is to follow universal duties that can be applied equally to all rational agents. The problem with both traditions, in this respect, is a reduction of human ethical life to following rules or what others have referred to as “moralism.” It appears in both cases that the problem of ethical life is discovering which rules, maxims, or calculus to follow for decision-making. Moralism marks an intense narrowing of what counts as ethics by modern philosophers who have focused on rules and obligations. As Williams has put it, “theorists have particularly tended to favor the most general expressions used in ethical discussion—good, right, ought,” instead of thick conceptions like lie, coward, or gratitude, in part because they have been driven by the “reductionist belief” that the former concepts contained the “more specific ethical conceptions.”24 So naturalism becomes the vehicle for the narrowing of ethics to a perennial, ahistorical set of concepts and rule-following concerns. Ethical motives (insofar as they can be properly called “ethical”) are always and in all places concerned with, say, maximizing utility or universalizing moral maxims. Human ethical agency is thus reduced to a set of ahistorical motives that lose sight of historicity and contingency. (p.165) Taylor has also been key in criticizing the naturalist reduction of ethics to morals. In particular he has observed the way this naturalist drive toward reduction is evident in Kant’s search for a set of formal rules that can sufficiently guide human action. A formal imperative that gives criteria for universalizing moral maxims or an imagined original position outside of all historically contingent beliefs and desires captures the ethical mind. In this way, the interpretively rich languages of thick historical traditions “get marginalized or even expunged altogether” in favor of an “epistemologically motivated reduction and homogenization of the ‘moral.’”25 In this way, “a naturalist account of man [that] comes in the wake of the scientific revolution” encourages “eschewing what we might call subject-related properties” or those that cannot be accounted for from an absolute standpoint free of all historically embedded perspectives.26 Once again, anti-naturalist philosophical insights give social theorists and ethicists alike a fuller account of values in human life. The reduction of ethics to morals proves to be the contingent result of a particular

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Ethics and democracy set of traditions within liberal societies—not the universal starting point of a normal science of ethics. Anti-naturalism thus reveals the naturalist drive toward reduction and ahistoricism to be premised on a deep philosophical confusion. Historical contingency is neglected. So social scientists should not remain indifferent in the field of ethics. Rather, without chaining adherents to a particular view of ethics, anti-naturalism does critical and eliminative work, disqualifying normative theories that rely on naturalist conceptions. It follows that the social scientific view of values cannot be one of either normal science or value relativism. Rather, social science and ethics cast mutual light on one another in the effort to properly grasp and conceptualize their status within human life.

The ethical significance of the human past So far we have seen how anti-naturalist theory gives social scientists an account of values that avoids naïve objectivism on one side and problematic relativism on the other. We now want to show that anti-naturalism is not limited to critical and eliminative work but also has a constructive side when it comes to ethics. This constructive side makes clear the ethical significance of the human past, which otherwise social scientists tend to reduce to simply a vast field of bygone facts— like a massive archive or dataset. By contrast, anti-naturalism highlights the way that the human self can take on various expressive forms. The past thus becomes a way to open up new possibilities for human identity. We have already seen that anti-naturalist philosophy assumes that human beings creatively and contingently form beliefs against the background of (p.166) historically inherited traditions. This means human agency is radically historical in character. Because human agency is radically historical in this way, antinaturalist social science research into the past can generate, inspire, and reveal new untapped sources for ethics and politics. This means history is not a mere hindrance to theory-building because of its empirical diversity and complexity. Nor is history simply a descriptive set of past cases. Rather, from the interpretive viewpoint, history contains certain ethical and political potentialities. Indeed, some of the most important ethicists of the last two centuries have made this creative turn toward the interpretive recovery of history as a vital source for ethics. A few brief examples of actual ethical programs that take into account anti-naturalist insights will make this point clear. One of the path-breaking works in this more anti-naturalist approach to ethics was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” in which he insisted that history was not merely of antiquarian interest but bore ethical significance. Famously, Nietzsche argued that human beings live an historical existence insofar as the past is always actively present as a set of inherited meanings, beliefs, practices, and institutions that he called “horizons.” Page 11 of 25

Ethics and democracy History has ethical “uses” according to Nietzsche because it is a source of inspiration and criticism for our own specific ethical and political inheritances.27 In his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche used history to carry out both these critical and inspirational tasks. So he famously attacked the assumption that “unegoistic” moral intuitions are a universal and necessary feature of human ethical life. Instead, he saw these as originating in ancient Jewish and Christian cultures, later becoming secularized through the Enlightenment. So history could show that what is thought to be a necessary feature of human ethical belief is actually contingent upon a particular set of cultural developments. Likewise, Nietzsche sought inspiration in Homeric Greek hero ethics of self-affirmation and anti-egalitarianism.28 The point here is by no means to promote Nietzsche’s ethical vision but rather to note the way antinaturalist insight unveils the uses of history—both critical and vindicatory—for ethical life. A wide range of philosophers has taken this historical and more interpretive turn with regard to ethics developing an impressive array of views. Perhaps Nietzsche’s most famous acolyte, Michel Foucault, insisted that historical inquiry could be put to ethical uses by denaturalizing what is considered natural and rendering contingent what is believed to be necessary. Foucault thus worked for much of his life to show that institutions like the asylum, the hospital, the school, and the prison were the result of particular cultural histories, and not inescapable features of human social and political life.29 But Foucault likewise believed that history could be put to inspirational or vindicatory uses in the search for values to orient human life. Thus, Foucault encouraged his readers to adopt a “limit attitude,” one that treated the past as a source for the “experimental” adoption of new values.30 In the latter part of his (p.167) life, Foucault immersed himself in the ethics of the ancient Greeks and Romans as part of an effort to formulate new conceptions of self for the present.31 Nietzsche and Foucault return to history to formulate an ethics that breaks with many of the values of the Enlightenment and of the Christian and Jewish religions. But this need not be the case. Charles Taylor has also taken this historical turn in order to discover deeper ethical sources for the project of modernity and some Enlightenment values. He has also argued that the recovery of Christian humanism is a better ethical source for modern commitments such as democracy and human rights.32 Although far more condemnatory about the nature of modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre has returned to past ethical sources in order to argue that the virtue ethics of Aristotle provides the most promising alternative to what he sees as the moral incoherence of late capitalist societies.33 The point is that the return to history made possible by antinaturalist conceptions of social reality can take various rival forms depending upon which traditions are tapped. The examples here are various and impressive —for instance, Heidegger’s call for a return to history in order to overcome modern “homelessness” or in a very different vein, Philip Pettit’s attempt to Page 12 of 25

Ethics and democracy revive the tradition of ancient republicanism.34 Such examples show that antinaturalist theory, in addition to critically eliminating certain distorting naturalist features from ethics, opens up historical sources for self-interpretation and critique that go far beyond the possibilities of the many ahistorical and reductive approaches to ethics that are inspired by naturalism. In addition, taking a historical turn in ethics means that overly voluntaristic or autonomous conceptions of the ethical subject become increasingly implausible.35 This is what is still valuable in Foucault’s polemic about the “death of the subject.”36 Anti-naturalism implies a certain anthropology—and this positive vision is a point of overlap between social science and ethics. Specifically, anti-naturalism assumes that human beings always act against a background of inherited cultural and linguistic beliefs and practices. These are what Gadamer dubbed “traditions.”37 The importance of situating the subject historically is seeing that ethically agents always begin from thickly embodied traditions. Kant’s transcendental subject and Rawls’s original position run afoul of the deeper historicity of all human ethical thought. As Hegel saw, ethics and political theory must grapple with the historical, customary world in which beliefs take form. In sum, anti-naturalist philosophy conceptualizes the human past and social reality in such a way that generates a substantive impact on ethical inquiry. Once naturalism has been abandoned, history is no longer simply antiquarian but a source of rival and contestable human meanings. This does not mean that anti-naturalism binds thinkers to any one particular ethic or substantive vision. Anti-naturalist social scientists and ethicists need not become champions of Greek thought before Socrates like Nietzsche and (p.168) Williams, limit avantgardists like Foucault, neo-Aristotelians like MacIntyre, or Catholic humanists like Taylor.38 The positive content of ethics is left for particular anti-naturalist thinkers to continue to sort out and debate through comparative modes of reasoning and objectivity. Indeed, perhaps some future philosophers will find a way to reconfigure utilitarianism and deontology so that they free themselves from naturalist conceptualizations and tendencies. Regardless, what should be clear are the ways in which anti-naturalism transforms social science’s view of the ethical dimensions of the human past.

Anti-naturalism and democratic theory We have suggested that social scientists should turn toward anti-naturalism because it offers a less problematic account of the role of values in human ethical and social life. Anti-naturalists conceptualize values as always contestable and contingent, never a fully objective, normal science, but also not simply relativistic. This contrasts with naturalist-inspired conceptions of values as either quasi-scientific or completely subjective. Anti-naturalists also view ethics and social science alike as a field of meanings that grapple with the double hermeneutic features of human agency. We want to conclude by showing Page 13 of 25

Ethics and democracy how anti-naturalist philosophy and its conception of the relationship between social science and values makes a critical theory of modernity and democracy possible. Naturalism, because it claims to advance a predictive science of society, can be used to legitimate top-down, abstractly representative, technocratic, and elitist forms of power. This means that in democracies there is a tendency by naturalists to favor rule by experts. This contrasts with anti-naturalism’s rejection of a specialized science of society and human behavior. Indeed, because anti-naturalists hold that human beliefs are the products of creative reasoning, their social theory tends to legitimate more deliberative and participatory forms of democracy. The reasons for this are philosophical. Specifically, anti-naturalism makes possible the insight that the philosophical frameworks guiding social scientific research are never simply doctrines guiding empirical research and explanation. Rather, naturalism and anti-naturalism are also either allied or hostile to certain ways of organizing power. This is because social scientific theory never simply observes reality but also plays a role in shaping it. Gadamer was one of the first to recognize this when he wrote that “the chief task” of interpretive theory in politics is to guard “against the domination of technology based on science…the idolatry of scientific method and the anonymous authority of the sciences” and in doing so vindicate “the noblest task of the citizen—decision making according to one’s own responsibility— instead of conceding that task to the expert.”39 (p.169) We want to briefly give readers a sense of the rich and complex critique of technocracy that antinaturalist social science has generated before turning to a more humanistic and democratic alternative.40 Currently the dominant paradigm for politics in North Atlantic societies is a form of representative democracy buttressed by the claims of naturalist experts and advisors. In the early twentieth century new kinds of ahistorical and formal naturalism became highly enmeshed in the study of the state. This, we saw, was a dramatic departure from late nineteenth-century views of politics and the state, which were conceived in terms of developmental narratives of the progression of a nation through certain fixed stages.41 Suddenly, social theorists turned from grand narratives to ahistorical models, correlations, and classifications said to hold across time and place. Political, social, and economic outcomes were explained by reference to functional requirements, psychological typologies, general features of human rationality, and formal analyses of processes.42 But this set of intellectual developments was also tightly related to actual changes in power and authority within the flesh-and-blood world of politics. One of the first groups to recognize this fact was the first British New Left. This was a group of intellectuals headed by figures like E. P. Thompson, Raymond Page 14 of 25

Ethics and democracy Williams, and Stuart Hall that hoped to articulate a more humanistic form of socialism.43 What was unique about this movement was the critique it generated of both Western liberal democracies and Soviet communist regimes as relying on authority that drew from naturalist theory. In the Soviet Union, a particularly crude form of Marxism authorized a hierarchical organization of the state, in which technocratic party elites engineered society according to supposedly inescapable laws. As Stalin put it, society could be explained “in accordance with the laws of movement of matter.”44 This was because “the origin of social ideas, social theories, political views, and political institutions should not be sought for in the ideas, theories, views and political institutions themselves but in the conditions of the material life of society.”45 In this way Stalinism encouraged Soviet leaders to treat human beings as objects susceptible to scientific manipulation. Leaders of the New Left like Thompson thus denounced Soviet statism as a form of pseudo-scientific authority that belittled human agency and justified mass-scale violence.46 A parallel set of criticisms was launched against the influence of naturalism in liberal capitalist societies. So, the young Alasdair MacIntyre provided a particularly scathing critique of the central institutions of liberal capitalism as being highly hierarchical because of an “enormous faith in the ‘levers’ of social engineering.”47 According to MacIntyre, claims to a technocratic science lifted bureaucrats, corporate managers, economists, and other sorts of naturalist authorities and experts into positions of power. For this reason life in the liberal democracies was increasingly dominated by a politics in which the (p.170) “mode of understanding human beings resembles the mode of understanding natural objects in that to understand is to control.”48 Against the naturalist forms of power in both communist and capitalist countries, the British New Left tried to stake out a more democratic and humanistic position. So Thompson insisted on the creative “activity and agency” of human persons as an alternative to the increasingly mechanistic politics of the age.49 In this way, as early as the mid-twentieth century, anti-naturalist and interpretive theory was viewed not merely as value neutral and descriptive but as generating a political critique of some of the most powerful institutions of modernity. Yet today the language around the state in particular has shifted significantly from the time of the Cold War. Particularly there has been a turn toward “governance” strategies that hand off traditional state power to markets and networks. The turn toward governance was part of a broader critique of the state’s welfare functions, a call for decentralization, and doubts about the continued efficacy of the state in the face of globalization. However, none of these changes mean the naturalism that so worried the British New Left has disappeared. Generally speaking, the new governance strategies have drawn on two social science paradigms—the first a naturalist variant of rational choice theory calling for

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Ethics and democracy markets and the second a naturalist sociological institutionalism advocating networks. The turn toward governance strategies began when intellectuals and activists argued that the twentieth-century state was beleaguered by overload and inefficiency in a way that required the implementation of fiscal austerity, monetary control, and the rolling back of services and institutions.50 These critics drew on rational choice theory to argue that the market or quasi-markets should replace bureaucracy because of their purported superior efficiency. The bureaucracy was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with an “entrepreneurial government” based on competition, markets, customers, and measured outcomes.51 At the level of national politics, these reforms were inaugurated in the Englishspeaking world via Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States.52 The policymakers brought to power by these movements drew on rational choice theories like public choice and the principal–agent problem to argue that just as private sector corporations needed to ensure managers acted on behalf of shareholders, so too did public administration need to ensure elected representatives acted on behalf of voters.53 In this manner, a tight analogy was drawn between the organization of the state and that of markets. Specifically, the public sector needed to be redesigned by policy elites who understood rational choice theory to create new incentive environments and quasi-market setups that aligned the interests of agents (managers/representatives) with their principals (shareholders/voters). Along with this shift came the popular political polemics denouncing old-style bureaucracy and public officials, and championing markets and entrepreneurs.54 Governments (p.171) needed to be run like businesses not only because the old modes were inefficient, but also because public officials could not be trusted to work according to bygone motives like civic self-sacrifice and the public good. A science of rational behavior would radically overhaul the institutions of the state in the name of efficiency and economic rationality. In this way, the critique of the state may have changed the content of naturalist expertise called upon for political power, but it did not actually challenge the technocratic form. From the perspective of anti-naturalist social science, one kind of naturalist authority waned even as the other waxed. The second type of shift toward governance came later and was in some ways a critical response to rational choice. These advocates of governance accepted neoliberal arguments about the inflexible and unresponsive nature of the traditional hierarchical bureaucracy. They also added their belief that the crisis of the state was aggravated by globalization, which showed the state could not go at it alone, but needed to pursue coordinated action with groups within civil society and across borders. However, unlike the rational choice theorists, these advocates of networks rejected that good governance comes from individual Page 16 of 25

Ethics and democracy incentive mechanisms within the context of markets and quasi-markets. Indeed, these advocates for new governance feared the spread of selfish and acquisitive understandings of citizenship in modern capitalist societies. Instead, they proposed communitarian forms of trust, social participation, and voluntary associations as the key to salvaging the state. The state needed to back off certain traditional bureaucratic functions in order to steer networks of civic associations, nonprofits, and other nongovernmental actors. What was needed, in other words, was a proliferation of networks and partnerships.55 Once again, social science naturalism became a form of power and not simply description. Drawing on sociologists ranging from Emile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu to Herbert Marcuse, advocates of networks claimed that alternative forms of rationality to those proposed by neoclassical economics needed to be brought into the picture. Specifically, they championed theories of social norms and roles within institutional frameworks as shaping human behavior. For example, so-called new institutionalists argued that individual beliefs and actions needed to be explained in terms of the institutional settings that generated them.56 In this way, agency was downplayed in these theories in favor of the right kinds of social norms shaping institutions as fixing the content of individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and reasoning.57 Institutions, broadly understood, became actors themselves, transcending time and space to create certain social and political outcomes. For this reason, despite all their differences, advocates of networks were no less naturalistic than rational choice theorists, rejecting historical contingency and using ahistorical forms of analysis to identify midlevel or universal generalizations that transcended space and time. A new kind of naturalist expertise was ushered in to remake the modern state. (p.172) In Britain this new policy trend clearly took hold through the New Labor government of Tony Blair. Under his government, policymakers often adopted network and institutional theories that emphasized that in areas like terrorism, the environment, and urban blight, the state faced problems that crossed too many boundaries and jurisdictions for it to handle alone. These were so-called “wicked problems” that no one sector of society could face by itself.58 Applying the social science of network governance, these reformers argued that coordination across agencies as well as public–private partnerships were needed instead of centralized bureaucracy.59 As with rational choice, the turn away from the centralized state did not mean renouncing naturalist expertise. Thus, for all the differences with prior waves of naturalist power, what continued unabated was the basic project of mechanistically engineering social reality in order to determine human conduct. In this way, anti-naturalist social science continues to unmask the false claims to expertise of these later forms, while also shedding light on how social science has never been a simple observer on political life but has actually entered into it and transformed it.

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Ethics and democracy Thus, anti-naturalism entails a particular evaluative stance toward the main institutions of modernity and the state. The authorization of naturalist expertise is implicitly critiqued. But what is the alternative to naturalist forms of power and technocracy? We want to conclude by briefly suggesting certain features of a more anti-naturalist, deliberative, and democratic theory of society. Against a mechanistic claim to naturalist, elite authority, anti-naturalism has a rival way of legitimating the organization of power in democratic societies. This rival approach is humanistic and participatory—centered on pluralism, devolution, and dialogue. Because anti-naturalist philosophy highlights the contingent and contestable features of human identity, it also brings attention to the diversity or pluralism of human beliefs, even when they fall under larger shared umbrella categories of race, class, nation, ideology, or creed. Anti-naturalism thus helps to disaggregate monolithic caricatures of identity by being sensitive to the nuances of meaning and belief that make for, say, rival forms of Islam and not one Islam, rival forms of social democracy and not just one form, etc. Much of this was discussed in prior chapters. But the point here is that this feature of anti-naturalist philosophy suggests a pluralist approach to democracy in which the diversity of citizenship identities is recognized by allowing opportunities for participation, deliberation, and collective choice at the community or local level. Rather than treating citizens as homogeneous institutional actors or reducing them to essentialist monolithic identities, anti-naturalism brings in the role of traditions and cultures in shaping historically situated identities. In this capacity, antinaturalism encourages governments to see citizens as existing in a plurality of traditions and cultures, not as agents reducible to ahistorical, formal categories. (p.173) Pluralism in turn suggests devolution of aspects of governance to diverse associations. Taking the local knowledge and beliefs of citizens seriously means creating more sites for deliberation, formulation of policies, and connection with one another. At present, calls for local participation are often reduced to consultation that sets a grid and narrow parameters for how citizens are brought into the process. By contrast, the anti-naturalist insistence that the beliefs of citizens must be engaged in their own cultural context encourages spaces for listening to citizens’ particular beliefs. This does not necessarily mean doing away with representative forms of democracy (a move whose viability is tendentious), but it does mean making new spaces for citizen self-rule that are sensitive to context. This ties in closely to a final general conceptual point—namely, an emphasis on dialogical policy formation. At present there is too often a monologue of policymaking driven by elite representatives who consult one another or technocrats who impose a science of society. By contrast, anti-naturalist social science makes clear the centrality of narrative understanding for grasping human beliefs and actions. This is because the genre needed to explain the Page 18 of 25

Ethics and democracy contingent causes that comprise human agency is a story or narrative. Antinaturalism therefore implies ways in which democratic governance can become more about telling stories. Citizens, policymakers, and politicians have more equal access to this basic genre for explaining human actions. The genre of storytelling does not require a claim to scientific authority or expertise (rather, it is present already in pre-historical societies and mastered very early on in human cognitive development). A democracy built on interpretive storytelling means that civic debates cannot be legitimately plucked into a domain of naturalist formalism and expertise. We must deliberate and dialogue in the form of competing narratives or stories. Anti-naturalism suggests forms of political power and organization that restore the reasonableness and necessity of storytelling to human life. The impact of this line of anti-naturalist thinking on public policy is something we will return to in greater detail in our discussion of the deliberative turn in policymaking in Chapter 9. But for now it should be clear how anti-naturalism’s conception of values, social science, and power is much more nuanced than the naturalist tendency to create a strong split between subject and object. Too often under the influence of naturalism, social scientists treat their theories as instrumentally clean and uncontaminated by the world of values they venture out to study. It is as if social science existed completely outside of the world of politics. But anti-naturalism reveals a much more nuanced and complex vision of the relationship between values, politics, and social theory. Because social science helps inform and shape the world of power, the theories guiding that social science have important evaluative implications for politics and democracy. There simply is no clean split between social scientific research and values.

(p.174) Overcoming the fact–value dichotomy We have argued that anti-naturalism gives a far richer and less problematic account of values than naturalism does and that social scientists should turn toward it for this reason. We have also suggested that there are deep ethical and political implications in choosing anti-naturalism over naturalism but that this is often obscured or poorly understood by working social scientists. All this amounts to a rejection of one of the longest-standing and most influential assumptions of naturalism (and still cherished by many social scientists today): the idea that there is a strict dichotomy between facts and values. Inaugurated by David Hume, this doctrine has taken many different forms since, but the basic idea is that the study of facts is logically distinct from the study of values. Beginning from factual premises, no evaluative conclusion can be deduced and vice versa. The foregoing arguments make clear that the relationship of facts to values is much more complex than this naturalist assumption would have us believe. After all, anti-naturalist philosophy begins from certain factual claims about human anthropology (contingency, self-interpretation, narrativity) and ends with Page 19 of 25

Ethics and democracy important contributions in the field of ethics, democratic theory, and a dramatic critique of technocratic modernity. In this way, anti-naturalism might help contribute to the wider critique of the tendency to segregate empirical or factual knowledge about the world from normative or evaluative claims. The kinds of knowledge and research we need in a future, more anti-naturalist study of human beings will break down these divisions. Ethics and social science are in dialogue not simply for the sake of being well rounded or to conform to a trendy call for “interdisciplinary” studies, but because they share intimate conceptual and philosophical concerns. Ethics and values meet up in questions of human agency and the nature of meanings and explanation. The simplistic binary between “facts” on one side and “values” on the other must then be abandoned. The deeper philosophies assumed by social inquiry are at once both empirical and evaluative, substantively shaping the ethical and political world. Notes:

(1.) Philip Cushman, “Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology,” American Psychologist 45:5 (1990): 599–611; Philip Cushman, “Psychotherapy as Moral Discourse,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 13:2 (1993): 103–13; Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (New York: Perseus Books Group, 1995). (2.) Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton, eds., Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). (3.) Stuart Hall, “Race, The Floating Signifier,” transcript, Media Education Foundation, 1997: ; Paul Spickard, Race in Mind (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). (4.) For an extended discussion of this claim see: Jason Blakely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016) chap. 5. (5.) For example: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 121. (6.) As Bernard Williams notes, ethicists are too often drawn to the idea that “in a scientific inquiry there should ideally be convergence on an answer…the answer [that] represents how things are.” Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 136. (7.) Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 10.

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Ethics and democracy (8.) J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001) 39. (9.) Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 26, 24. (10.) Arguably the early John Rawls also followed Kant in assuming ethics begins from a modified version of this rationalist certainty with his notion of an original position: “The original position may be viewed, then, as a procedural interpretation of Kant’s conception of autonomy and the categorical imperative.” John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) 226. (11.) For one of the most recent extended accounts of the relationship of language to human action and social reality, see: Charles Taylor, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016) 264–84, 292–3. (12.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) 468. (13.) The line of argument that follows is greatly indebted to Williams’ important work (albeit we integrate it into our own concern with social science antinaturalism). Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 139; see also: 149–50. (14.) Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 140; see also: 150. (15.) Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 128, 140; Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 3–30. (16.) As Williams rightly notes: “I cannot see any convincing theory of knowledge for the convergence of reflective ethical thought on ethical reality in even a distant analogy to the scientific case.” Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 152. (17.) Max Weber, “The Vocation of Science,” in The Essential Max Weber, ed. Sam Whimster (New York: Routledge, 2004) 279–80. (18.) This tendency within political science dates back to the birth of the modern discipline and the behavioral revolution. For a brief account, see: James Farr, “Remembering the Revolution: Behavioralism in American Political Science,” in Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, eds. James Farr, John Dryzek, and Stephen Leonard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 203, 205.

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Ethics and democracy (19.) Charles Taylor, “History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy: An Interview with Charles Taylor,” by Ulf Bohmann and Dario Montero, Constellations 21:1 (2014): 3. Bernard Williams has also echoed this call for a comparative form of objectivity in ethics in which “arriving at an ethical life” that is “objectively founded” will require “practical” forms of convergence and not theoretical claims about access to an absolute world picture. Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 171; see also: 154. See also: Charles Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 34–60. (20.) For an introduction to the varieties of utilitarianism, see: J. J. C. Smart, “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics,” in Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 3–74. (21.) For the relationship of social science positivism to Mill’s ethical and political philosophy, see: Evaldas Nekrašas, The Positive Mind: Its Development and Impact on Modernity and Postmodernity (Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press, 2016) 88. (22.) Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism: For and Against, 84. (23.) This drive toward simplicity is motivated by a misguided emulation of the natural sciences: “Why should theoretical simplicity and its criteria be appropriate?… [Because] some later theorists have…unquestioningly assumed that an ethical system should try to have the same virtues as a scientific theory.” Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 106. (24.) Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 128; see also: 8, 16–17. (25.) Charles Taylor, “The Diversity of Goods,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 234. See also: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) 71–90. (26.) Taylor, “The Diversity of Goods,” 242. (27.) Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 57–123. (28.) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) I. (29.) Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

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Ethics and democracy (30.) Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) 45–6. (31.) Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2001). (32.) Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?”, in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) 167–87. (33.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). (34.) Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1993) 242; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). (35.) For an early analysis of the connection between determinist forms of naturalism and a kind of ethical voluntarism in which an individual, autonomous subject floats above historical and social context, see: Alasdair MacIntyre, “Notes From the Moral Wilderness,” in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) 31–49. (36.) Even late in his career Foucault insisted that researchers should “get rid of the subject” and conduct “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject.” Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” interview by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 117. (37.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004) 276–7. (38.) Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008) 164–6. (39.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics and Social Science,” Cultural Hermeneutics 2:4 (1975): 316. (40.) For more comprehensive account see: Mark Bevir, Democratic Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Blakely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, chaps. 1–2. (41.) See: Mark Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000,” Political Studies 54 (2006): 583–606.

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Ethics and democracy (42.) For the detailed historical background on this shift, see: William Everdell, The First Moderns (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) chaps. 8–10; and Margaret Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). (43.) The best histories of the first British New Left are: Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995); Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). (44.) Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York: International Publishers, 1940) 15, 30. (45.) Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 20–1. (46.) E. P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines,” The New Reasoner 1 (1957): 105–43. (47.) MacIntyre, “Notes From the Moral Wilderness,” 36. (48.) Alasdair MacIntyre, “Breaking the Chains of Reason,” in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953–1974, eds. P. Blackledge and N. D. Davidson (Boston, MA: Brill, 2008) 145–6. (49.) E. P. Thompson, “The Long Revolution,” New Left Review 9 (1961): 33. (50.) E.g., Anthony King, “Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s,” Political Studies 23 (1975): 284–96. (51.) David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1992). (52.) For an account of the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the United States, see: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) chaps. 2–3. On public sector reform, see: Donald Savoie, Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1995). (53.) For literature relating congress to the bureaucracy in the United States, see, for example: D. Roderick Kiewiet and Matthew McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process (Chicago, IL: Page 24 of 25

Ethics and democracy University of Chicago Press, 1991). For studies focusing on internal bureaucratic structures and elections, see: Gary Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and James Fearon, “Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types Versus Sanctioning Poor Performance,” in Democracy, Accountability, and Representation, eds. Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 55–97. (54.) For one history of these developments in the United States, see: Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017). (55.) R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity, and Accountability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997). (56.) For the varieties of new institutionalism see: P. A. Hall and R. Taylor, “Political Science and the Three Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44 (1996): 936–57; Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, eds. Sven Stienmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longsttretch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 1–32. (57.) For example: James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989). (58.) See: Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–69; Jeff Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems (Chichester: Wiley, 2006). (59.) See, for example: Tony Bovaird, “Public–Private Partnerships: From Contested Concept to Prevalent Practice,” International Review of Administrative Sciences 70 (2004): 199–215.

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Public policy

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Public policy Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords Readers are introduced to how an anti-naturalist framework can ground a distinctively deliberative and interpretive turn in public policy. Over the last three decades there has been an important shift among a minority of public policy scholars toward interpretive and deliberative modes that are critical of naturalism’s justification of rule by supposedly scientific experts of human behavior. Like the interpretive turn more generally, this deliberative remaking of public policy has drawn on a great diversity of philosophical sources, including phenomenology, discourse theory, Dewey’s pragmatism, and post-structuralism. While we embrace the fact that this transformation of policy discourse and practice can be reached by a variety of philosophical routes, we also argue that an anti-naturalist framework can clarify certain confusions that cloud these debates. Keywords:   deliberative policy, dialogical approaches, rule by experts, humanism, public policy

There has been a dramatic and important shift in public policy in the last twentyfive years. Scholars inspired by a wide variety of philosophical sources—from phenomenology to post-structuralism, from Habermas’s discourse theory to Dewey’s pragmatism—have converged on the view that policymaking needs to take an interpretive and deliberative turn.1 This means rejecting the widespread naturalist conception of public policy as composed of a technical science. Instead, these scholars insist that policymaking be rethought as an interpretive

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Public policy craft that draws on storytelling, local knowledge, democratic dialogue, and argumentation. We heartily affirm these efforts for an interpretive turn in public policy and have learned a great deal from these path-breaking scholars. However, we also believe there is a little bit of confusion lingering as to what philosophically justifies this paradigm shift. Even some of the best works calling for an interpretive turn still claim that part of what is at stake is methodological and the need to shift from quantitative to more qualitative research methods.2 This echoes the larger methodological battle between “quants” and “qualies” that we have questioned throughout. Alternatively, many interpretive policy scholars also suggest that an interpretive turn is legitimized by globalization and the complexity of this phenomenon.3 Yet although we remain highly indebted to the work of these scholars, we want to quibble with these methodological and sociological bases for the interpretive turn. Anti-naturalism gives policy scholars a far better justification for converting to more deliberative approaches. Philosophy unearths the major issues (not methodology or sociology). The current debate could benefit from this philosophical clarification and a deescalation of quant versus qualie polarization of the field. A number of interpretive scholars calling for deliberative public policy—Dvora Yanow and Hendrik Wagenaar, to name a couple—have already done an excellent job bringing together theoretical, analytic, and empirical concerns in order to help researchers reflect upon and carry out their inquiries.4 By contrast, our task is more philosophical. We want to show how an anti-naturalist philosophical framework supports and legitimates the work of scholars calling for a more deliberative policy paradigm, while also moving the debate away from certain common misunderstandings and formulating a distinctive approach to policymaking. At the most general level public policy is defined as a set of actions, plans, laws, and strategies adopted by governments. The norm in most North Atlantic states today is to treat public policy as the privileged domain of (p.180) technocratic and scientific authorities, experts who formulate solutions to the problems facing society in a highly specialized and inaccessible language of law or economics.5 We want to join deliberative policy scholars (Frank Fischer, John Forester, Maarten Hajer, Hendrik Wagenaar, Dvora Yanow, and many others) in arguing that policy should move away from technocratic modes. Of course, as should by now be familiar, our anti-naturalist brand of interpretivism holds that grasping human beliefs and actions involves deciphering meanings and not primarily uncovering technical scientific laws. Our framework thus generates six major consequences for policy analysis and implementation that support the deliberative policy turn. First, anti-naturalism justifies policies centered on narratives or storytelling; second, it reveals policy to be inherently contestable; third, it shows that policymaking should be more self-consciously normative; Page 2 of 23

Public policy fourth, it explains the importance of contextual cultural and historical knowledge; fifth, it legitimizes a more deliberative and democratic approach; and finally, it brings attention to the performative dimensions of all policy formation. The result of these six factors is a full-blown alternative to conducting public policy (one that theoretically grounds the work of an increasingly important group of deliberative scholars). Ultimately, as Aristotle famously noted, the goal of political knowledge is action. The hope of most political actors is to gain greater discernment and clairvoyance when pursuing their goals. We believe anti-naturalism is currently the best option for dealing with the difficulties and unpredictable character of the political world. Far from being purely theoretical and academic, anti-naturalism is part of the state of the art in the pursuit of real-world politics. As such, statesmen, politicos, and ordinary citizens (not just scholars and theoreticians) will find reflections of relevance to their own concerns in these pages.

Policy narratives Those calling for a deliberative turn in public policy agree that narratives or storytelling should become the central genre or form for crafting policy. So, for example, John Forester notes that in the world of policymaking stories are absolutely necessary in order to do certain “kinds of work: descriptive work of reportage, moral work of constructing character and reputation…political work of identifying friends and foes…deliberative work of considering means and ends, what is relevant and significant, what is possible and what matters.”6 Deborah Stone has similarly argued that public policy problems only emerge against some background narrative about how a phenomenon relates to human action and responsibility.7 However, sometimes this laudable work is justified in terms of replacing “quantitative policy analysis” and the “neutral (p.181) methods” of the natural sciences with more qualitative approaches.8 The problem, however, is not one of stigmatizing or jettisoning quantitative methods. As we have already argued at length, method pluralism allows for social scientists and policy actors to use both qualitative and quantitative methods in good faith. Rather, philosophical reasons are what legitimize the shift toward using narratives or stories in policymaking. So, why are stories so important to policymaking? Readers will recall that one of anti-naturalism’s major premises is that human beliefs and actions are the result of what we referred to as a (weak) rational agency. Normal human agency involves deliberation over beliefs, reasons, desires, and motives. This means human beings believe, act, or embody meanings in one way, but if they reflected differently, they might also believe, act, or embody meanings in a completely different manner. In other words, any one belief, action, or practice is contingent upon other beliefs and meanings. Thus, human agency spins holistic webs of meaning that cannot be explained by formal causal laws. Instead, stories or narratives are the genre or form that captures the meaning holism of a Page 3 of 23

Public policy purposeful agent. This is because stories recount beliefs and meanings as only one possible set of happenings or state of affairs. A story always implies that given other beliefs, meanings, and actions, the whole chain of events may have gone very differently. Because policymaking itself tries to prescribe or account for a field of human beliefs and actions, it should not surprise us to see that policy is always implicitly narrative. An example from the real world will help clarify how this is so. In 2007, Quebec was embroiled in an intense political controversy over immigration and how to accommodate the practices of religious minorities— particularly Muslims and Sikh immigrants—into a secular liberal state and a French-Catholic majority. A number of high-profile incidents reported by the local media (including a Muslim girl who wanted to play sports wearing a headscarf as well as a Sikh boy trying to wear his Kirpan or small ceremonial dagger to school) inspired a public narrative of religious alarm, in which Quebec was depicted as a society torn by major rifts and loss of its traditional Catholic identity.9 In this context, two of Quebec’s most prominent intellectuals, Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard, were asked by the provincial government to publicly inquire into what constituted “reasonable accommodation” for religious minority practices in order to formulate recommendations to the state. One of the central findings of the Bouchard-Taylor report was that Quebec’s media had dangerously and inaccurately circulated a story of crisis. This narrative was in turn championed by “hardline secularists and conservative Catholics” to advance “hostility towards foreigners, cloak[ing] itself in liberal values such as gender equality and the protection of civic space” while “the media fanned the embers.”10 In fact, contrary to the impression created by Quebec’s media at that time, Bouchard and Taylor argued that cases of (p.182) minority accommodation were “relatively rare” and the wider “situation is under control.”11 Indeed, “a warm, cordial atmosphere and obvious pleasure in engaging in debate prevailed at almost all” of the citizen forums held by the commission.12 So, Bouchard and Taylor’s approach to the public policy problem was in part to challenge a dominant narrative of crisis by presenting a counternarrative of de-escalation and a sense of civic health and unity across cultural lines. Needless to say, Bouchard and Taylor’s critique of the crisis narrative generated controversy in Quebec. But for our purposes it is important to highlight the inescapability of a narrative for trying to account for the significance of accommodating minority religious communities in Quebec. The meaning of a little Muslim girl wearing a headscarf while playing soccer depends on how this action is related to other meanings and actions in the web. Is this headscarf a sign of social disintegration and loss of identity? Or is it instead a reasonable and healthy symbol of civic pluralism? Against the crisis narrative’s view that Muslim headscarves are anti-democratic, the Bouchard-Taylor commission Page 4 of 23

Public policy instead found that “women who wear the headscarf attach different meanings to it and respond to different motives,” with only a small minority in Quebec signaling anti-democratic attitudes while for many the headscarf symbolized a “strong feminist current” albeit one that “differs from the feminism prevailing in Quebec.”13 The point is that some narrative must be implicitly adopted to characterize the significance of the actions. Thus Forester, Stone, and other scholars calling for a narrative turn in policy analysis are right to claim that narrativity is inescapable.14 The question is always which narrative is the best one, and not whether to have narratives at all. Unfortunately, naturalism’s glorification of the natural sciences too often leads to the prejudice that narratives are primarily a genre pertaining to the “soft” disciplines and ways of thinking typical of the humanities. The role of narratives in public policy is thus sidelined or repressed in favor of the naturalist pursuit of correlations, elaborate, mathematized choice theory models, and quasi-scientific covering laws. Emphasizing technical “rules and regulations pertaining to effective performance,” naturalist public policy often becomes entangled in heavy jargon under the banner of true science.15 By contrast, anti-naturalism draws attention to the central role of narratives for public policy. Once narratives are brought to the surface, it also becomes clear that unlike technical, law-like correlations, narratives are a popular and democratically accessible form. As interpretive policy scholar Frank Fischer rightly notes, policy narratives often embody some widely familiar genre from literature or drama. So there are policy stories of decline, and others of progress, comedy, crisis, tragedy, farce, reconciliation, reform, or melodrama. In all these cases, the story is as important as debates over specific facts because it often organizes the significance or weight of particular facts.16 (p.183) Finally, recall that narratives are neither here nor there when it comes to the ongoing debates between quantitative versus qualitative methods. One can tell a story that incorporates quantitative methods like statistics and the latest opinion polling; likewise, one can try to build stories drawn from qualitative methods like doing ethnographic fieldwork. The point is not to drop expert knowledge altogether but to stop using it to cloak an underlying narrative in the prestige of science. Instead, expert knowledge in the social sciences should be put in the service of openly popular uses of narrative. This means the ordinary citizen can better grasp the place of technical method within the larger narrative whole.

Contestability Narrativity is closely related to another feature of deliberative policymaking— namely, contestability. The literature on deliberative policymaking is rightly insistent that policies must stop being presented as the single, official scientific account, and instead recognize the contestability and argumentative dimensions of all policy formation.17 Policymaking is not about unveiling a universal Page 5 of 23

Public policy mechanics. Instead, “the policy process is—at least in part—a struggle to get one or another meaning established as the accepted one.”18 However, sometimes it is mistakenly claimed that this interpretive turn has to do with a sociological shift undergone by globalization or post-modernity. So some authors have suggested that a turn toward contestability better matches “today’s decentered world of governance” and is related to the advent of the “Information Age.”19 But the underlying reasons to opt for this turn are not relative to a particular age or set of sociological developments. Instead, they are the result of more abiding philosophical issues. Anti-naturalism brings attention to the expressive dimensions of human agency. As expressive agents, humans continually devise new meanings, which in turn inform their actions and practices. For this reason we have argued that social reality is in fact composed of meanings and does not primarily involve the uncovering of brute mechanical bonds as is often found in the natural sciences. How does this generate the conclusion that all policymaking is inherently contestable? The contingency of meanings implies that the beliefs and practices comprising social reality may be one way, but they could be radically different. Certain features of the natural world are for all intents and purposes necessary or given to us in a way that would be absurd for us to contest (for example, the speed of light, the nature of a DNA helix, the rate of a falling object, the gravitational and magnetic forces). By contrast, social reality and the policies made by political actors can always be contested because they (p.184) could always be expressive of some other rival set of meanings. This is no less true for public policy than it was when we looked at ethical values. Yet the dream of naturalism is to discover an absolute level of description—the indisputable scientific language of politics and social theory. The job of the policymaker under the sway of the naturalist paradigm becomes to find this language and scientifically resolve the means of how to achieve certain goals. To challenge a scientifically unassailable theory of society or human behavior then appears irrational. By contrast, anti-naturalism highlights that human affairs are always open to dispute. What kind of a society do we want? What sort of citizens ought we to be? How will the meaning of a given policy impact the meanings we already hold? Is this particular policy on, say, crime or economics expressive of one tradition or ethical framework versus another? The world of policymaking is about starting discussions concerning meaning and interpretation of a given set of actions or objectives, and not about applying the one and only set of rational instruments for resolving problems. For example, what is the effect of naming a policy the “war on terror” or “radical Islamic extremism” versus a “war on Wahhabism” or a “war on ISIS”? How do these meanings effect the accomplishment of military objectives that require the cooperation of highly heterogeneous groups of both Sunni and Shiite Muslims spanning different ethnic and theological groupings? How do the different Page 6 of 23

Public policy expressions of the opponent reflect different meanings of democracy? The contestability of meanings calls attention to the need to avoid unilaterally devising or applying terms without considering the meanings, practices, and traditions of the populations involved. What will calling something a war on “Islamic extremism” do to the ability to cooperate with democratically minded Muslims? What might it do to our own practices and institutions? Whether certain terms will help or thwart policy is not something that can be settled beforehand by devising a neutral and indisputable policy vocabulary. In this way, the contestability of meanings implies that central policy structures and actors can never hope to simply control and freeze the meanings of particular legislation and policy action. Policymakers should not expect to legislate meanings from the top down. Instead, the meaning of a given policy will depend on a confrontation with the existing practices and traditions of those to whom the policy is directed.20 There is always a contest over interpretation. Clearly, if this is the case, then the contestability of policy is a perennial feature of human social and political life, and not the result of a particular shift in era toward globalization, networks, post-modernity, information, or any other dramatic sociological change we are currently undergoing. Instead, as antinaturalism makes clear, contestability is a philosophical feature of expressivity.

(p.185) Ethical engagement The need for public policy to become more self-consciously narrative and contestable is closely tied to a third claim made by interpretive policy scholars: namely, that policy needs to be normatively and ethically engaged. For example, scholars like Fischer and Stone astutely recognize that policy narratives tend to exude particular evaluative slants. So they observe that a story about the fragmentation of a group or agency against “a narrative backdrop of concern with order and efficiency…is usually also a call for reorganization.”21 We saw above that narratives about a crisis of religious assimilation can also imply politics of exclusion and nationalist backlashes. As John Forester puts it, policy “stories are ethically loaded through and through.”22 Part of the reason for this does indeed have to do with the way in which stories give an interpretive view of the significance or meaning of phenomena and events. Stories have implied protagonists, antagonists, goals, and purposes. A story’s implied protagonists can succeed or be frustrated. Similarly, stories always pick out relevant versus non-relevant features of reality. This line of thought links up to the anti-naturalist argument we made in the prior section: because policies are expressive of meanings (and not some brute mechanics) they can be contested for what they dub significant and worthy of attention and achievement. Is the accommodation of religious minorities in Quebec symptomatic of the breakdown of liberal norms or is it an innocuous instance of religious freedom calling for democratic tolerance? Are minority Muslims and their religious practices antagonists to democracy or signs of Page 7 of 23

Public policy healthy pluralism? Is Quebecker nationalism a defense of democracy or its unwitting betrayal? Clearly, how the significance or meanings of these actors and events is interpreted via some narrative has wide-reaching ethical and normative implications. Indeed, this implies that the meanings of social and political reality are ethically contestable all the way down. Ought our policies be expressive of a commitment to equality and liberty? Or should we instead favor policies that protect the identity of a particular ethnicity or cultural heritage? The meanings that are instantiated within our public policy are never closed to ethical questioning. But our anti-naturalist framework also points to further, deeper ethical affinities between the interpretive turn and policymaking. In particular, we have argued that because anti-naturalism assumes a humanistic view of individual agency, it is inherently critical of reductively technocratic treatments of human beings. Humans, anti-naturalism holds, are creative agents whose reasons for action need to be understood and engaged on their own terms. Their creativity makes them inappropriate objects for mechanistic manipulation akin to engineering in the natural sciences. The relevance of these arguments to public policy is that all policies treating humans as inert, (p.186) mute objects subject to manipulation are at one and the same time philosophically illusory and unethical. In this sense, anti-naturalism self-consciously ties the deliberative scholars’ critique of technocracy to the deeper historical tradition of humanism. The new deliberative policy turn has roots in prior humanisms and their defense of the integrity of the human subject. Yet as many of the deliberative policy scholars note, there is a persistent tendency within naturalist-inspired public policy to treat human beings as subject to mechanistic manipulation. The naturalist ideal of the scientist as an impartial, neutral observer free from ideological commitments often leads policymakers to present themselves as technicians neutrally implementing policy. The policymaker is like the scientist in his or her laboratory, applying theories to empirical cases. But the underlying assumption is that human affairs are in principle manipulable. For example, the economists John Donahue and Steven Levitt have infamously argued that legalizing abortions lowers crime rates across cultural groups and time periods because crime is tightly correlated with unwanted children, and unwanted children with criminality and other social ills.23 The clear implication of their research is that human agency is driven by quasi-automatic triggers. Unwanted children are in aggregate statistically destined to criminality. Lurking in the background of such a theory are implied prejudices against the poor, their prospects as families, and the value of their children for society at large. One wonders what meanings ethnography might have revealed to Donahue and Levitt about the supposed “unwantedness” of children among the poor.

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Public policy By contrast, an anti-naturalist philosophical framework shows any supposedly necessary causal chains binding unwantedness and criminality to be philosophically confused. Because human beings are creative agents, the relationship between feeling unwanted and committing crimes is purely contingent. One might tell a story about why some people who are unwanted turn to crime, but the idea that they are bonded through a causal generalization (that can in turn be tied to claims about disproportionately aborting children who come from the poor) is wildly off the mark. Rather, like so many of the heroes of Charles Dickens’s novels, poor kids who are unwanted might instead form beliefs about the importance of being generous and compassionate with strangers.24 Conversely, instead of criminality, an early experience of family dysfunction followed by later economic success might instead lead an individual to develop an exaggerated sense of priggish autonomy and a moralistic attitude about those in his community who are caught in crime and underachievement.25 Even in aggregate, there is no reason to suppose that the alleged unwantedness of poor children will lead to criminality as opposed to, say, political resistance, spiritual revival, or some other not yet imagined cultural form. The point is that there simply is no necessary causal bond that forces a story of unwantedness to also end up being a tale of criminality, instead of another (p. 187) set of contingently related beliefs and actions. Whether the story of an unwanted child will lead a predictable cohort of the poor inexorably toward criminality cannot be decided beforehand via a supposedly value-free science of social mechanics. The creative agency of individual human beings defies this technocracy.

Cultural context In addition to narrativity, contestability, and ethical engagement, an interpretive turn in policymaking also means paying more attention to cultural context. Scholars like Dvora Yanow have done crucial work highlighting the need for “local knowledge” when conducting policy analysis.26 And our discussion of the imposition of terms like “unwantedness” on those in poverty underscores the need for such inquiry to avoid massive and politically sinister misunderstandings. Once again, our anti-naturalist philosophical framework justifies the calls made by pioneers like Yanow. However, as philosophers we must quibble when Yanow sometimes implies that the “presuppositions” differentiating an interpretive approach to policy are “interpretive methods” that contrast with “analytical methods” modeled after the “scientific method.”27 The problem is there is no such thing as a logically binding “interpretive method” versus a naturalist one. Our anti-naturalist framework instead arrives at the need for local knowledge without this reduction to method polarization.

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Public policy In our view, the reason policymakers should not neglect local knowledge is because human actions, practices, and institutions are embedded within particular traditions, backgrounds, and life-worlds. These life-worlds and traditions are the result of certain historical trajectories and past legacies of beliefs and practices of other agents. It follows that social reality is composed of worlds of meaning such that the actions and practices of specific individuals or a societal milieu can be badly misunderstood if they are not viewed in light of the specific matrices of beliefs, meanings, and traditions held by those agents. Yanow remains a vital source for chronicling the misunderstandings and selfdefeating actions that ensue when policymakers neglect these local contexts. To take only one example, Yanow recounts the case of the development of drought remedies that called for the digging of more wells in a region with nomadic tribe peoples. The policymakers neglected the local traditions and practices of the tribesmen who attached social prestige to the size of their herds, and therefore increased their livestock to match the available new wells. In doing so, the policy of more wells actually worsened the drought conditions it was intended to address.28 By contrast, an anti-naturalist framework for (p.188) policymaking always encourages familiarity with a particular problem as embedded in the cultural contexts of a specific place. This local knowledge can save policymakers from the spell of a naïve ethnocentrism, which superimposes the same structure of belief everywhere. One cannot assume that more wells will be met by the same actions regardless of the people involved. What the local people valorize will have much to do with how they respond to the increase in well access. Note that in our version of this argument, we do not rely on any claim about methods. Say the contextual knowledge a policymaker wants to extract is from the census data of Los Angeles or London. There is nothing philosophically barring the use of quantitative methods as part of a wider research strategy aimed at local knowledge. So an urban planner could use mass surveys or statistics to gain some picture of public opinion in L.A. or London. Of course, sometimes this might lead to a neglect of local knowledge, but in other cases it might be an important factor in acquiring it. Quantitative methods are not fated or determined to neglect local knowledge—it is all in how they are used. Likewise, a policymaker could spend months doing ethnographic research on the customs and habits of Los Angelenos and still leap to naturalist explanations and modes of thought that neglect particular beliefs and meanings of actors. As we established in Chapter 5 on methods, there is nothing that prohibits ethnographic means from being used for naturalist ends. If the problem is not quantitative methods, how then does naturalism neglect local knowledge? Naturalist-inspired public policy tends to neglect context in favor of formalism. Naturalists often make claims to necessary causal bonds that link two formal variables together as they migrate through highly heterogeneous cultural and historical contexts. Other times, naturalists set up formal decision Page 10 of 23

Public policy or game theories that supposedly capture the logical essence of an institution or practice and allow them to ignore context. This is very common, for instance, in the so-called public choice approach, which has come to dominate the study of American institutions and guide much neoliberal policy.29 Of course, rational choice might be put to interpretive uses but only if the holistic nature of meanings is kept firmly within the policymaking enterprise. The various methods of the social sciences can be retained by policymakers but only if the importance of context is not lost.

Dialogue and deliberation The centrality of cultural context, ethical engagement, contestability, and narrativity implies a critique of forms of mainstream policy expertise in the North Atlantic liberal democracies. Indeed, many interpretive policy scholars have noted that naturalist policymaking has a tight fit with a “particular form (p.189) of thin, representative democracy, in which…the better informed few prescribe for the less informed many” (something we discussed in the context of ethics).30 Yet, as John Dryzek shrewdly observes, “the technological manipulation of causal systems by an elite composed of, or advised by, analysts” is perpetually foiled by the “intentional actions of human agents.”31 Once more, this turn away from naturalist technocracy is not contingent upon an epochal sociological shift to the age of globalization as some scholars suggest, nor is it the result of the “complexity” of the issues involved in the social sciences.32 What in fact legitimizes the turn toward more dialogical and deliberative forms of public policy is the conceptual critique of naturalism. Technocratic and elite policy expertise depends on claims to a special scientific knowledge of society. The assumption is that policy elites have access to a specialized science of society that allows them to strongly predict outcomes. But if anti-naturalism is correct, then the kinds of causal relationships needed for strong, predictive technocratic expertise are simply unavailable in the social sciences. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has succinctly put it: “our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone’s [scientific] control.”33 As the deliberative policy scholars have perceptively seen, hermeneutics has a democratizing effect on public policy. Consider the factors we have been looking at so far. If public policy is primarily narrative (and not a technical science), then its explanatory form is as readily available to the laymen as to experts. Similarly, the contingency of meanings implies that all citizens may contest and ethically engage public policy and social reality (not simply the experts). This point was made in terms of democratic theory but it revamps public policy as well. Finally, the importance of cultural context for understanding beliefs, actions, and practices implies that those carrying out public policy would do well to be in dialogue with those with whom they are hoping to live under a policy decision.

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Public policy In this way, our anti-naturalist framework grounds the claims of deliberative policy scholars who have been calling for the reconceptualization of policy analysts as “facilitators” rather than quasi-scientific technicians.34 Part of this shift in viewpoint means seeing the populations that are targets of policymaking as collaborators and not merely as a field of objects to which policy is applied. As Fischer puts it: “whereas the goal in the technical community is to find the one best solution to a problem,” the deliberative turn in policymaking seeks “to find the workable decision that holds the decision-making participants together.”35 A facilitator’s goal is thus “to work to increase understanding among the participants in ways that help reduce conflict and generate cooperative behavior in the face of differences.”36 Rather than a policy elite simply formulating and applying theories, a deliberative turn in policymaking views dialogue between different sectors of society as vital. Differing stakeholders in a policy process teach and mutually inform each other of their views (p.190) and special knowledge. Judith Innes and David Booher speak of deliberative policymaking as having the potential to become a “joint exercise” where participants are given the chance to ask questions of the experts, while also “brainstorming and scenario building, often with different players adding pieces to build a shared story.”37 Some readers might be thinking that all this sounds a bit wooly and idealistic. After all, did we not say that the deliberative and dialogical turn is also accompanied by a heightened awareness of the inherent contestability of all social and political reality? At this point an objection might be raised against our attempt to legitimize this turn in policymaking. Namely, is this call for democratic deliberation viable in practice? And what of the many policy debates that exist at the intersection of society and the natural sciences and undoubtedly involve highly technical knowledge? For example, is the interpretive and deliberative model really helpful when governments must resolve some dilemma with the economy or the environment? Is not rule by experts and technocrats still necessary in such cases? Perhaps the best way to begin addressing doubts about the practical viability of a deliberative and dialogical turn in policymaking is to briefly analyze an actual example of this kind of policy succeeding. If this paradigm in policymaking can be shown as successful in an actual concrete situation, then perhaps this goes some way toward allaying this type of objection. As Rousseau once famously quipped: “it seems to me good logic to reason from the actual to the possible.”38 In this context, Sarah Connick and Judith E. Innes provide an especially helpful case study of deliberative policy approaches when dealing with California’s complex water laws. Briefly summarizing this case—while also integrating it into an anti-naturalist framework—will help address these doubts.

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Public policy What is of great value in Connick and Innes’s work is their confirmation that deliberative policy can outperform naturalist paradigms in the technically complex domains like California’s water laws. California is infamous nationwide for the complexity and intensity of conflict around its water policy (sometimes colloquially referred to as “water wars”). The issues involved almost always include highly technical economic factors and problems in the environmental sciences. This poses the question of whether the policy problems are simply too difficult for anyone but scientific elites to handle. In this light, we will briefly consider Connick and Innes’s findings studying the San Francisco Estuary Project (SFEP). SFEP was a policy group assembled by the government in the early 1990s to attempt a consensual proposal for environmentally restoring and managing this important waterway. The group consisted of diverse stakeholders and governmental agencies, many with intensely conflicting interests, including environmentalists, agriculturalists, urban water users, business leaders, and developers. Indeed, so ferocious was the initial disagreement that Connick and (p.191) Innes report there was no consensus on “the estuary’s problems” or even “that there was a problem.”39 This conundrum should not surprise readers given what we have been arguing about the interpretive nature of political phenomena. Policymaking is always an interpretive issue about human beliefs, meanings, actions, and practices. In the world of policy, some evaluative story must be told about the existence of a problem, what this problem means to the political community, and who if anyone can or should fix it. Problems do not appear on the radar of governments as value-neutral facts. In this sense, the deep disagreement that Connick and Innes report is ultimately centered on the contested meaning or significance of the estuary for political life. This involves technical issues of the natural sciences, but these are always embedded within a narrative stream of contested political meanings. The reality that the world of political action is composed of contested meanings helps shed light on Connick and Innes’s finding that the deliberative approach to policy formation adopted by SFEP exhibited a number of concrete advantages over naturalist approaches. First, for all their differences, the diverse stakeholders comprising SFEP were able to learn from one another. The deliberative policy processes educated all involved in how agreement over both scientific facts and cultural meanings is achieved (something lost sight of in the naturalist mindset that attempts to simply apply a scientific solution devised by experts to social reality). So, for example, the scientists in the group were able to shed light on the technical problems of the estuary in a way that enriched and informed laypeople’s own positions on the issue. This information was then translated into more democratically accessible language about the estuary that was communicated to the public.40 No less important, the scientists on SFEP learned from the laypeople about the nature of the political process. Scientists reported that they had become overly accustomed to an “experimental mode” of Page 13 of 23

Public policy thought in which hypotheses are simply systematically applied to an object, but through their deliberative meetings they came to appreciate that politics required a different dialogical mode of inquiry.41 Once we accept antinaturalism’s insight that policy is always about contested meanings and narratives, it becomes clear that any findings of the natural sciences will need to be effectively embedded within an interpretive web or narrative structure about what to do about it. In democratic societies, this means that successful policies will not be possible if they fail to be grafted into a story communicable to a wider public. SFEP needed not simply to prove a set of facts, but to achieve consensus on what the significance of these facts was for political life. This brings us to a second related advantage of the deliberative and interpretive approach over a naturalist one. Namely, it has the power to generate legitimacy among participants. Connick and Innes report that at the beginning of policy disagreements of this kind there is often extreme suspicion of the facts presented by any other stakeholder. This can lead to “adversary science” (p. 192) in which conflicting sides build parallel sets of facts and theories in isolated silos.42 In such an environment, pseudo-scientific theories proliferate. By contrast, the SFEP’s deliberative approach yielded a shared set of facts even among stakeholders hostile to the interests of environmental scientists.43 As SFEP moved onto making policy recommendations, this collaborative and dialogical process generated a sense of buy-in and legitimacy that made the final document remarkably influential with government agencies and in future public debates.44 Again, this should be of no surprise to an anti-naturalist. Legitimacy is only achieved in the domain of meaning or significance. It is not some magical property that is conferred on any decision made by scientific experts. In democracies in particular, citizens tend to identify more strongly with decisions in which they partook or their views were actively incorporated. This also implies that when such deliberative practices do not flourish, society can become stalemated in suspicion and adversarial theory-building. The result in American society has been a polarization where opponents are in silos of “fake” news and only one side believes it has any contact with reality. Finally, Connick and Innes argue that the above features of a deliberative approach to policy can also result in high-quality decisions. So SFEP developed a water quality index that became a major point of reference among rival constituencies in ongoing debates over water policy.45 Technical findings of the natural sciences were successfully embedded into the world of cultural and political meanings. This is not to say that simply implementing a deliberative and interpretive approach to policy guarantees success. Like all human endeavors, interpretive policy is a risk that must deal with the freedom of human agency and vulnerability to everything from slight errors to spectacular failures.46 But only a particularly crude form of naturalism would expect to see policy as simply the resolution of problems like solving arithmetic or building a piece of infrastructure. As Connick and Innes rightly note, a deliberative approach has Page 14 of 23

Public policy virtues that extend beyond any one victory or defeat—including strengthening a sense of civic engagement and opening up informal channels by which stakeholders might preempt future problems.47 In short, what we see emerging from interpretive policymaking strategies is a different, more engaged and egalitarian form of democracy.

Performativity One of the main features of all policymaking that becomes apparent in the turn toward interpretivism is the way that particular policy styles enact different kinds of political realities. As we just saw, an anti-naturalist policy style has the potential to reinforce deliberative democratic values and educate participants in what it means to self-rule. By contrast, a naturalist approach (p.193) might enact forms of political reality that are technocratic and based on claims to expert rule and power, in which a populace largely becomes a passive spectator on democracy with diminishing senses of efficacy. This brings us to the performative dimensions of policymaking. Scholars like Maarten Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar have written perceptively on how people can be described by a given policy (for example, as “protestors” versus “collaborators”) in such ways that have a huge impact on politics itself. As they put it, in the case of public policy so often “representation of an issue…is the issue.”48 Fischer dubs this the “constructing [of] target populations” in which certain groups and individuals are conceptualized as a threat, a help, a problem, neutral, etc.49 However, as in the other features of the interpretive turn in public policy, there could be more clarity over what justifies such awareness of performativity.50 How does an anti-naturalist philosophical framework legitimize claims to the performative dimensions of public policy? Here again we affirm the important work of scholars like Wagenaar who wrestle with the way in which human beings embody meanings.51 Because social science theories are themselves composed of meanings and beliefs, it follows that the very concepts, language, and explanations used by social scientists and policymakers in turn shape political reality. This means there is no firm boundary between the description of an object in social reality and its constitution. If enough agents take concepts on board from, say, public choice theory versus deliberative interpretivism, then the world is in a very real sense reconstituted and reshaped by these beliefs. New institutions and practices arise that are expressive of these new beliefs and theories. This performative dimension of policymaking can have enormous political stakes —changing policy outcomes, reshaping institutions, and even generating a revolutionary remaking of the political order. In American politics such constructions have had powerful consequences on politics. For example, Helen Ingram and Anne L. Schneider have tracked how groups conceptualized as Page 15 of 23

Public policy “advantaged target populations” enjoy “significant political power resources” and also approval as “deserving people” (often “business, science, the military, the middleclass, and white people” are constructed in this way).52 These contrast dramatically with “deviant” groups “such as terrorists, gang members, and criminals who have few, if any, legitimate political power resources and are viewed as dangerous and of no value to the society.”53 In all these ways, “planning analyses not only depicts but also constructs the issues at hand… policy-making is a constant discursive struggle over the criteria of social classification, the boundaries of problem categories, the intersubjective interpretation of common experiences, the conceptual framing of problems, and the definition of ideas.”54 A concrete example occurs in the work of Bernard Harcourt, who has argued that the “Broken Windows” policing instituted by Mayor Rudolph (p.194) Giuliani in New York City carried with it certain conceptions of “order” versus “disorder.” In particular, minor crimes more typically committed by the urban poor (e.g., turnstile jumping, loitering, graffiti painting) were policed far more heavily than those frequently committed by the rich (e.g., tax evasion, whitecollar fraud, not cleaning up when walking a dog). In other words, the concept of “disorder” was enacted in such a way that it led to far more punitive treatment of the poor and racial minorities than the white upper class.55 The construction of Broken Windows categories therefore had strongly performative dimensions when enacted as a form of policing and policy that have entrenched racial discrimination and unequal treatment of citizens. Yet the performative dimensions of policy language can also be harnessed in attempts to heal societal wounds and enact reconciliation. The Bouchard-Taylor report is an excellent example of this aspect of the performative power of policy analysis. Indeed, the commission’s explicit intention was to create forums that combatted a sense of crisis and disunity in Quebec by opening shared spaces for debate and dialogue. Among other things, these public forums were intended to give performative recognition to victims of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism (the report’s very subtitle reads “A Time for Reconciliation”). The performative power of such reconciliation policies has received much attention at least since South Africa’s famous Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Similar to that much more famous case, Bouchard and Taylor’s report was also executed in such a way as to give voice to both the experiences of religious minorities and the cultural fears and anxieties of more nationalistic French-Canadians. Indeed, the co-chairs explicitly defended this deliberative way of constructing public policy, arguing that it gave victims of discrimination public recognition, fostered civic unity, and corrected the myth of a crisis of legitimacy, showing that a wide consensus existed on common language, equality, and secularism across differing religious and ethnic groups in Quebec.56

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Public policy Quebec’s Muslim population in particular reported high levels of satisfaction with this aspect of the commission’s work.57 The effect of such attempts to publicly recognize ethnic and religious discrimination reflected not only a selfconscious effort to enact a process of reconciliation, but also an attempt to shift the terms of the debate away from simply the need for immigrants to conform to French-Canadian values.58 Instead, both immigrants and longtime nationalists faced the challenge of meeting the standards of the shared democratic norms of Quebec’s state. In this way, the very enactment or performance of the commission’s work “somewhat calmed things down” such that the “crisis diagnosis” did not “genuinely apply.”59 Indeed, Bouchard and Taylor even suggested that “the lull [in sense of crisis] that has occurred over the past year is due, by and large, to our Commission’s investigation: Quebecers expressed themselves…[and] the media themselves altered the tenor of their reporting.”60 (p.195) When making concrete recommendations for policy implementation by the Quebec government, Bouchard and Taylor’s report also called for the state to adopt the kinds of interpretive practices that had been employed by the commission itself. So, when weighing specific future cases of accommodating minority religious practices, Bouchard and Taylor recommended the government employ forms of decision-making that were contextual and deliberative in approach. Quebec and other multicultural democracies will surely face continuing controversies over acceptable versus unacceptable accommodations of minorities (for instance, should minorities receive special vacation time for their holy days or only what are frequently de facto Christian holidays?). A “contextual” approach means taking into account the uniqueness of local knowledge to “avoid unwarranted generalizations,” instead adopting a “case-bycase approach.”61 This means a deliberative way of engaging in dialogue with the particular institutions, individuals, and groups involved in any such decision should be enacted. In these ways the commission clearly sets an example of the goal of performatively enacting the deliberative and argumentative ethos suggested by the hermeneutic turn—though obviously the ultimate success of this particular policy is for others to sort out.

“As if” naturalism were true Naturalism appears defeated on nearly every set of grounds philosophically. So can social scientists and policymakers ever rightfully make use of naturalist assumptions? Colin Hay has developed a provocative case for the usefulness of sometimes treating naturalist assumptions as though they were true in order to develop insights or political warnings. That is, naturalist theories might be used not in any meaningful way as descriptive or explanatory of social reality, but instead as helpful heuristics deployed by social scientists and policymakers. In Chapter 5 on methods we already considered at length how rational choice theory might be treated “as if” it were true for the sake of generating political warnings about, say, the squandering of public goods due to a free-rider Page 17 of 23

Public policy problem.62 The purpose of such a use of rational choice theory should not be mistaken (as social scientists under the sway of naturalism often do) for a description of reality, but instead as a kind of thought experiment that can “reveal the consequences of a world (unlike our own) in which the hypothecated assumptions were true.”63 This basic move might also apply to a broad swath of the naturalist concepts and theories we have studied so far in this volume. For instance, behavioralists in political science, busy seeking correlations in order to establish regular patterns (say, that incumbents in the U.S. Congress tend to win reelection under certain circumstances), might untether their (p. 196) work from the naturalist goal of describing and explaining the world. Instead of seeking universal, mechanistic covering laws, these political scientists might just make “the convenient assumption that any regularities thereby observed will continue to hold in the future.”64 In other words, they could act as if naturalism were true, knowing full well the point would no longer be whether the research corresponded to political reality but only that policymakers and social scientists found it useful as a kind of thought experiment. A similar point might be made about the naturalist concept formation treated in earlier chapters. In particular, we established at length that essentialism, atomism, and reification are highly distortive of social reality. So in our discussion of Foucauldian governmentality, we saw that treating the state as an ahistorical, unitary agency is highly distortive of the actual historical contingency of the state. Indeed, shifting to an anti-naturalist, interpretive analysis of the state not only frees social scientific concepts of distortions but also yields new insights. However, Hay notes that the “conceptual abstraction” of the state might for heuristic purposes be treated by social scientists “as if” it possessed a certain unity and agency.65 Doing so might be more convenient for certain policy discussions or could yield certain insights as to the institutional constraints that politicians face when they enter into office.66 Indeed, Hay even suggests that “the majority of self-proclaimed political scientists proceed as if a natural science of the political were possible” even as “far fewer would now regard this as much more than a convenient, simplifying and perhaps necessary assumption.”67 So what are we to make of Hay’s as-if defense of naturalism? Philosophically, we agree with Hay that such a move is valid and perhaps may even be useful on occasion. Hay is right to draw attention to this research possibility while also insisting that a naturalist, “predictive science of the political [is] impossible.”68 As Hay himself recognizes, this dramatically changes the status of all naturalist research. Naturalist research cannot go on as usual. Suddenly, all such naturalist social science must accept that it neither primarily describes nor explains political reality but instead actively distorts it. Indeed, social scientists

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Public policy pursuing this as-if line of inquiry would have to present themselves as builders of elaborate thought experiments, not rigorous, empirically minded scientists. One of the ongoing labors of this book has been to catalogue the many ways in which naturalist philosophy distorts political and social reality. Surely many working social scientists and researchers would very much like to accurately describe and explain political reality. For them the cost of as-if naturalist research may very well be too high. This points to certain inherent limitations in an as-if treatment of naturalism. Moreover, as-if naturalists must also consider how helpful false or purposefully distortive theories are when navigating in the world. Although nothing keeps an as-if naturalist from using his or her findings to bolster humanistic or deliberative political ends, we have (p.197) also seen that there is the risk that these forms of understanding be used to make false claims to hierarchical and scientistic authority. In short, even if social scientists and policymakers wanted to simply adopt naturalism on an as-if basis, the reach and importance of such a research program would be greatly diminished. It is difficult to imagine a society whose entire public policy is willingly run on the basis of a turn away from social reality in favor of abstract academic models and thought experiments. Meanwhile, the interpretive turn offers an entire paradigm of social research with the advantage of knowledge about the world that is both more philosophically defensible and more likely to generate insights into practical human affairs. Notes:

(1.) For an approach inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatism see: Frank Fischer, Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); for one drawing on selected elements of Habermas see: John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For books that effectively convey the range and diversity of interpretive approaches to public policy analysis, see: Frank Fischer and John Forester, eds., The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Frank Fischer and Herbert Gottweis, eds., The Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Hendrik Wagenaar, Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2011); Maarten Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds., Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). (2.) For example: Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiii. (3.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiv; Judith E. Innes and David Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking: Governance Through Dialogue,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis, eds. Hajer and Wagenaar, 35–6; Sarah Connick and Judith E. Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making: Applying Page 19 of 23

Public policy Complexity Thinking to Evaluation,” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 46:2 (2003): 179–80. (4.) Dvora Yanow, Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000) 20–93; Wagenaar, Meaning in Action, 241–74. (5.) For a more detailed account of these forms of naturalist power see: Mark Bevir, Democratic Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) 178–87. (6.) John Forester, “Learning From Practice Stories: The Priority of Practical Judgment,” in The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis, 195. (7.) See: Deborah Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,” Political Science Quarterly 104:2 (1989): 281–300. (8.) Hajer and Wagenaar, eds., Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiii. (9.) Meena Sharify-Funk, “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable Accommodation’: Analyzing the Bouchard-Taylor Report and Its Impact on the Canadian Province of Quebec,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30:4 (2010): 538. (10.) Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation (Quebec City: Gouvernement du Quebec, 2008) 187, 186. (11.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 25. (12.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 36. (13.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 234. (14.) Stone, “Causal Stories,” 282. (15.) Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 204. (16.) Frank Fischer, Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 169–71. (17.) Fischer and Forester, eds., The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. (18.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 65. (19.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiv; Innes and Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking,” 35–6. (20.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 64–5.

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Public policy (21.) Fischer cites the work of Deborah Stone to make this claim: Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 206. (22.) Forester, “Learning From Practice Stories,” 195. (23.) John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics CXVI:2 (2001): 379–420. (24.) See, for example: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). (25.) For a memoir that is one part autobiography and another part social commentary of this kind, see: J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). (26.) Dvora Yanow, “Accessing Local Knowledge,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis, 231, 236; Dvora Yanow, Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000) 5. (27.) Yanow, Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, 5. (28.) Yanow, “Accessing Local Knowledge,” 236. (29.) For a seminal early tract in public choice theory of this kind, see: James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 3: The Calculus of Consent (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999). (30.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiii. See also: Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 178. (31.) Dryzek, Discursive Democracy, 115–16. (32.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiv; Innes and Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking,” 35–6; Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 179–80. (33.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2007) 107. (34.) See, for example: Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 221; Frank Fischer, “Beyond Empiricism,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis, eds. Hajer and Wagenaar, 224–5; Innes and Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking,” 38, 40. (35.) Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 160. (36.) Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 161. (37.) Innes and Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking,” 44.

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Public policy (38.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin Books, 1968) 137. (39.) Sarah Connick and Judith E. Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” in The Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement, eds. Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, and Jennifer Thomas-Larmer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999) 805. (40.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 812. (41.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 812. (42.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 822. See also: Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 185. (43.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 822. (44.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 814, 824; Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 186–7. (45.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 813. (46.) For example, see Connick and Innes’s critiques of the shortcomings of SFEP: “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 821, 823. (47.) Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 184– 5. (48.) Hajer and Wagenaar, “Introduction,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis, 30. (49.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 66. (50.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 22. (51.) Here we have some similarities with: S. D. Noam Cook and Hendrik Wagenaar, “Navigating the Eternally Unfolding Present: Toward an Epistemology of Practice,” The American Review of Public Administration 42:1 (2012): 3–38. (52.) Anne L. Schneider and Helen M. Ingram, “Introduction,” in Deserving and Entitled: Social Constructions and Public Policy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005) 17. Another important interpretive piece of work in this area focusing more exclusively on race is: Dvora Yanow, Constructing “Race” and “Ethnicity” in America: Category-Making in Public Policy and Administration (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). (53.) Schneider and Ingram, “Introduction,” in Deserving and Entitled, 17.

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Public policy (54.) Fischer and Forester, “Introduction,” in The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis, 1–2. See also: Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 168–87. (55.) Bernard Harcourt, “Policing Disorder: Can We Reduce Serious Crime by Punishing Petty Offenses?”, Boston Review (April/May 2002), . (56.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 36–7. (57.) Sharify-Funk, “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable Accommodation,’” 535–53. Some have argued that the commission report was particularly effective in reassuring religious minorities, but less adept in addressing Quebec nationalists. For a mostly positive assessment of the commission see: SharifyFunk, “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable Accommodation,’” 535–53; for a mostly critical one see: Gada Mahrouse, “‘Reasonable Accommodation’ in Quebec: The Limits of Participation and Dialogue,” Race & Class 52:1 (2010): 85–96. (58.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 232–5. (59.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 38–9. (60.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 76. (61.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 168. (62.) See also: Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public Administration 82:1 (2004): 39–62. (63.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 39. (64.) Hay, Political Analysis, 44. (65.) Colin Hay, “Neither Real nor Fictitious but ‘As If Real’? A Political Ontology of the State,” The British Journal of Sociology 65:3 (2014): 459. (66.) Hay, “Neither Real nor Fictitious but ‘As If Real’?” 472–5. (67.) Hay, Political Analysis, 138. (68.) Hay, Political Analysis, 48.

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Conclusion

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Conclusion Mark Bevir Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords Anti-naturalism’s effect on the study of human behavior and society is profound and comprehensive. In terms of empirical inquiry, a new approach to explanation and concept formation is generated. In terms of normative inquiry, the wall dividing the study of values versus facts comes tumbling down. Where naturalism built barriers separating ethics, political theory, and social science, anti-naturalism instead builds bridges and opens access to areas of mutual concern. An interpretive turn also generates a uniquely humanistic approach to civic life, democracy, and public policy.... Anti-naturalism’s effect on the study of human behavior and society is profound and comprehensive. In terms of empirical inquiry, a new approach to explanation and concept formation is generated. In terms of normative inquiry, the wall dividing the study of values versus facts comes tumbling down. Where naturalism built barriers separating ethics, political theory, and social science, anti-naturalism instead builds bridges and opens access to areas of mutual concern. An interpretive turn also generates a uniquely humanistic approach to civic life, democracy, and public policy. In addition, we have shown how anti-naturalism is capable of encompassing the best insights of a wide range of philosophical traditions—including pragmatists, post-structuralists, analytic philosophers, neo-Aristotelians, phenomenologists, Hegelians, social constructivists, and many others who in the case of the philosophy of social science can cooperate in reasonable harmony. The point of Page 1 of 3

Conclusion this has been to achieve greater philosophical clarity and consensus about what social scientists are doing when they set out to study and explain human beings and their societies from an interpretive perspective. Indeed, the interpretive turn, clarified by anti-naturalist philosophy, might join together the intellectual dynamism of thinkers often thought of in oppositional terms: Michel Foucault and John Searle, Charles Taylor and Friedrich Nietzsche, E. P. Thompson and Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel. This does not mean that disagreements and tensions disappear. It rather means that the interpretive tradition is capable of a very broad overlapping consensus among otherwise divergent thinkers. What joins them is a view of human agency and society as constructed out of meanings. A narrative and historical view of the social sciences in turn unlocks rich new ways of studying the world. Expert and amateur social scientists alike can step into the immersive field of meanings and venture their best interpretations. Ethnographies, mass-scale sociologies, genealogies, and countless other genres of narrative explanation are open to study when one has left the idea of an absolute, exclusive, and hegemonic scientific explanation of society behind. Like a rich poem or text, the understanding of society itself is enacted through an endless and hopefully virtuous circle of interpretations. Interpretive social science does not expect a final, historical vantage point that will speak preemptively for all further reflection or inquiry. Nor does it maintain that society is finally only about institutions, or rational actors, or evolutionary genetics, or stimulus triggers in the environment, or neurons firing in the brain, or some other absolute, brute feature of a machine-like cosmos. Rather, (p.202) the meanings that interlock and generate the worlds of human life are themselves subject to perpetual waves of historical change and flux. For this reason, the future holds new, yet unknown understandings of the present and the past. The future is even the bringer of new pasts. And this is not due to the historical provisionality of a march toward absolute science, but rather is the result of the very nature of social and political reality itself. What Jorge Luis Borges said of literary fiction is indeed true of social reality, as well: “literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”1 The same can be said of the density of events and everyday happenings, wars and treaties, practices and habits, institutions and social spaces, religions and mores that are the stuff of human life. The meaning of human society is not exhaustible for the simple reason that the meaning of a single human life has not yet been exhausted. Notes:

(1.) Jorge Luis Borges, “A Note on (Toward) Bernard Shaw,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions Publishing Company, 2007) 213–14.

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Index

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist Approach Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018 Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

(p.203) Index actions 66–67, 116 and beliefs, constitutive relationship between 23–24 as brute data 33–35 contingent 35–36, 51, 54, 138, 142 holistic nature of 23–24 and narrative 24–25 Adams, Herbert 3–4 Adcock, Robert 77 age, and voter behavior 68–70 agency 45–48, 53, 116, 156–157, 181 situated 48–49, 53–54, 62 ahistoricism 44–45, 49–51, 54 Alexander, Jeffrey 156 Alexander, Michelle 121–122 Al–Qaida 120 American Way of Life 128–129 analytic philosophy 13–14, 35 Anderson, Benedict 147–149 Anglo-Foucauldians 152 anti-essentialism 72–73, 80 anti-humanism 44–50, 53–54, 61–62 anti-naturalism 2, 9–15, 18–19, 44–45 basic philosophical features 19–20 concept formation 80–85 and naturalism contrasted 32–33 anti-Semitism 26–27 Aristotle 167, 180 Aryan physics 26–27 atomism 5–6, 8, 95, 196 authoritarianism 75–76 autonomy 27–28, 45–48 Page 1 of 13

Index axioms of rational choice theory 104–107 Ayer, A. J. 32 behavioral genetics 36–37 behavioral political science 5–8, 35, 196 beliefs 48–49, 66, 68, 95, 116–122, 128 and actions, constitutive relationship between 23–24 and age of voters 69–70 as brute data 33–35 changes in 25–27 contingent 30–31, 35–36, 49, 51, 53–54, 82, 99–100, 138–139, 142, 160 dilemmatic sources of 25–27, 29–30, 82 explaining 21–22 holistic nature of 20–23 inter-subjective 28, 31 and narrative 24–25 pathological sources of 25–27 racial 121–122 repressed changes in 26 and self-interpretation 24 and social background 29 understanding 21 Bellah, Robert 83–84 Bernstein, Richard 32 Bidney, David 55 big data 34 bio-power 151–153 black identity 121–122 Blair, Tony 172 Bloom, Allan 59–60 Booher, David 189–190 Borges, Jorge Luis 202 Bouchard, Gérard 181–182, 194–195 Bourdieu, Pierre 171 Brady, Henry 68 Broken Windows policing, New York 194 brute data, beliefs and actions as 33–35 brute fact reification 66–67, 69, 142–143 Bueno de Mesquito, Bruce 77–79 Burgess, John 3–4 Burke, Edmund 128–129 California, water policy 190–192 capitalism 141, 150, 169–170 indigenous 130 case studies 7–8, 96–97, 100–101 causality 35–38 certainty 59–60 Chicago school of political science 5–6 Christian culture 166–167 circular definition 58–59 Page 2 of 13

Index civic engagement 123–125 civil religion 83–84 civil society 171 clash of civilizations thesis 117–119 Collier, David 65–68, 71–73, 77 colonialism, and ethnography 93–94 communism 147, 169–170 community 147–149 completeness axiom 104–107 (p.204) Comte, Auguste 3–4, 138 concept formation 10, 65–85 anti-naturalist 80–85 naturalist 65–66, 196 essentialism 70–76, 164, 196 linguistic instrumentalism 76–80 reification 66–70, 196 concepts descriptive 80–82 explanatory 80, 82–83 family resemblance 72–73, 80–82 conceptual stretching 71–73 conceptual traveling 71 Connick, Sarah 190–192 contentious politics 10, 73–74 contestability 139, 142–144, 153, 160 in policymaking 183–185 contingency 30–31, 35–36, 49, 51, 53–54, 82, 99–100, 138–139, 142, 151–152, 160–161, 174 counter-democracy 124–125 criminal identity 121–122 criminality 186–187 critique 45, 60–62 cross-sectional surveys 94–95 cultural approach 156 cultural practices 122–128 cultural studies 131 culture(s) 6, 131, 172 popular/mass 131 and public policy 187–188 Cushman, Philip 156 Darwinism 3–4, 146–147 data analysis methods 89, 96–103 case studies 7–8, 96–97, 100–101 grounded theory 96–97, 101–102 Q methodology 96–97, 102–103 random sampling 96–100 statistical inference 96–100 data collection methods 89–96 ethnography 19, 88–94 Page 3 of 13

Index interviews 90, 94–96 surveys 5–6, 94–96 Davidson, Donald 13–14, 55–56 death of the subject 44–47, 53 deductive theory 6 definitional circularity 58–59 deliberative democracy 168, 172–173 deliberative public policy 179–180, 183, 189–192 democracy 68, 75–77, 79, 92, 101, 167 deliberative 168, 172–173 participatory 168 representative 169, 173, 189 see also counter-democracy democratic peace theory 58–59, 74–75 democratic theory 27, 157, 168–173 Denton, Melinda Lundquist 98–100 deontology 159–160, 164, 167–168 Derrida, Jacques 53 Descartes, Rene 3 descriptive concepts 80–82 Desmond, Matthew 91 developmental historicism 3–5, 138 devolution 172–173 Dewey, John 12–14 diachronic research 11–12, 116, 135–136 dialogical policy formation 172–173, 189–192 dictatorship 79 dilemmatic beliefs 25–27, 29–30, 82 discontinuity 138–139, 142–144, 153 discourses 46–48, 51–53, 56–57, 61 disenchantment thesis 30–31 Donahue, John 186 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 26–27 Demons 26 drugs 121–122 Dryzek, John 189 Dubner, Steven 149–150 Durkheim, Emile 171 duty see deontology Easton, David 6 economics 4–5, 105, 107–108, 149–150, 158–160 Einstein, Albert 26–27 empiricism 5–8, 55–56 end of history thesis 129–130 Enlightenment 166–167 entrepreneurial government 170–171 epistemes 46–48, 52, 57, 61 epistemology 13–14 essentialism 70–76, 117, 196 strong 71–74 Page 4 of 13

Index weak 71–75 ethical critique 12, 157–158 ethical engagement, of public policy 185–187, 189 ethical neutrality 162–163 ethics 27, 156–165, 174 deontological 159, 164, 167–168 facts of 161–162 Greek/Roman 166–167 historical turn in 165–168 utilitarian 4–5, 106–107, 158–161, 163–164, 167–168 virtue 167 (p.205) ethnography 19, 88–94 and colonialism 93–94 and naturalist research 92–93 post-colonial turn in 93–94 ethnomethodology 44 evolutionary theory 3–4, 146–147 experts/expertise 39, 168–170, 172, 179–180, 189, 193 explanation 21–22, 35–36, 45, 49–54, 61, 67–68, 103–104 explanatory concepts 80, 82–83 facts 6, 12 ethical 161–162 natural sciences 161 shared 58–60 fact–value dichotomy 162, 174 family resemblance concepts 72–73, 80–82 Finer, Herman 5 Fischer, Frank 179–180, 182–183, 185, 189–190, 193 Flyvbjerg, Bent 14 folk naturalisms 120–121 folk psychology 32 Forester, John 179–182, 185 formalism 4–5, 8 formal modeling 104–110 Foucault, Michel 28, 44–53, 56–57, 61, 106–107, 142–144, 147–148, 167–168, 201 anti-humanist position 46–48, 54, 61 death of the subject 46–47, 53, 167 discourses 46–48, 51–53, 56–57, 61 epistemes 46–48, 52, 57, 61 and ethics 166–167 genealogical approach 31, 46–47, 138–140, 143–144 governmentality 151–153 power, regimes of 46–48, 52–53 foundationalism 58–62 Freeman, Edward 3–4 free-rider problem 105 French peasant communities 148–149 Fukuyama, Francis 129–130 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 13–14, 20, 29, 44, 48–49, 167–169 Page 5 of 13

Index Galileo 3 game theory 105, 109 Geertz, Clifford 147, 156, 161 genealogy 31, 44–47, 135–140, 143–144, 152–153 Gerring, John 100–101 Giuliani, Rudolph 194 globalization 129–130, 171, 179 Goffman, Alice 91, 122 Gordon, Colin 151 governance 170–172 market 170–171 network 170–172 governmentalities 151–153, 196 Gramsci, Antonio 131 Gray, John 129–130 Greek ethics 166–167 Green, J. R. 3–4 grounded theory 96–97, 101–102 Habeck, Mary 120 Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck 119 Hajer, Maarten 179–180, 193 Hall, Stuart 131, 156, 169 Hansen, John Mark 68–70 happiness/pleasure 158–161, 164 Harcourt, Bernard 194 Hartz, Louis 128–130 Hay, Colin 7–8, 12–13, 37–38, 48, 104–105, 108–109, 195–196 Hegel, G. W. F. 3–4, 167, 201 Hegelianism 14–15, 44 hegemony 131 Heidegger, Martin 24, 44–45, 167, 201 Hempel, Carl 67 hermeneutic circle 20–23, 33, 75–76, 99 heuristics 89, 103–110 high culture 131 Hispanic identity 121 historical institutionalism 7–8 historical sociologies 135–153 historicism 53–54, 82 developmental 3–5, 138 history 29–31, 160–161 ethical significance of 157, 165–168 and social background 29–30 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 151 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 91 homo economicus 150 horizon, Gadamer’s concept of 48–49 humanism 39, 185–186 see also anti-humanism human rights 167 Page 6 of 13

Index Hume, David 174 Huntington, Samuel P. 117–120 Husserl, Edmund 44–48 hypothesis testing 6–7 idealism 3–4 ideal types 50 identity 116–122 criminal 121–122 (p.206) Islamic versus Western 116–120 racial 121–122 ideology 12, 26–27, 61–62 incarceration of racial minorities 122, 144 inclusive fitness logic 146–147 incommensurability 57–58 incommensurable goods 106–108 induction 6–7 Ingram, Helen 77 Innes, Judith E. 189–192 institutional theory 171–172 institutions 123–128 invisible 125 interpretive turn 2, 9–15, 44–45, 201 interviews 90, 94–96 in-depth 90 semi-structured 95–96 structured 95–96 Islam 116–120 Japan 130 Jevons, William Stanley 4–5 Jewish culture 166–167 judgment 124–125 Kant, Immanuel 159, 164–165, 167 kinship 146–147 knowledge-power 56–57, 61 Kuhn, Thomas 158 ladder of abstraction 71 ladder of generality 72 Lampland, Martha 126 language 28–29, 47 see also linguistic instrumentalism large-N statistics 7–8 law-like explanation 35–37 legitimacy 124–125, 192 Lenard, Philipp 26–27 Levitsky, Steven 68 Levitt, Steven 149–150, 186 liberalism 128–129, 147 linguistic instrumentalism 76–80 object-side 77, 79, 117–118 subject-side 76–79 Page 7 of 13

Index Lippmann, Walter 6 Locke, John 128–129 logical positivism 55 longitudinal surveys 94–95 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 136 McAdam, Doug 73–74 MacIntyre, Alasdair 24, 37, 167–170 MacLeish, Kenneth 90–91 Mahon, James 71–73 Maoz, Zeev 74–75 Marcuse, Herbert 171 markets 150, 152–153, 170–171 Marx, Karl 3–4, 128–129, 138 Marxism 35, 163–164, 169 mass incarceration 122, 144 mass/popular culture 131 mass surveys 94–96, 99 materialism 3 Mead, Margaret 92–93 meaning 46–47, 55–56, 67–68 age and voter behavior 69–70 contestability of 139, 142–144, 153, 160, 183–184 meaning holism 20–21, 33–34, 55–56, 67, 99 Merriam, Charles 5–6 meta–narratives 135–140, 153 methods 10–11, 14, 88–111 heuristics 89, 103–110 multi–methods 89, 94, 96, 108, 110–111 see also data analysis; data collection methods; qualitative methods; qualitative–quantitative debate; quantitative methods midlevel theory 6–7 Mill, J. S. 4–5, 138, 158–159 modernity 144–145, 157, 160–161, 167–168 Moore, Kathleen 119, 159 moralism 164–165 Morrow, James 77–78 multi-methods 89, 94, 96, 108, 110–111 narratives 24–25, 54, 62, 82–83, 173 and objectivity 44–45 and public policy 180–183, 189 see also meta-narratives nationalism 146–149 National Survey of Youth and Religion 98 nation-ness 147–148 naturalism 2–9, 18, 50–51 as anti-democratic 39 as anti-humanistic 39, 153 and anti-naturalism contrasted 32–33 “as if” defense of 195–197 assumptions Page 8 of 13

Index beliefs and actions as brute facts 33–35 goal of scientific knowledge is predictive power 36–39 (p.207) scientific explanation seeks general causal laws 35–36 concept formation 65–66, 196 essentialism 70–76, 164, 196 linguistic instrumentalism 76–80 reification 66–70, 196 and economics 149–150 and ethical values 158–159 and ethnographic techniques 92–93 folk 120–121 and institutions 123–126 and nationalist social imaginary 146–147, 149 and race 121 as rejection of scientism 19 secularization thesis 144–145 and the state 151 and traditions 128–129 and violence studies 140–142, 144 natural sciences 2–3, 12, 18–19, 24, 26, 32–33, 36, 59–60, 126, 158–161, 163–164 neoclassical economics 4–5, 105, 149–150, 158–160 neoliberalism 131, 152–153, 171 network governance 170–172 New Age spirituality 145 new institutionalism 171 New Labor 131, 172 New Left 2, 14–15, 130–131, 169–170 New York, Broken Windows policing 194 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 137–140, 160–161, 166–168, 201 nongovernmental actors 171 normal science 158–161 normativity 61 Norris, Pippa 124 objectivity 45, 54–62, 115, 162 observer-participation 90, 92–93 O’Donnell, Guillermo 77 ontology 13–14 Orientalism 118–119 original position 167 Pader, Ellen 91–92 Panofsky, Aaron 36–37 panopticism 143–144 participatory democracy 168 pastoral power 151–152 pathologies 25–27 Patrick, Glenda 67 peasant communities, nineteenth century France 148–149 peasant resistance, Southeast Asia 131–132 Pentland, Alex 18, 34 Page 9 of 13

Index performativity, public policy 193–195 Pettit, Philip 167 phenomenological sociology 44 phenomenology CP3 10, 12–14, 32, 44–47, 50, 54–55, 60 phronesis 14 Pinker, Steven 140–142, 144, 163–164 pleasure/happiness 158–161, 164 pluralism 172–173 Polanyi, Karl 150 policymaking see public policy political science 5–8 behavioral approach 5–8, 35, 196 case study analysis in 100–101 concept formation in 66–70, 73–79 historical institutionalism in 7–8 rational choice theory in 7–8 politics 3–4 popular culture 131 Porter, Theodore 126–127 positivism 3–4, 6–8 post-structuralism 10, 12–14, 28, 44–47, 52–53, 61 see also Foucault, Michel power 31, 52–53, 56–57, 148, 151–153 regimes of 46–48, 52–53 see also knowledge-power practices 28, 31, 47, 49 see also cultural practices pragmatism 12–14 prediction 36–39, 163–164 principal–agent problem 170–171 prisoner’s dilemma 140 prospect theory 107 public choice approach 170–171, 188 public opinion 6, 124–125 public policy 12–13, 27 contestability 183–185 cultural context of 187–188 deliberative 179–180, 183, 189–192, 195 dialogical 172–173, 189–192 ethical engagement 185–187, 189 legitimacy 192 narratives or stories in 180–183, 189 performative dimensions of 193–195 public–private partnerships 172 puppets 50–51 Putnam, Robert 123–125 Q methodology 96–97, 102–103 qualitative methods 10–11, 88–89, 180–181 (p.208) qualitative–quantitative debate 88–89, 93–95, 179, 183 quantification 5–6, 126–128 quantitative methods 10–11, 88–89, 180–181, 188 see also qualitative–quantitative debate Page 10 of 13

Index Quebec, accommodation of religious minorities 181–182, 185, 194–195 race 121–122, 156 radial categories 72 random sampling 96–100 rational choice theory 7–8, 38, 89, 104–110, 140–142, 149–150, 160, 170–171, 195–196 axiomatization 104–107 rationality 56–57 Rawls, John 167 Reagan, Ronald 170–171 reason/reasoning 35 local 49 reconciliation policies 194 referents of concepts 67, 77 regicide 143 reification 66–70, 102–103, 196 rejection, democracy of 125 relativism 56–60 religion 30–31, 98–100, 140, 144–145, 167 civil 83–84 religious minorities, Quebec 181–182, 185, 194–195 representative democracy 169, 173, 189 repression 26 reputation 124–125 resistance 128, 130–132 Ricoeur, Paul 24 Rios, Victor 122 Roman ethics 167 Rosanvallon, Pierre 124–125 Rosenstone, Steven 68–70 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 190 Russett, Bruce 74–75 Russia 130 see also Soviet Union Said, Edward 118–119 San Francisco Estuary Project (SFEP) 190–192 Sartori, Giovanni 65–67, 71, 76–77 Schaffer, Frederic 92 Schmitter, Philippe C. 77 Schneider, Anne L. 193–194 Schutz, Alfred 44–52, 54–56, 60 scientism 61–62 naturalism as rejection of 19 Scott, James C. 131–132 Searle, John 13–14, 201 secularization 30–31, 140, 144–145 selectorate theory 10, 77–79 self-deception 26–27 self-interpretation 24, 27–30, 81, 100, 124, 160, 174 Shaw, R. Paul 146–147 situated agency 48–49, 53–54, 62 Page 11 of 13

Index Siverson, Ralph 77–78 small improvements argument 106 Smith, Adam 150 Smith, Alastair 77–79 Smith, Christian 98–100 Smith, Jane 119 Smith, Rogers M. 129–130 social background 27–29, 31, 33, 46–49, 54 and belief formation 29 and history 29–30 social capital 123–124 social choice theory 105 social constructivism 13–14, 19–20 Social Darwinism 163–164 social engineering 37, 169–170 social imaginaries 145–150, 153 socialism 129–131, 169 social physics 18, 34 sociobiology 146–149 Southeast Asia, peasant resistance 131–132 Soviet Union 169 Spencer, Herbert 150 Spickard, Paul 156 Stalinism 169 standardization 126–128 Stark, Johannes 26–27 Star, Susan Leigh 126 state 170–171, 196 governmental approaches to 151–153 naturalist study of 151 statistical inference 96–100 statistics 5–6, 88–89 large-N 7–8 Stone, Deborah 180–182, 185 strong essentialism 71–74 Stubbs, William 3–4 subjectivity 45–49 surveillance 124–125, 143–144 survey research 5–6, 94–96, 99 synchronic research 11, 116, 135 Tarrow, Sidney 73–74 Taylor, Charles 13–14, 24, 30–31, 44, 48, 61, 136, 139–140, 144–145, 165, 167–168, 181–182, 194–195, 201 (p.209) technocracy 36–37, 39, 168–172, 179–180, 189, 193 Thatcherism 131 Thatcher, Margaret 170–171 theory 57–60 midlevel 6–7 thick descriptions 90–92, 161 Page 12 of 13

Index Thompson, E. P. 130–131, 169–170, 201 Tilly, Charles 73–74 Tocqueville, Alexis de 128–129 traditions 46–49, 53–54, 82, 128–130, 167, 172 multiple 129–130 resistance to 128, 130–132 tragedy of the commons 105 transcendental subject 167 transitivity axiom 104–105 tribalism 146 truth 57 understanding 21 unity of science movement 32 utilitarianism 4–5, 106–107, 158–161, 163–164, 167–168 value-neutrality 60–61 values 12, 157–165, 168, 173–174 violence 140–144 virtue ethics 167 voter behavior 66, 68–70, 95 Wagenaar, Hendrik 179–180, 193 Wallas, Graham 5–6 War on Drugs 121–122 warfare 146–147 weak essentialism 71–75 Weber, Eugen 148–149 Weber, Max 50, 99–100, 157 welfare state 152–153 wellbeing 99–100 wicked problems 172 Williams, Bernard 139–140, 161, 164, 167–168 Williams, Raymond 130–131, 169 Wilson, E. O. 146–147 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 13–14, 20–21, 44–45, 72–73, 80–81, 201 women, Islamic 119 Wong, Yuwa 146–147 working class 130–131 Yale School of Cultural Sociology 156 Yanow, Dvora 179–180, 187–188

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