Anti-Climacus

ON METHOD AND THEORY: I had lunch with a fellow theorist, where the recent Crooked Timber post on whether there are methods in political theory came up (found via Jacob Levy. For both of us, the answer to that question was 'no.' I agree in part with aaron_m:

"Obviously it does not follow that because political theory lacks methods of the character we find in empirical sciences that we also fail to demonstrate a purpose to our field. In fact the methods in empirical science do not tell us anything about their purpose either."

'Method' does not seem to me apt to describe the difference between, say, a textualist or contextualist approach. In international relations (the area of social science with which I am most familiar), 'method' is generally not a designation for the output or purpose of a piece of scholarship, but rather for the means by which that end is achieved. That is (in the ideal case), you begin with a theory about the way the international system works, ask where you would go to find evidence that it is true, and then choose a research method appropriate to finding that evidence. Thus statistics, formal theory, game theory, case-study, process-tracing, analysis of documents, etc. A different method corresponds to a different starting place for the purposes of theory-building or proving a thesis.

Textualists and contextualists, I think, both start with texts: the question is what else one might need to read in order to make claims about a text's meaning (and these others sources will almost invariably be texts themselves). The actual process of reading itself goes by without much comment--my experience of grad classes, with professors from far apart on a 'methodological' spectrum, has almost always begun with the assumption that we already know how to read.* A contextualist can be asked about a particular author he is speaking about, and give an analysis of that text.** It is less frequent (though not unheard of) for, say, a statistician to be able to give a significant level of detail about any particular case in their dataset. To me, this suggests the difference of method in political theory is not so wide as it is sometimes made out to be.

Now, the conceptual-v-applied distinction may be more on the level of methodology: Glyn Morgan delineates the content of applied political theory well. Conceptual theory begins at some level to look like formal theory in empirical political science, and applied theory begins to move into questions of policy--and to that extent, begin to look like methods. Not wanting to stir up a hornet's nest, I'll submit that conceptual-v-applied becomes more of an issue as one moves from political theory to political philosophy.***

By way of conclusion, Colin Farrelly suggests resisting the temptation to not think about methodology. The point is well-taken, but one's position of this question may be affected by his stage in academic life. Ideally, when beginning, the focus is on mastering the information necessary to begin putting out interesting work. Speaking from my position in academia, that's what I am trying to do: I think about issues of method and style, but these are secondary considerations (in part because there exists a template of scholarship I can borrow without having to reinvent the wheel). After the point of that mastery, it makes sense to focus more on honing the method of delivery, or the style in which it's done.

These are, as ever, tentative thoughts following a lunchtime conversation...



*even a strident Straussian approach would seem to boil down to 'read very carefully'

**and a good textualist should be able to say something about the political conditions or intellectual history of the author they are focusing on. I lean towards the textualist side, but if you want a background on religious controversies in early 17th-century Holland, I can talk about it to some length.

***less obliquely: texts root political theory. This is not to say that political philosophy is a useless enterprise, or that the same people may not dabble in both (my dissertation requires that to not be true), just that this makes for as good a line as any.