To a political theorist, publishing a book on ideas and politics in social science research might seem an oddity, as the mere suggestion that anyone might think that ideas are not a central feature of the political is bizarre. If the central premise of this book is that “ideas are a primary cause of political behaviour” (Robert C. Lieberman, p. 210), it reveals something shocking about our discipline that such statements are necessary in the first place. Were ideas not to be a primary cause of political behavior we would be bypassing the human mind as a regulator, coordinator, and selector of human conduct: We would be greatly underestimating the role of the mind on both individual conduct and—more importantly for the social sciences—the conduct of individuals interacting in society.

The purpose of this diverse and rich collection of chapters is, rather, to educate a particular professional grouping: political scientists engaged in policy-related research. Because such research is heavily causal, the book has located its sets of arguments for the significance of ideas within an intellectual and research framework that is familiar to such political scientists. The great advantage of that approach is to try to persuade policy-related researchers in their own language, by conceiving of ideas as agent-produced, cognitive, causal beliefs in constant flux that have an identifiable influence on what happens in politics. The costs are that all-too often, addressing that class of unbelievers necessitates stating the obvious, that the possibility of unconscious beliefs is muted and that the empirical features of ideas other than their causal impact are excluded, even though those, too, should be of great interest to political scientists. The emphasis on causality as the mark of a social science leads to an admirable appreciation of the historical diachronic evolution of idea systems, but there is no parallel examination of their synchronic attributes, or of their reception rather than production.

The editors have done a fine job of assembling a diverse set of perspectives through which to promote their message. Jal Mehta insists that the study of political ideas matters mainly in explaining action and that ideas define problems—in other words, they serve as interpretive tools in which agency is constrained by culture. His reference to such a culture as a Zeitgeist, however, overemphasizes an underlying unity that societies rarely possess. That is largely corrected by Lieberman in his revealing study of the competing paradigms informing race thinking—color blindness and race consciousness.

From another angle, Craig Parsons presents dissent and the exclusion of alternative policies in the European Union as an aid to establishing the comparative impact of ideas. Vivien A. Schmidt helpfully focuses on discursive institutionalism to observe that institutions are internal to the thinking and actions of agents. Collective discourse, she argues, takes two forms: communicative to the general public and coordinative, among policy actors. Colin Hay persuasively explores the incommensurability of ideas and their relative messiness, and drives home the weakness of material self-interest explanations as against the indeterminacy of ideas and their effects. That theme is continued by Mark Blyth, who acutely notes that (mis)perceptions of interest count for more than the “interests” themselves. Ideas “are simultaneously the media through which agents understand the world and the material that constitutes it” (p. 84). So ideas exist in concrete empirical arrangements, yet, crucially, they are continually reinterpreted. In that kind of analysis, uncertainty importantly replaces measurable risk. But while Blyth sees ideas mainly as constructing stability, ideas are also notoriously, or beneficially, destabilizing. The absence of ideational neatness and the resulting accidental complexity of policy outcomes are topics reiterated by Daniel Wincott, who challenges the simplistic view of a golden age of the welfare state, albeit a viewpoint already well documented by welfare historians and theorists.

Sheri Berman's is the most straightforward history-of-ideas study in the book, offering an instructive lesson in the emergence of European social democratic thinking. She sees political transformation occasioned by the opening up of new ideological spaces. Again, structure and agency are seen to operate in tandem. Two chapters look at dedicated “idea-producers.” John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen examine telling differences among “knowledge regimes,” in universities, research centers, and party organizations, though a reminder that there are many other sources of knowledge would have been appropriate, and a parallel study of the mass media is one thing this volume lacks. Andrew Rich investigates think tanks, while significantly relating them to the ideological environments in which these purveyors of expertise function. He claims that conservative think tanks are more up front in promoting political views, while liberal ones claim research neutrality (though, in fact, their liberal ideologies are simply disseminated more subtly). And I would challenge his assumption that ideas are not as important to liberals as to conservatives (p. 205).

The problem this book seeks to address is the purported disjuncture between ideas and policies, let alone ideas and interests, that emanates from a particular view of political science. Yet a methodology based on genesis, sequences, and instigation discloses only one element of the role of ideas in politics. Even bringing ideas into the picture as causal autonomous factors, as externalities, exaggeratedly underlines their divorce from the world of politics. Ideas are not knocking at the gate of politics, supplicating for an entry ticket. They are empirically in and of the political. Unpack an interest and there are ideas entangled in it. Decode a policy or a procedure and it is found to be saturated with ideational and ideological assumptions, aspirations, or fears. Investigate an institution and it is a crystallization of social, legal, and cultural understandings. Many of the contributors know that—certainly the editors do—but the message of the book could be bolder. Hermeneutical interpretation, discourse analysis, conceptual morphology, and conceptual history are some of the alternative approaches that may illuminate the place of ideas in politics, and they are underrepresented or absent in this volume. What work do ideas do or fail to do in terms of presenting political worlds? How do they map competing social realities? How do they decode and enable political understanding? How do they offer glimpses of the multiverse of more plausible or less plausible accounts of political occurrences? “What does this mean?” must accompany “What does this do?”

At the heart of the problem lies the challenge of integrating the power of impact-oriented or predictive approaches to the political with meticulous analyses of what the political actually contains. Hence, Lieberman's astute observation that “the methodological challenge … is to weave together two explanatory modes whose analytical vocabularies and technologies have largely diverged” (p. 211) is almost satisfying, if by explanatory is also meant interpretive. From that viewpoint, Lieberman's scholarly contribution on two competing ideational paradigms could be supplemented by asking which components of each paradigm mesh with which, how components mutate to produce new variants, and what might be the tipping point in terms of their variable intensity. Change, too, can be seen more clearly when one investigates what happens to the microstructures of ideas when they undergo modifications. It is quite legitimate, as social scientists, to be curious about the behavior of our subject matter—thinking politically—as a necessary component of policymaking. That, too, is what the professional study of ideas in politics is about.

This book makes a number of important steps in the direction of bringing social scientists, political theorists, and intellectual historians together. That momentum now needs to be accelerated for the good of the discipline.