Heated controversies about the theory and practice of social inquiry seem to come in waves. In political science, one such wave arrived with the advent and aftermath of the so-called behavioral revolution. Roughly a quarter century later, in October 2000, the self-named Perestroika rebellion inspired another wave of intense interest in the proper conduct of political inquiry. Unlike the earlier wave, the Perestroika movement failed initially to generate much compelling discussion of methodological issues. To be sure, it elicited numerous expressions of discontent with the hegemonic influence of rational choice theory and quantitative methods, as well as vocal demands for greater methodological pluralism, problem-driven research, and political “relevance.” In addition, the proponents of Perestroika raised serious questions about the institutional structures and intellectual orthodoxies that have organized academic political inquiry in the United States over the past few decades. Yet these expressions of discontent and demands for reform were rarely accompanied by creative thought about the nature of political inquiry or compelling visions of alternatives to the present hegemony. Consequently, those scholars who hoped that the Perestroika revolt might rejuvenate the increasingly moribund literature on methodologies of political inquiry were sorely disappointed. Instead of providing powerfully articulated defenses of or alternatives to the methodological axioms of our age, the Perestroika controversy all too often issued in amorphous proposals and empty platitudes.

If the three books under review here are any indication, we may now be entering a period of renewal, one in which the impoverished state of epistemological and methodological reflection is superseded by a variety of more promising and substantive interventions. Although the authors of and contributors to these books advance distinctive arguments of their own, each provides important intellectual resources for breaking through the crust of convention that has inhibited recent discussions about the nature of political inquiry. Moreover, while none of these books provides a full-blown philosophy of social science, and none converges on a single epistemological stance or set of regulative principles, all of them offer scholars of social inquiry a host of valuable insights, clues, and reminders. In short, each of these books demonstrates convincingly how careful reflection on the theory and practice of social inquiry may improve the quality of social inquiry, yielding studies that better illuminate the complex and contested landscape of social and political life.

At first glance, George Steinmetz's edited volume, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences, looks like a classic baggy monster of a text. Composed of a lengthy introduction and 17 essays that collectively map the “explicit and … implicit” (p. 1) epistemological assumptions animating the major social scientific disciplines (with the exception of psychology), as well as history, the philosophy of science, and area studies, the book's sheer size and scope make it an intellectually daunting undertaking. It is, however, an undertaking well worth one's investment of time and energy, as these essays deliver a wide array of stimulating perspectives on the politics of knowledge production in the human sciences. Reflecting the ambition that animates this project, Steinmetz states that the collection aims to “provide a portrait of epistemology and methodology (writ large) in the contemporary social sciences” (p. 1). The portrait that emerges is an amalgamation of diverse styles and foci, with pointillist studies of specific developments in individual disciplines (such as Emily Hauptman's essay on the changing meanings of theory in postwar political science in the United States) juxtaposed with more broadly conceived investigations of entire fields and subfields over a period of more than a half century (see, for example, Web Keane's discussion of the development of anthropology since the time of Boas). These, in turn, are followed by a group of essays that sketch alternatives to positivist epistemologies in the human sciences. The alternatives include both programmatic articulations of various philosophical and ontological positions, such as standpoint theory (Sandra Harding) and critical realism (Andrew Collier and Tony Lawson), as well as more tightly drawn studies of psychoanalytic theory (Anthony Elliott), different conceptions of temporality (Andrew Abbott), and the enduring power of the fact/value dichotomy in recent and contemporary political science (Sophia Mihic, Stephen Engelmann, and Elizabeth Wingrove).

What unites these diverse studies is an ambition to chart the past and present trajectories of the positivist influence in the human sciences. By assembling in a single volume investigations of the extent and form of positivist influence in virtually all of the major social scientific disciplines, Steinmetz and his contributors provide a valuable comparative perspective on current debates about the past, present, and future of the human sciences. Indeed, given the fairly common tendency of scholars to view the positivist influence in the human sciences today as either pervasive or negligible, the comparative approach usefully foregrounds the distinctive forces that both propel the development of specific disciplines and modify the relationships between them. In addition, Steinmetz's introductory essay and later chapter on sociology makes an admirable effort both to locate “the common denominators of all positivist positions” (p. 34) and to disaggregate distinct variants of positivism. Considering the reluctance of many scholars to specify in any detail what is meant by the term “positivism,” as well as the present tendency to attach “overwhelmingly negative and pejorative connotations” (p. 276) to it, Steinmetz's attempt to track the unity and diversity of meanings that travel under the positivist label is most welcome.

In his engaging study, Terms of Inquiry, James W. Davis investigates a distinctive “scientific approach” to political inquiry, one that first came to prominence at the end of World War II and for the past several decades has exerted a profound influence on scholarship in political science. Although Davis does not specifically designate this approach as positivist, his characterization of it as “deductive-nomothetical” (p. 189), grounded in strict “scientific rules of inference” (p. 1) and premised on an allegiance to “the two-valued logic of falsification” (p. 132), indicates, at a minimum, a very strong family resemblance. In the end, however, Davis is less concerned with what this approach is called than with the practical consequences of its application. And here he contends that the evidence is at best mixed. On the one hand, the scientific approach to political inquiry has provided the field with both a palpable sense of mission and a clear focus—in this sense, it has contributed significantly to the development of a discipline of political science. On the other hand, it exhibits a “curious lack of … cumulation of general knowledge, often regarded as the measure of ‘progressive’ research programs” (p. 2). More specifically, Davis maintains that the scientific approach to political life has failed thus far to yield either “robust theories” that anticipate and explain important political events or forms of knowledge that are valued by policymakers and the general public. Indeed, he holds that the widespread application of the scientific method to the study of politics has produced a field that “has increasingly become detached and irrelevant to political practice” (p. 2).

Clearly troubled by the apparent incapacity of political science to generate research that informs and impacts the great practical and policy issues of our time, Davis structures his book around a careful analysis of the central assumptions and claims that animate the proponents of the scientific approach. In his own words, his goal “is not so much a comprehensive critique of the governing philosophy of social science but rather the discovery of a ‘middle way’ between, on the one hand, the claim that scientific progress is a matter of a stricter adherence to the proper ‘rules of inference’ and, on the other hand, the assertion of radical postmodernists that ‘anything goes’” (p. 3).

It goes without saying that there is a lot of room for maneuver between these polarities. Not surprisingly, the significance of Davis's book lies less in the fact that he stakes out this terrain than in the thoughtful way he negotiates it. The author develops his view by working from the ground up. Starting from an analysis of the basic constituents of science—namely, concepts and approaches to conceptualization (Chapters 2 and 3)—he proceeds to investigate issues of theory development and testing (Chapter 4), the distinctive ways that rules and norms impact human behavior (Chapter 5), and, finally, the challenge of generating “useful knowledge” (Chapter 6). In each of the book's core chapters (Chapters 2–5), Davis demonstrates how orthodox conceptions of scientific method establish standards of procedure that are inappropriate and cannot generally be met. So, for example, he considers the familiar claim that the advancement of science requires commitment to a particular kind of conceptual precision, one that eliminates all ambiguity and semantic instability by anchoring scientific concepts in operationalized definitions that specify discreet, necessary and/or sufficient features or properties. Drawing on a wealth of empirical research in linguistics, cognitive science, and anthropology, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous remarks on family resemblances and blurred concepts, Davis argues that the persistence of debates about the proper definition of key concepts is not necessarily an exercise in futility, nor is it a clear indication that political scientists are insufficiently committed to canons of good scientific practice. Rather, concepts “are inherently vague and ambiguous” (p. 5). Definitions, he proposes, are “better thought of as imprecise, their imprecision being a matter of degree” (p. 52). This view suggests, among other things, that efforts to forge scientific concepts that eliminate all vagueness and blurriness tend to subvert rather than advance the scientific enterprise.

In the book's final chapter, Davis clarifies the implications of his central arguments. Focusing on the quest for useful knowledge, he recommends that political scientists abandon the quest for deductively elegant and universally valid theories of political life. Instead of imitating an idealized (and, I might add, distorted) model of physics, he proposes that scholars of politics should consider the case of modern medical science, “which progresses through an amalgam of deductive and inductive theorizing” (p. 186). It is interesting that Davis has virtually nothing to say about the alternative that looms largest in Steinmetz's volume, namely, critical realism. Yet his arguments throughout the book and especially in the final chapter suggest that the affinities between his views and those of contemporary critical realists are considerable. His preoccupation with the identification of causal processes and mechanisms, skepticism about the ability of social scientists “to make predictions with any degree of certainty” (p. 187), rejection of logical positivist accounts of scientific explanation, and endorsement of “well-developed middle range theories” (p. 187) indicate that the middle way he aims to chart may ultimately lead down a path strikingly similar to the one mapped by critical realists. It is therefore unfortunate that Davis does not attempt to situate his own views in relation to those of contemporary critical realists.

Although more compact than Steinmetz's anthology and less targeted on a single discipline than Davis's study, William H. Sewell's book, Logics of History, nonetheless represents an impressive achievement. Sewell, a distinguished social and cultural historian whose scholarly inquiries interweave work in history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, organizes this collection of previously published but revised essays around a deceptively modest goal: to prompt historians and social scientists to undertake a “serious dialogue” about social theory. Acknowledging at the outset that some readers might consider the objective itself rather dated—as he readily concedes, social scientists and historians have been engaging each other's work for some time—Sewell contends that on issues of theory, the flow of communication has been largely unidirectional, namely, from social science to history. This, he submits, is unfortunate.

Historians, Sewell argues, display a highly sophisticated yet often overlooked understanding of “the temporalities of social life” (p. 6): of how actions and events simultaneously possess an irreversible character—once undertaken or experienced, they cannot be revoked or expunged—and are “profoundly dependent” upon their place in a particular “sequence of actions” (p. 7). Moreover, this dual sensitivity to the temporal fatefulness of social existence and its contingency has enabled historians to develop a rich understanding of what Sewell calls “eventful' temporality” (p. 83). This conception of temporality—which isolates cases in which the mundane flow of history and social life is dramatically reconfigured by key actions and events—accents the complexity, heterogeneity, and context-specific aspects of social life. As such, it directly challenges notions of temporality that dominate contemporary historical sociology and much social science, namely, “teleological” and “experimental” temporality. He maintains, however, that this “subversive” and “many-sided” understanding of social temporality is only implicitly theorized by historians. Consequently, historians themselves are often “not conceptually aware of what they know” (p. 11). Lacking awareness of their own knowledge, historians also fail to transmit that knowledge to social scientists, who would benefit greatly from it. A central aim of Sewell's book is to theorize historians' implicit conception of temporality, showing how and why it matters.

While much of the book tries to show what social scientists might learn from a dialogue with historians, Sewell also believes that social scientists have something important to offer historians: a “strong penchant for structural thinking” (p. 14) and a willingness to grapple with big historical questions. Historians' disciplinary culture, he holds, encourages accounts of historical process that are multilayered but “causally diffuse.” By contrast, the demand to explain phenomena in terms of structural features imposes on researchers an empowering form of discipline, one that forces them to express their views with greater clarity and precision. Unfortunately, Sewell remarks, social scientists often couple this important emphasis on structural thought with static, ahistorical conceptions of temporality, as, for example, when they conceive of structures as “given.” In his view, both historians and social scientists require a conception of structural thinking that is informed by historical notions of temporality. In one of the most important—and perhaps controversial—chapters of the book (chapter 4), the author proposes a theory of structure that aims to overcome what he regards as the central limitations of the concept as it is usually deployed in the social sciences: its 1) erasure of human agency, 2) tendency to locate change outside of structures, and 3) sharp division between materialist and semiotic conceptions of structure. Drawing on and reformulating the work of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, Sewell aims to articulate a conception of structure that is “dynamic, not static” (p. 151).

Regrettably, this brief review cannot describe adequately the multitude of interesting arguments, analyses, and reflections contained in a book that is at once autobiography, intellectual history, and social theory. In addition to Sewell's ambitious effort to rethink problems of structure, agency, and temporality, the book includes insightful discussions of the “cultural turn” (Chapter 2), the culture concept (Chapter 5), and the relationship between culture and history, the latter accomplished through thoughtful investigations of the work of Clifford Geertz (Chapter 6) and Marshall Sahlins (Chapter 7). It also includes a pair of theoretically informed case studies in French history that illuminate Sewell's views of the event (Chapter 8), social temporalities (Chapter 9), and historical duration (Chapter 9), as well as an “interpretivist manifesto” that reexamines “the social in social science” (Chapter 10).

Of course, any book that ranges so knowledgeably across disciplinary boundaries to address fundamental questions of social theory is likely to provoke both admiration and debate. I hope and expect that this will be the fate of Sewell's book. Sewell's effort to integrate structure and event, for example, will surely elicit responses from scholars who take issue with the way in which he conceptualizes either or both of these key concepts. Others readers may wish that Sewell's account had addressed recent efforts of critical realists, such as Margaret Archer, to think through similar questions. Still others may contest aspects of his analysis of the cultural turn, as well as his view of how its achievements are best preserved and its limitations overcome. If these responses are nearly as lucid and reflective as his own study, they will also be well worth reading.

Apart from offering readers a fascinating, if admittedly incomplete, glimpse into the past and present state of methodological reflection in social and political science, one might wonder what, if anything, these books portend for its future. Do they indicate possible or probable patterns of disciplinary development? Do they chart promising alternatives to the binary divisions and “epistemological dualisms” (to borrow Sewell's phrase) that have so frequently structured debates about political inquiry? If so, what might these be and what might we think of them? Although neither Davis nor Sewell nor any of the contributors to Steinmetz's volume purport to foretell the future of social and political science—indeed, some of the authors of and contributors to these volumes are quite suspicious of this very ambition—their work provides a large storehouse of useful material for reimagining the nature of social scientific inquiry and for thinking about the likelihood of various possible futures. Viewed collectively, what is perhaps most striking about these studies is their skepticism of all proposed panaceas, whether fashioned along the lines of traditional naturalist proposals to transform social science into a unified, “normal” science, or cast in terms of a nebulous and vaguely defined pluralism.

In contrast to these proposals, Sewell, Davis, and the contributors to Steinmetz's volume develop views of social and political inquiry that bring into conversation methods and methodologies that are commonly thought to inhabit mutually exclusive universes of discourse and practice. This ambition is particularly evident in Sewell's work, which aims not only to establish a dialogue between historians and social scientists but also to close—or at least dramatically diminish—the epistemic gap that is often presumed to divide the proponents of quantitative and interpretive methodologies. It is also readily apparent in Davis's book, which rejects both unificationist and “anything goes” models of social inquiry in favor of a conception of political science that is theoretically and methodologically diverse, but discriminating. In fact, Davis's proposal for relinking theory and practice in political inquiry is explicitly grounded in just such a view of the scientific enterprise. Finally, many of the essays in Steinmetz's volume evince a similar desire to break out of the straightjacket of false dichotomies. This is observable, for example, in Mihic, Engelmann, and Wingrove's critical examination of how a mainstay of classical positivism—the fact/value dichotomy—both structures much research in political science and is sustained by a disciplinary division of labor that appropriates to a single subfield, political theory, the task of normative evaluation. Starting from the supposition that facts and values are not, as Hilary Putnam has put it, “totally disjoint realms” (Reason, Truth and History, 1981, 127), but are instead mutually constitutive, the authors argue that this division of labor perpetuates a variety of bad intellectual habits. Within the field of political theory, it promotes and legitimates the questionable practice of “fact neutrality,” which “presumes that data are ancillary to the preoccupations of the analyst” (p. 470), while in other areas of the discipline it fuels the pleasing fiction of “value neutrality,” that is, “the presumption that normative assumptions and/or commitments can be set aside … in the process of scientific analysis” (p. 470).

Although all three of these books display a laudable willingness to confront entrenched views of social and political inquiry, and thus provide some basis for cautious optimism about the future of social and political science in the United States, one key issue posed at the outset of this review remains largely unresolved: the problem of producing “relevant” or, as Davis puts it, “useful knowledge” (p. 9). This, of course, is not a new, or even recent, problem. Rather, it is a chronic problem that has regularly haunted scholars of political inquiry in the United States ever since political science first began to emerge as an autonomous discipline within the American academy (see Terence Ball, “The Ambivalent Alliance: Political Science and American Democracy,” in Farr et al., eds., Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, 1995). Moreover, it is a problem that is exceedingly difficult to resolve, in no small part because of the very general manner in which it is typically formulated. Questions about whether and how political inquiry might be rendered more relevant and useful, for example, immediately prompt further questions of audience and purpose: “for whom” and “to what end” should political inquiry be relevant and useful? Throughout much of the postwar period, the dominant impulse within the discipline was to solve the riddle of relevance by appealing to a conception of political science as a “policy science.” By locating disciplinary authority on practical matters of political life in claims of scientific objectivity, political scientists hoped to reconcile the demands of the scholarly vocation with the desire for practical impact. Partly in reaction to this disciplinary image, a second response to the problem of relevance emerged, one that sought to carve out a space for intervention in political affairs by appealing to the vocation of political theory as a source of moral authority and political judgment on matters of justice, democracy, and citizenship (John G. Gunnell, “The Founding of the American Political Science Association: Discipline, Profession, Political Theory, and Politics,” American Political Science Review 100 [November 2006]: 479–86). In contrast to these two views, Davis defends a third alternative, one which aims to overcome the disconnect between academic inquiry and public policy by refiguring the image of science that galvanizes political inquiry. By modeling political inquiry on modern medical science rather than physics, Davis contends, it may be possible to reorient the discipline in ways that make it directly relevant to policymakers and the general public.

Although Davis's proposed reorientation of political inquiry has much to recommend it, I am not fully persuaded by his discussion of how we might bring “the practice of political science closer to the practice of politics itself” (p. 8). In the first place, I find too vague his recommendation that scholars of social and political inquiry begin “moving toward a model of science closer to that of medical practice” (p. 8). Given some of the sharp disjunctions between medical and social science, a convincing defense of Davis's proposal requires a much more precise specification of the value as well as the limitations of the medical analogy. Second, Davis's proposed solution to the problem of relevance fails to explore the full range of reasons why “decision makers and other members of the political elite” may decide “simply to ignore the academic study of politics” (p. 2). Like many supporters of the Perestroika movement, Davis believes that policymakers are indifferent to the academic study of politics because that study is itself burdened with a misconceived ideal of scientific inquiry. Incapable of achieving the grandiose ambitions inherent in this miscast ideal, or, more modestly, of providing “clear and persuasive guidance for effective action” (p. 2), Davis asserts that most scholars of political inquiry respond to their growing irrelevance by abjuring even the pretense of contributing to the public good.

However depressing this account of the discipline may be, it is not necessarily defeatist. For if, as Davis and others argue, political science lacks political relevance because it is captive to a misguided model of scientific method, then political scientists need only look within the borders of their own discipline in order to restore its impact on matters of public policy. Stated bluntly, epistemological reform is the principal vehicle for reasserting the “relevance” of academic political science as Davis construes it, that is, as influence on “policymakers,” “decision makers and other members of the political elite” (p. 2).

Without trivializing either the possible significance of such reforms or concerns about the irrelevance of the discipline, I would submit that any adequate analysis of this problem must consider the role of external as well as internal factors. Among other things, it must address certain realities of contemporary (though not only contemporary) political life, namely, that political elites and policymakers are often more interested in crafting policies that are consistent with ideological orthodoxies, the demands of powerful interest groups, and the desires of political cronies than with devising responses to social ills that are just, humane, effective, and consistent with democratic ideals and practices. In such cases, admission into the inner sanctum of policymaking may require compromises that are at odds with any serious notion of intellectual independence or scientific integrity. Indeed, precisely because political elites routinely try to justify their policies through appeals to science and reason, scholars of political life may find that they are often most “useful” to policymakers when they lend a patina of scientific authority to policies that are corrupt, dishonest, and patently unjust. At such moments academic scholars of politics may discover that the price of relevance is very high indeed.