v. 1. Interpretive theories -- v. 2. Interpretive methods -- v. 3. Interpreting politics -- v. 4. Interpreting policies.

Interpretive political science focuses on the meanings that shape actions and institutions, and the ways in which they do so. This Handbook explores the implications of interpretive theory for the study of politics. It provides the first definitive survey of the field edited by two of its pioneers. This Handbook is an invaluable resource for students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of international relations, comparative politics, political sociology, political psychology and public administration.

This article concerns the relevance of postfoundationalism, including the ideas of Michel Foucault, for political science. The first half of the article distinguishes three forms of postfoundationalism, all of which draw some of their inspiration from Foucault. First, the governmentality literature draws on Marxist theories of social control, and then absorbs Foucault’s focus on power/knowledge. Second, the post-Marxists combine the formal linguistics of Saussure with a focus on hegemonic discourses. Third, some social humanists infuse Foucauldian themes into the New Left’s (...) focus on culture, agency and resistance. The second half of the article then describes a research program that may bring together these varieties of postfoundationalism. This research program includes aggregate concepts that overtly allow for the constitutive role of meanings in social life and the contingent nature of these meanings. The concepts are: situated agency, practice and power. A postfoundational research program also needs concepts that demarcate a historicist form of explanation, that is, concepts such as narrative, tradition and dilemma. Finally, this research program contains specific empirical focuses to link these aggregate and explanatory concepts back to governmentality, post-Marxism and social humanism. (shrink)

This essay approaches Derrida through a consideration of his writings on Saussure and Husserl. Derrida is right to insist, following Saussure, on a relational theory of meaning: words do not have a one-to-one correspondence with their referents. But he is wrong to insist on a purely differential theory of meaning: words can refer to reality within the context of a body of knowledge. Similarly, Derrida is right to reject Husserl's idea of presence: no truths are simply given to consciousness. But (...) he is wrong to reject the very idea of objective knowledge: we can defend a notion of objective knowledge couched in terms of a comparison of rival bodies of theories. The essay concludes by considering the implications of the preceding arguments for the enterprise of phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper provides a short summary of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Logic stands here as a subset of Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as a matter of the grammar of our concepts. It studies the forms of reasoning appropriate to a discipline, rather than the material of that discipline. Hence, the logic of the history of ideas considers the nature of meaning, the way we should justify our knowledge of (...) past meanings, and how we should explain things such as the existence of meanings, the beliefs people held, and conceptual change. (shrink)

In this book Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely set out to make the most comprehensive case yet for an 'interpretive' or hermeneutic approach to the social sciences. Interpretive approaches are a major growth area in the social sciences today. This is because they offer a full-blown alternative to the behavioralism, institutionalism, rational choice, and other quasi-scientific approaches that dominate the study of human behavior. In addition to presenting a systematic case for interpretivism and a critique of scientism, (...) class='Hi'>Bevir and Blakely also propose their own uniquely 'anti-naturalist 'notion of an interpretive approach. This anti-naturalist framework encompasses the insights of philosophers ranging from Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Charles Taylor and Ludwig Wittgenstein, while also resolving dilemmas that have plagued rival philosophical defenses of interpretivism. In addition, working social scientists are given detailed discussions of a distinctly interpretive approach to methods and empirical research. The book draws on the latest social science to cover everything from concept formation and empirical inquiry to ethics, democratic theory, and public policy. An anti-naturalist approach to interpretive social science offers nothing short of a sweeping paradigm shift in the study of human beings and society. This book will be of interest to all who seek a humanistic alternative to the scientism that overwhelms the study of human beings today. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of genealogy, explaining its rise in the nineteenth century, its epistemic commitments, its nature as critique, and its place in the work of Nietzsche and Foucault. The crux of the theory is recognition of genealogy as an expression of a radical historicism, rejecting both appeals to transcendental truths and principles of unity or progress in history, and embracing nominalism, contingency, and contestability. In this view, genealogies are committed to the truth of radical historicism and, perhaps (...) more provisionally, the truth of their own empirical content. Similarly, genealogies operate as denaturalizing critiques of ideas and practices that hide the contingency of human life behind formal ahistorical or developmental perspectives. (shrink)

The secondary literature on Rawls is vast, but little of it is historical. Relying on the archival materials he left to Harvard after his death, we look at the historical contexts that informed Rawls's understanding of political philosophy and the changes in his thinking up to A Theory of Justice. We argue that Rawls's classic work reveals positivist aspirations that were altered and frayed by various encounters with postanalytic naturalism. So, we begin in the 1940s, showing the influence of other (...) positivist projects, such as those of Popper and Ducasse. Thereafter, we explore how Rawls's encounter with Wittgenstein and Quine in the 1950s and 1960s led him to introduce the post-analytic features evident in A Theory of Justice. Our historical narrative challenges commonplace folk-understandings that portray Rawls as either wholly committed to positivism or as its principal slayer. (shrink)

Many philosophers have rejected the possibility of objective historical knowledge on the grounds that there is no given past against which to judge rival interpretations. Their reasons for doing so are valid. But this does not demonstrate that we must give up the concept of historical objectivity as such. The purpose of this paper is to define a concept of objectivity based on criteria of comparison, not on a given past. Objective interpretations are those which best meet rational criteria of (...) accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, progressiveness, fruitfulness, and openness. Finally, the nature of our being in the world is shown to give us a good reason to regard such objective interpretations as moving towards truth understood as a regulative ideal. (shrink)

Foucault introduced the concept ‘governmentality’ to refer to the conduct of conduct, and especially the technologies that govern individuals. He adopted the concept after his shift from structuralist archaeology to historicist genealogy. But some commentators suggest governmentality remains entangled with structuralist themes. This article offers a resolutely genealogical theory of govermentality that: echoes Foucault on genealogy, critique, and technologies of power; suggests resolutions to problems in Foucault’s work; introduces concepts that are clearly historicist, not structuralist; and opens new areas of (...) empirical research. The resulting genealogical theory of governmentality emphasizes nominalism, contingency, situated agency, and historicist explanations referring to traditions and dilemmas. It decenters governance by highlighting diverse elite narratives, technologies of power, and traditions of popular resistance. (shrink)

This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘Interpretivism and the English School of International Relations’. It distinguishes between what we term the interpretivist and structuralist wings of...

This article argues against both hard linguistic-contextualists who believe that paradigms give meaning to a text and soft linguistic-contextualists who believe that we can grasp authorial intentions only by locating them in a contemporaneous conventional context. Instead it is proposed that meanings come from intentions and that there can be no fixed way of recovering intentions. On these grounds the article concludes first that we can declare some understandings of texts to be unhistorical though not illegitimate, and second that good (...) history depends solely on accurate and reasonable evidence, not on adopting a particular method. (shrink)

This article responds to Charlotta Friedner Parrat’s critique of our argument that the English School of international relations should embrace a more thoroughgoing interpretivism. We address four of Friedner Parrat’s objections to our argument: that our distinction between structuralism and interpretivism is too stark; that our understanding of the relationship between agency and structure is problematic; that our approach would confine the English School to the study of intellectual history; and that the English School should eschew explanation. We argue that (...) if the School is to use structuralism, it must be clearer about how it understands structures and their relationships to agents. We argue too that interpretivism not only offers a better account of situated agency, but also that it provides the English School with one way to move beyond the description and classification of institutions in international society towards better explanations of international relations. (shrink)

The general aim of this paper is to establish the plausibility of a postfoundational intentionalism. Its specific aim is to respond to criticisms of my work made by Vivienne Brown in a paper "On Some Problems with Weak Intentionalism for Intellectual History." Postfoundationalism is often associated with a new textualism according to which there is no outside to the text. In contrast, I suggest that postfoundationalists can legitimate our postulating intentions, actions, and other historical objects outside of the text. They (...) can do so by reference to, first, philosophical commitments to general classes of objects, and, second, inference to the best explanation with respect to particular objects belonging to such classes. This postfoundational intentionalism sets up a suitable context within which to address Brown's more specific questions. (shrink)

This article analyses the evolution of the English school’s approach to international relations from the work of the early British Committee in the late 1950s and early 1960s to its revival in the...

This paper sets out an agenda for the study of the history of analytic and post-analytic political philosophy. It builds on a growing literature on the history of analytic philosophy to make three main suggestions. First, analytic philosophy arose as part of a wider shift from the developmental historicism of the nineteenth century to more modernist modes of knowledge. Second, analytic philosophy included a wide range of approaches to moral and political issues, many of which reflected distinctive concepts of analysis, (...) logic, and science. Third, analytic philosophy only became widespread when the work of Quine and Wittgenstein moved it in a more post-analytic direction. Crucially, the move toward post-analytic philosophy inspired people to rediscover and reinvent other traditions, including liberal humanism, democratic republicanism, virtue ethics, and historicism. The resulting history provides a fluid and diverse understanding of arguably the most powerful philosophical movement of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The History of Political and Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction by Melvin Richter History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives by Iain Hampsher-Monk; Karin Tilmans; Frank van Vree History and Theory.

This paper argues that history differs from natural science in relying on folk psychology and so narrative explanations. In narratives, actions, beliefs, and pro-attitudes are joined by conditional and volitional connections. Conditional connections exist when beliefs and pro-attitudes pick up themes from one another Volitional connections exist when agents command themselves to do something having decided to do it because of a pro-attitude they hold. The paper defends the epistemic legitimacy of narratives by arguing we have legitimate grounds for postulating (...) conditional and volitional connections since they are given to us by a folk psychology we accept as true. (shrink)

J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have led a recent onslaught on the alleged "myth of coherence" in the history of ideas. But their criticisms depend on mistaken views of the nature of mind: respectively, a form of social constructionism, and a focus on illocutionary intentions at the expense of beliefs. An investigation of the coherence constraints that do operate on our ascriptions of belief shows historians should adopt a presumption of coherence, concern themselves with coherence, and proceed to (...) reconstruct sets of beliefs as coherent wholes. The history of ideas merges history with aspects of philosophy, where philosophy is understood as the study of the grammar of our concepts. (shrink)

J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have led a recent onslaught on the alleged ”myth of coherence“ in the history of ideas. But their criticisms depend on mistaken views of the nature of mind: respectively, a form of social constructionism, and a focus on illocutionary intentions at the expense of beliefs. An investigation of the coherence constraints that do operate on our ascriptions of belief shows historians should adopt a presumption of coherence, concern themselves with coherence, and proceed to (...) reconstruct sets of beliefs as coherent wholes. The history of ideas merges history with aspects of philosophy, where philosophy is understood as the study of the grammar of our concepts. (shrink)

On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; (...) and Susan Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity. (shrink)

In this volume, Mark Bevir argues that postfoundationalism is compatible with humanism and historicism. He engages leading postmodernists such as Derrida and Foucault, exploring the role of human agency and historical context in philosophy, social science, and ethics.

This paper argues that historicism can provide substantive philosophical grounds for critical theory and various modes of critique. Unlike the developmental historicism that dominated the nineteenth century, we start from a radical historicism tied to nominalism, contingency, and contestability. This radical historicism is compatible with a commitment to truth claims, including the truth of historicism and the truth of particular genealogies and other accounts of the world. Genealogy can be viewed as radical historicism in its critical guise, denaturalizing the ideas (...) it targets. In addition, however, radical historicism provides possible grounds for both historical ontology and a revised version of ideology critique. Ideology is conceived here in relation to failures in consciousness itself rather than the alleged conflicts of a material base. (shrink)

Foucault's archaeological method is contrasted with that of a humanist history. The contrast highlights strengths and weaknesses found in Foucault's approach. It is argued that he is right to reject a concept of objective knowledge based on pure facts and pure reason; and that he is right to reject the idea of the autonomous individual uninfluenced by the social context; but that he is wrong to extend these rejections to an utter repudiation of respectively our having reasonable knowledge of an (...) external reality and our being creative and rational agents. A recognition of these strengths and weaknesses is used as a basis for the development of an account of the human sciences that is an alternative to that of Foucault's The Order of Things. This alternative history shows his proclamation of the death of Man to be mistaken. (shrink)

This paper describes the historical background to contemporary discussions of empathy and rationality. It looks at the philosophy of mind and its implications for action explanation and the philosophy of history. In the nineteenth century, the concept of empathy became prominent within philosophical aesthetics, from where it was extended to describe the way we grasp other minds. This idea of empathy as a way of understanding others echoed through later accounts of historical understanding as involving re-enactment, noticeably that of R. (...) G. Collingwood. For much of the late twentieth century, philosophers of history generally neglected questions about action explanation. In the philosophy of mind, however, Donald Davidson inspired widespread discussions of the role of folk psychology and rationality in mental causation and the explanation of actions, and some philosophers of history drew on his ideas to reconsider issues related to empathy. Today, philosophers inspired by the discovery of mirror neurons and the theory of mind debate between theory theorists and simulation theorists are again making the concept of empathy central to philosophical analyses of action explanation and to historical understanding. (shrink)

This paper analyses conceptual change. A rejection of pure experience has prompted philosophers of science to adopt a certain perspective from which to view changes of belief. Popper, Kuhn, and others have analysed conceptual change in terms of problems or anomalies, that is, in terms of contingent reasoning about issues posed in the context of an inherited web of belief. This paper explores a more general analysis of conceptual change in dialogue with these philosophers of science. Because changes of belief (...) are not all changes in scientific belief, we seek to unpack conceptual change in terms of dilemmas, as opposed to anomalies or problems. For a start, the notion of a dilemma has to be broader than that of an anomaly since it purports to apply to conceptual change as a whole, not just the transition from one era of normal science to another. In addition, we should detach the notion of a dilemma from the objectivism of Popper's world-3 problems. (shrink)

Pluralism is among the most vital intellectual movements of the modern era. Liberal pluralism helped reinforce and promote greater separation of political and religious spheres. Socialist pluralism promoted the political role of trade unions and the rise of corporatism. Empirical pluralism helped legitimate the role of interest groups in democratic government. Today pluralism inspires thinking about key issues such as multiculturalism and network governance. However, despite pluralism's importance, there are no histories of twentieth-century pluralist thinking. Modern Pluralism fills this gap. (...) It explores liberal, socialist, and empirical ideas about diversity in Britain and the United States. It shows how pluralists challenged homogenous nations and sovereign states, often promoting sub-national groups as potential sites of self-government. In it, intellectual historians, political theorists, and social scientists collectively explore the historical background to present institutions and debates. The book serves to enrich our understanding of the history of pluralism and its continuing relevance. (shrink)

Abstract This paper defends a historicist approach to the history of ideas. A historicist ontology implies that texts have meaning only for specific people, whether these be individual authors, particular readers, or the intersubjective beliefs of social groups. Texts do not have intrinsic meanings in themselves.