David Laitin uses Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter as a surrogate manifesto on behalf of the Perestroika movement’s campaign for methodological pluralism in political science. After an overview of Perestroika, I note my own vision for the movement, outline the most significant features of Flyvbjerg’s call for a revived social science, and provide a critique of Laitin’s attempt to assimilate Flyvbjerg’s analysis to his own vision for an improved political science. I conclude with a word about the potential of (...) Perestroika to build on Flyvbjerg’s insights to promote what I call “post-paradigmatic” social science. (shrink)

James C. Scott’s book The Art of Not Being Governed is offered, in this essay review, as the latest evidence of the high value of Scott’s transdisciplinary research into how ordinary people resist state power. Scott’s critics have found his work methodologically deficient, suggesting that his approach is more a matter of art than of science. In this defense of methodological pluralism, Scott’s approach is shown to be vindicated by his insights into how the peoples of Zomia evolved ways to (...) evade incorporation, over a period of centuries, into any of the states of Southeast Asia. Scott’s book is examined as a prime example of how the study of politics can and should help to effect political change — and its insights on anarchism as a way of life are applied to the Occupy Wall Street movement. (shrink)