Political Studies As Narrative and Science, 1880-2000

P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 0 6 VO L 5 4 , 5 8 3 – 6 0 6
Political Studies as Narrative and Science,

1880–2000
Mark Bevir
University of California, Berkeley
Today we are often skeptical of the role played by representations of the nation state in constructing and
legitimating ways of life and public policies. We portray what once appeared to be neutral, scientific
representations of our practices and our heritages as contingent historical objects. How did we become
so skeptical? The answer has several parts: developmental historicism dominated the human sciences in the
latter half of the nineteenth century; the turn of the century witnessed an epistemic rupture and the rise
of a modernist empiricism that came to dominate the social sciences; modernist empiricists reformulated
their approach during the latter half of the twentieth century in response to alternative visions of social
science; and, finally, the close of the twentieth century also saw the rise of a radical historicism that spread
from philosophy and literature to history and even social science. In short, we have become skeptical as
we have moved toward a radical historicism that challenges scientism and decenters the grand narratives
of yore.
Numerous human scientists write about the ways in which nation states represent
themselves. Many are acutely aware of the role these representations play in
constructing and legitimating ways of life and public policies.What is more, their
studies often have a skeptical cast.They show how these representations, and the
policies based on them, are simplistic, parochial, temporally and culturally cir-
cumscribed and otherwise inadequate. They portray what once appeared to be
neutral, scientific accounts of national practices and heritages as contingent
historical objects. They debunk elder accounts of the nation by revealing as
contingent what these accounts portrayed as natural, and by exposing the con-
tingent historicity of these accounts themselves.
How did we get to be so skeptical? What story might we tell about ourselves? The
relevant story is, of course, a history of the human sciences; it concerns the fate
of historicism and positivism since the late nineteenth century.This story, as I will
narrate it, has several parts: a developmental historicism dominated the human
sciences during the latter half of the nineteenth century; the turn of the century
witnessed an epistemic rupture and the rise of a modernist empiricism that came
to dominate the social sciences; modernist empiricists reformulated their
approach during the latter half of the twentieth century in response to alternative
visions of social science; and, finally, the close of the twentieth century also saw
the rise of a radical historicism that spread from philosophy and literature to
history and even social science. This story about the fate of historicism and
positivism also concerns debates about the role of narrative and science in the
© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association
584 MARK BEVIR
study of social life. Historicists typically explain our practices in terms of narra-
tives – at first national histories but now narratives of networks of peoples.
Modernist empiricists and positivists generally do so by reference to laws, cor-
relations and comparisons, all of which are more ahistorical. In short, we have
become skeptical because of the spread among us of a radical historicism that
challenges scientism while also decentering the grand narratives of old.
Our story will soon prove too complex for synopsis.We will come across different
concepts of narrative and science at different times and even at the same time.
Some concepts of narrative will prove compatible with some of science. Examples
of developmental historicism still appear today. Examples of radical historicism
can be found in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, although we might be
skeptical of grand narratives with their big aggregate concepts, we should recog-
nize that narratives must deploy aggregate concepts if they are to be more than
chronicles of one damn thing after another. What matters is that our aggregate
concepts are suitably contingent, historicist and pragmatic.Think of my story as
a series of snapshots of the dominant approaches to political studies from the
late nineteenth century to today; each snapshot relies primarily on British
and American examples; and each snapshot includes references to its own
simplifications.
Developmental Historicism, cc. 1880–1920

In the late nineteenth century, few human scientists defined narrative and science
in contrast to one another. They thought that valid narratives depended on the
systematic, impartial, painstaking and rigorous collection and sifting of facts, and
they identified science with just such inductive rigor.1 Often they contrasted their
scientific narratives with the more partisan expressions of party politics. For James
Bryce, political science took its materials from the historical study of the past
before then applying them to the present, and this inductive study of history was
an important counterweight to excesses of party.2 The Whig historian E. A.
Freeman famously remarked, ‘history is past politics; politics is present history’.
Such attitudes were not peculiar to Britain. Scholars styled themselves professors
of history and political science all across America, from William Sloane at
Princeton, through Jesse Macy at Iowa, on to Bernard Moses at the University of
California, Berkeley. In their view, historical narratives were integral to a science
of politics that was to guide statesmen.
Although human scientists emphasized their rigorous, inductive methods, they
typically collected and sifted facts within a particular framework, which we might
call developmental historicism.3 In Britain, developmental historicism owed
much to the conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment
thinkers forged a science of society that explored the development of sociability
in relation to a ‘stadial’ Whig historiography, which culminated in patterns of
exchange that were understood as analogous to the movement of the planets.
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2006, 54(3)
N A R R AT I V E A N D S C I E N C E 585
Developmental historicism also owed much to an organic or romantic outlook

that emphasized the ability of living beings to make and remake social life
through their activity, where activity expressed purpose, thought and imagination.
The conjunction of Whig historiography and organicism inspired numerous
attempts to study politics within an evolutionary narrative (compare, Burrow,
1966; 1981; Collini et al., 1983, chs 6 and 7). Developmental historicists used
organic and evolutionary terms to frame narratives of the unfolding of the
principles of nationality and liberty along fairly fixed paths.We find such narra-
tives most famously in the Whig constitutional histories of Freeman, J. R. Green
and William Stubbs.Yet they also attracted both sides in the philosophical dispute
between idealists and positivists.Although positivists followed August Comte, J. S.
Mill and, at times, Leopold von Ranke in promoting rigorous scientific methods,
they increasingly identified evolutionary theory as the pinnacle of science, and
they thus adopted developmental historicism as a suitable setting in which to
situate their empirical findings (Bevir, 2002; Collini, 1991; Ross, 1990). It was this
evolutionary positivism that Sidney Webb hoped to foster when he founded the
London School of Economics in 1895. Likewise, although idealists sought to
unpack the absolute as spiritual perfection, they increasingly used Hegelianism
and social organicism in ways that made developmental historicism the setting in
which the absolute unfolded (den Otter, 1996). It was this organicist idealism that
the Bosanquets drew on when they confronted the Webbs in the great Edwardian
debate about social policy (McBriar, 1987). Developmental historicism domi-
nated the human sciences during the late nineteenth century precisely because it
could bring together conjectural Whig histories, theories of evolution and
accounts of the unfolding of divine providence.
Developmental historicists told narratives of continuity in the gradual triumph of
the principles of nationality and freedom.They believed that historical eras were
linked by a commonality of experience that appeared in the present conceived as
a culmination of a developmental process. They understand the past by locating
it in relation to a larger whole, the content and meaning of which typically
derived from contemporary notions of nationality and freedom. Their national
histories told of incremental changes in the ideas, institutions and practices of
freedom as they triumphed over those of tyranny. Moreover, even when devel-
opmental historicists pointed to threats to freedom, they still conceived of its
triumph as somehow ensured by an evolutionary process. Progress was built into
the order of things. Developmental historicists thus structured their national
histories by reference to principles that operated in time either as foundational
facts or as unfolding ideals. The most important principles included the nation
state and democratic liberty, which were intimately linked in so far as the
prevalent understanding of democratic liberty was one that suggested it presup-
posed an organic community that had reached its highest form in the nation state.
Whig historians suggested that the English nation had an unbroken continuity
located principally within its democratic institutions. American historians drew
on their reading of German historicism to argue, as John Burgess wrote, ‘the
586 MARK BEVIR
national state is the consummation of political history’ (Burgess, 1934, p. 247), and
they typically identified the American state with a principle of freedom, as in
Herbert Adams’ account of how American democracy had developed out of
Teutonic ‘germs’ (Adams, 1884).4 English and American scholars welded their
exceptionalisms together by means of a widespread belief in a shared Anglo-
Saxon, common law heritage that informed their democratic institutions
(Cosgrove, 1987).
The developmental historicists took the nation state to be an organic unit defined
by ethical, functional and linguistic ties as well as by a shared past. Adams argued
that the institutions of the state constituted ‘the all-uniting element of civil society
and of the common life of men’ (Adams, 1895, p. 171). Often developmental
historicists conceived of national histories in terms of the gradual realization of
Teutonic principles.Teutonic principles allegedly had emerged among the tribes
and village communities of northern Europe before going on to flower in
England and then perhaps America. The principles supposedly gave rise to
representative institutions, constitutional liberty, local self-government and
common law. By contrast, continental Europe, and especially France, was allegedly
home to an unrestricted democracy, centralized authority and codified law.5
Despite such contrasts,Teutonism could rely on a historical argument about the
evolution of civilizations, not a biological argument about racial characteristics.6
Developmental historicists could equate civilizations with shared cultural and
moral habits or common social and political institutions. They could locate
civilizations at various stages of a hierarchic process of evolution or growth, which
was arguably more or less universal. England and America were what they were
because of a history that had inspired within them individualism and self-reliance,
a passion for liberty, a willingness to pursue enterprise and trade and a practical
capacity that stood in contrast to abstract reason. J. S. Mill, to mention just one
example, vehemently opposed efforts to attribute ‘diversities of conduct and
character to inherent natural differences’; he argued instead that they arose from
different contexts, some of which provided ‘a lack of adequate inducements’ (Mill,
1963–91, vol. 2, p. 319). Similarly, developmental historicists could understand
imperial rule as an attempt to spread liberty and democracy, rather than as an
expression of racial superiority. Mind you, local administrators in the colonies all
too rarely acted in accord with a democratic spirit if it clashed with a racial one,
and even when they did, the distinction was not necessarily one that was
appreciated either in theory or in practice by their colonial subjects.
Developmental historicism inspired narratives or national histories that expressed
racialist themes in terms of civilizations. A civilization embodied principles that
provided a basis for continuity as well as for gradual change in response to new
circumstances. In the English case, this national history emphasized that rule was
in accord with precedent and convention, rather than a written constitution, and
that these conventions protected civil liberty and local government.The consti-
tutional settlement of 1689 represented the moment when it became clear that
the monarch had to obtain the consent of parliament to raise taxes or make laws.
Local government meant that there was no place for a centralized and powerful
bureaucracy or police. Ancient institutions such as the monarchy and House of
Lords had responded suitably to rising democratic pressures, thereby ensuring
their own survival even as the power of popular institutions grew and the
franchise was extended to greater numbers.This gradual evolution had produced
a balanced constitution that allowed for popular participation and respected civil
liberties even while it retained checks on excessive power and its misuse. In the
American case, the founding of the republic could appear as a continuation of a
Teutonic past inherited from England or as the creation of a new utopia.7 Either
way, the American people expressed themselves in the revolution and the
Constitution so as to give legitimacy to the offices of state.Thereafter American
history had exhibited the development of the spirit and institutions of this
foundation from the local to the centre – often with the Civil War appearing as
the final act of unification – and from a limited republic to the more democratic
eras of Jefferson and Jackson.8
Developmental historicists made sense of their world by means of narratives of
continuity and progress. They conceived of these narratives as scientific in large
part because they identified science with rigorous, inductive studies theorized in
comparative and evolutionary terms. In this view, objective narratives required a
rigorous inductive approach to facts. Stubbs wrote that histories should be
composed out of painstaking ‘chronologies of minutiae’ (Stubbs to Freeman, 13
April 1858, cited in den Otter, forthcoming).These chronologies could then be
understood in terms set by a comparison of the origins, development and present
nature of nation states along an evolutionary scale. Burgess described the consti-
tutions and institutions of England, France, Germany and America in a manner
that purported to show that America had reached the highest stage of develop-
ment in the evolution of liberty and democracy (Burgess, 1891).
Because developmental historicists fused narrative and science in these ways, they
almost never made a sharp distinction between political science and history.
Political scientists thought of their subject matter as thoroughly historical.9
Typically, they sought to trace the ways in which ideas or principles had unfolded
within the historical evolution of the institutions of a state. Introductory texts to
politics often explicitly expounded just such principles or categories and the
comparative stages of their development (see, for example, Seeley, 1896). Political
scientists used the narratives and techniques of developmental historicism to
describe and explain political practices, to edify the public and to guide policy-
makers. Most saw themselves as historians as well as social scientists. In America,
William Dunning helped to create the political science curriculum at Columbia
University, and he was, at the time of his death, president-elect of the American
Political Science Association. But he was also a founding member of the American
Historical Association who served as its president, and he was one of the
best-known historians of the reconstruction era of his time. His works on political
588 MARK BEVIR
science deployed an inductive historical method to trace the history of political

thought through to its expression in national institutions. In Britain, John Seeley
introduced the inductive study of politics at Cambridge University as part of the
History Tripos, and the study of politics at Oxford was situated in the History
School until the establishment of Modern Greats – philosophy, politics and
economics – in the 1920s. History was integral to those social sciences that the
political and intellectual elite relied on both to make sense of contemporary issues
and to frame their responses to these issues.
Modernist Empiricism, cc. 1920–1960

Some ideas of the late nineteenth century foreshadowed the crisis of historicism
that undercut developmental historicism (Everdell, 1997). F. H. Bradley argued
that historical knowledge was always partial and incomplete, that there were no
discoverable evolutionary laws and that we could not predict future events
(Bradley, 1935). Even the Webbs’ evolutionary positivism inspired empiricist
studies that paid so much attention to the minutiae of administrative and social
affairs that they almost lost sight of Whig constitutionalism (see, for example,
Webb and Webb, 1894). Despite these precursors, modernism flourished only as
people struggled to comprehend the First World War. The senselessness of the
conflict eroded widespread assumptions of continuity, progress and reason. In
Britain and the US, moreover, the Teutonic principle was discredited as a result of
its association with the enemy; it became tarred as Germanic absolutism.
The First World War undermined the faith in progress and reason that had
informed developmental historicism. Although images and ideals of progress still
appeared after the war, progress was seen more as a contingent victory of human
activity and less as an inevitable aspect of history (compare, Kloppenberg, 1986;
Rodgers, 1998). The contingent victory of progress depended, for many, on the
promotion of new sciences to guide attempts to resolve social problems.The First
World War encouraged calls for new sciences even as it eroded the narratives of
developmental historicism.The new sciences that arose in this context relied on
an epistemology of modernist empiricism (compare, Everdell, 1997; Porter, 1995;
Ross, 1991, chs 8–10; Schabas, 1990). Modernist empiricism was atomistic and
analytic. It broke up the continuities and gradual change of elder narratives by
dividing the world into discrete, discontinuous units. It then sought to make sense
of these units by means of impersonal mathematical rules or analytic schemes. It
used ahistorical calculations and typologies to define its narratives, or even to
replace narrative as a mode of explanation.As early as 1921, Herman Finer added
to his study of comparative government an analytic index of topics designed to
enable readers to compare similar institutions across states (Finer, 1921). Before
long, Finer, and others such as Carl Friedrich, started to present their studies in
analytic rather than historical terms. They proceeded topic by topic, discussing
institutions in comparison with similar ones in other countries rather than in the
context of a historical narrative (Finer, 1970; Friedrich, 1937).
The First World War also challenged the principle of the nation state conceived
as an expression of an organic unity, which, when expressed in popular sover-
eignty acted as a guarantor of liberty. Even if human scientists still viewed the state
positively in terms of the expression of a general will or common good, they
typically did so in relation to a society that was itself legitimately pluralistic. Ernest
Barker and A. D. Lindsay adapted their idealist inheritance, for example, in ways
that gave greater credence to pluralism.The erosion of the principle of the nation
state inspired yet other human scientists to try to get behind what they now
condemned as constitutional pieties in order to explore what they now believed
to be the real back and forth of contemporary politics (see, for example, Wallas,
1908). Some of them believed that social conditions had changed so dramatically
that elder principles could no longer serve their purpose.They expounded on the
need to explore these new conditions and behavioral patterns so as to craft new
principles and institutions for the twentieth century (examples include Beard,
1961, and especially Wallas, 1914). The concept of the nation state gave way to
that of government, which lacked the association with reason and morals that
developmental historicists had ascribed to the former; government was under-
stood in more neutral terms as an aggregation of diverse interests and attitudes
found in society, or even as the institutions that articulated, managed and
responded to these interests and attitudes.
Modernist empiricists brought atomistic and analytic modes of inquiry to bear on
the study of government.They thereby crafted a political science that focused on
issues of psychology and process, not history. For a start, where the developmental
historicists conceived of action as conduct infused with reason and morals, the
modernist empiricists thought of it as behavior to be examined either indepen-
dently of any assumptions about mind or else in terms of theories about hidden
depths of the mind that often overwhelmed reason and morals. Even when
developmental historicists such as Bryce suggested that political science con-
cerned mental habits, they situated these mental habits in the context of historical
narratives about organic communities that evolved so as to realize principles of
nationality and liberty. In contrast, modernist empiricists such as Charles Merriam
and Graham Wallas used surveys and statistics, often informed by an analytic
psychology, to reveal atomistic attitudes and opinions. In addition, whereas devel-
opmental historicists thought about society and politics in terms of a moral
narrative, modernist empiricists did so in terms of interests, processes and func-
tions. Modernist empiricists even drew on a diffuse functionalism that they took
from sociology and anthropology. Of course, we can read aspects of functionalist
reasoning back into nineteenth-century theorists, including Herbert Spencer.
Still, it was only in the early twentieth century that Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R.
Radcliffe Brown and others defined functional explanations as scientific in
contrast to historical ones.10 The functionalists attempted to explain social facts
by reference to the contributions they made to the social order as a whole. At
times they paid attention to the relationships between elements of a social whole
in a way that can appear to be at odds with atomization. However, they then
590 MARK BEVIR
conceived of the social whole as an abstract, even universal, framework that made
possible comparison and classification of atomized units across diverse societies.
Functionalism thereby overlapped with a systems approach to organizations in a
way that promised to provide a trans-historical context for atomistic and analytic
studies of behavior and processes.
We should not draw too sharp a rupture between modernist empiricism and
developmental historicism. On the one hand,Wallas had notoriously little imme-
diate impact on British political science, while Merriam’s supporters spent much
of the 1930s lamenting the limited use of quantitative methods in American
political science. On the other hand,Whig narratives still dropped off the pens of
Bryce and younger scholars such as Barker, while Charles Beard’s historical
studies of American politics remained the best-selling political science texts of the
time and standard textbooks in many colleges and universities. Even when human
scientists remained committed to elder approaches and narratives, however, they
generally did so nostalgically. Novelists and poets such as E. M. Forster and John
Betjeman, just as much as human scientists like Barker, wrote in ways that
suggested the world to which they referred was somehow a thing of the past.The
expansive confidence of the nineteenth century in continuity, reason and progress
was no more.11
Modernist empiricists introduced analytic and atomistic modes of inquiry, and
new focuses on behavior and processes. In Britain,Wallas stands out as a particu-
larly forceful advocate of this type of political science. He denounced elder
approaches to politics that bore little relation to political reality. He championed
instead a political science that deployed quantitative techniques and based itself in
a scientific psychology of habit, emotion and non-rational inference. However,
even if we forget about Wallas, modernist empiricism wrought a shift in the study
of the British nation state. The rise of atomization and analysis transformed the
Whig historiography of the developmental historicists into the Westminster
model. British students of politics had understood their state in terms of a
historical narrative. Now they came to do so in terms of an abstract set of
institutions that could be compared and classified in relation to other states. Britain
was a unitary state characterized by parliamentary sovereignty, cabinet govern-
ment, party control of the executive and a loyal opposition. Ironically, just as the
Whig narrative got relegated to the background of the Westminster model, so the
new foci on behavior and process highlighted aspects of British politics that did
not fit well with this model.Political scientists noted a decline in the independence
of members of parliament, the influence of unelected officials and the activities of
pressure groups and the media.The history of British political science is, in many
ways, one of successive attempts to locate new data and new concerns in relation
to aWestminster model that is itself the legacy of the developmental historicism of
the nineteenth century (compare Bevir and Rhodes, 2003, pp. 24–31).
The impact of modernist empiricism was even greater in America, no doubt in
part because history had less cultural authority there. Even before the First World
War, Lawrence Lowell used his mathematical training to undertake a statistical

study of party voting in Britain and America (Lowell, 1913). After the war,
Merriam and Walter Lippmann, who was a student of Wallas’s, promoted both the
use of quantitative techniques and the study of behavior in terms taken from an
analytic psychology (see, for example, Lippmann, 1922; Merriam, 1931). They
encouraged political scientists to begin to examine electoral behavior through
aggregate analyses of official census data and electoral statistics.The rise of survey
research was perhaps an even more significant development in American political
science. The sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, who had trained as a mathematician,
founded the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which generated much of its
income by undertaking market research while also writing academic studies
of the data thereby generated (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). Likewise, the University of
Michigan formed a Survey Research Center where an interdisciplinary group of
scholars worked through the 1940s and 50s on four programs addressing eco-
nomic, political and organizational behavior as well as methodology. They sur-
veyed public opinion so as to create new unofficial data with which to explore
political behavior (see, most famously, Campbell et al., 1960). All this survey
research precluded historical or comparative approaches if only because neither
the past nor other countries could offer similar data.
The rise of modernist empiricism did not mean an end to history.What it meant
was that history occupied a smaller place in political studies and so in debates about
public policy. Social scientists used history more as a source of data than as grounds
for explaining that data.Their explanations relied less on narrative and more on
atomization, classification, statistical correlations or even identification of func-
tions within a system. History continued to attract some attention, especially
among political theorists (Boucher, 1985; Gunnell, 1993). But generally social
scientists shunned original historical research, relying on syntheses of existing
scholarship to provide the data or background to their studies of the behavior and
processes of contemporary politics. Beard actually defended history by arguing
that it was a source for data.The more aggressive Merriam argued that it was just
a barrier to the rise of a proper science of politics. Contemporary changes in the
study of history further exacerbated this division between narrative and science.12
Although historians still concentrated on political and constitutional history – in
part because they associated objectivity with the use of well-authenticated archives
and documents – they became more convinced of the otherness of the past.
Increasingly they argued that we should study the past for its own sake, not to
engage present concerns, an argument that had been expressed by Morse Stephens
in his retort to Burgess at the 1896 meeting of the American Historical Association
(Stephens, 1897).
Varieties of Social Science, cc. 1960–2000

Most modernist empiricists still equated science with the rigorous and impartial
collection and sifting of facts.They just detached such rigor from narrative.They
592 MARK BEVIR
tied it instead to atomization, classification and quantification. By 1960, the social

sciences were grappling with a different concept of science, couched in terms of
universal theories that generated hypotheses, which, in turn, received confirma-
tion from experiments and factual investigations.This positivist concept of science
appealed to social scientists in part because it legitimized their claims to expertise.
If natural scientists and economists played the fullest role in directing the expan-
sion of state activity after the Second World War, other social scientists also
contributed, and a positivist concept of social science helped to legitimate their
contributions at a time of optimism about technocratic reform. With state
funding for social science favoring scientism and policy relevance, social scientists
who defined themselves as delivering such goods were simply more likely to find
stable employment.The positivist concept of science also appealed to some social
scientists as a way of taking control of the mass of data then being generated.The
new techniques and concerns of modernist empiricism had led, in this view, to
‘hyper-factualism’; social scientists were being overwhelmed by quantitative and
qualitative data in the absence of a theoretical framework with which to make
sense of it all (Easton, 1965, p. 134).Whatever its source, the rise of positivist social
science led to a further denigration of history and narrative. Now, even when
social scientists explicitly champion historical inquiry, they are often merely
defending a modified form of modernist empiricism against the more positivistic
claims of a universal theory.
The behavioral revolution was the most notable expression of the turn toward
positivism. David Easton argued that political science was falsely wedded to ‘a
view of science as the objective collection and classification of facts and the
relating of them into singular generalizations’ (Easton, 1953, pp. 65–6).13 He
argued that a proper science would produce ‘reliable, universal knowledge about
social phenomena’; ‘the purpose of scientific rules of procedure is to make
possible the discovery of highly generalized theory’ (Easton, 1953, pp. 24–5).
Other behavioralists also adopted a positivist concept of science as universal,
deductive, predictive and verifiable theory.They denigrated the correlations and
classifications of modernist empiricism as lower-level generalizations that needed
to be incorporated within a universal theory. Hence they developed various
abstract scientific theories, such as systems theory and structural-functionalism,
which they hoped would act as general systematic frameworks (see Almond,
1960; Easton, 1953). Although modernist empiricists had used functionalist
explanations, behavioralists consciously crafted functionalist theories and con-
cepts at a sufficiently abstract level to suggest that they had universal applicability.
Sometimes behavioralists sought universality through the application to com-
parative politics of the types of survey research already being used in the study
of American politics (Almond and Verba, 1989). However, even when they
extended techniques developed by modernist empiricists, they often had a dif-
ferent concept of the relationship of theory to data.Whereas modernist empiri-
cists thought of theory as inductive generalizations, the behavioralists wanted to
deduce hypotheses from their theoretical frameworks and then verify them by
reference to data. Behavioralists thus placed the results of survey research within
general theories as well as (or instead of) mid-range correlations and typologies.
The universal and deductive pretensions of behavioralism challenged modernist
empiricism as well as developmental historicism. Some modernist empiricists
responded to this challenge by redefining their approach in terms of a compara-
tive, historical and sociological study of states.The state thus became the focus for
a diverse range of substantive agendas, including comparative political economy,
the political development of America and the study of revolutions.14 This redefi-
nition of modernist empiricism was led by the Committee on States and Social
Structures set up by the Social Science Research Council in the early 1980s with
Peter Evans and Theda Skocpol as chairs and Albert Hirschman, Peter Katzen-
stein, Ira Katznelson, Stephen Krasner, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Charles Tilly
as its other members.These modernist empiricists complained that behavioralist
attempts to replace the concept of the state with that of ‘the political system’ had
resulted in a reductionism that neglected the potential autonomy of the state.
Paradoxically they thus tied modernist empiricism to neo-statism when in fact it
had arisen as social scientists tried to get behind constitutional pieties to examine
actual behavior and processes.Again, these modernist empiricists complained that
behavioralist attempts to deduce universally valid hypotheses from general theo-
ries had resulted in a lack of sensitivity to different social and historical contexts.
Paradoxically they thus associated modernist empiricism with a historicist resis-
tance to the universal claims of behavioralism when in fact it had arisen as social
scientists introduced atomization, analysis, correlation and classification as alter-
natives to the narratives of the developmental historicists.
The challenge of behavioralism led modernist empiricists to define themselves in
terms almost diametrically opposed to those with which their predecessors had
broken with developmental historicism. Hence the neo-statists were seduced by
lopsided views of their intellectual history and their preferred methods. They
portrayed their neo-statism as a radical new paradigm, ignoring the continuities
between their work and earlier forms of modernist empiricism, and obscuring
the commonalities between their approaches and behavioralism when located in
contrast to developmental historicism.15 They described their methods as com-
parative and historical, ignoring the extent to which their modes of understand-
ing and explanation were correlations and classifications rather than historical
narratives. The neo-statists were hostile to universal theories based on large-N
statistical analyses, but they still explicitly advocated a process of ‘analytical
induction’ in which small-N comparisons and case studies would generate mid-
level theories (see, for example, Skocpol, 1985). Moreover, they wanted the case
studies to be selected on analytic grounds, and they wanted the mid-level
theories to be correlations and classifications couched in terms of quasi-
universal, analytic categories. Typically they conceived of history as little more
than a series of atomized episodes that could provide data to be absorbed within
more timeless variables.The explanatory power of their social science depended
594 MARK BEVIR
either on general relationships between variables or on cross-national typologies;

it did not depend on particular narrative histories.
Behavioralism had far less of a presence in Britain than in America. However, in
Britain as well, modernist empiricists reacted to behavioralism by defining them-
selves against it in a way that gave them a lopsided picture of their own history
and methods. They started to invoke a British approach to political science that
was alleged to be sensitive to agency, contingency and history, in contrast to the
positivism that dominated America. They thereby ignored the extent to which
British political scientists actually embraced aspects of behavioralism, albeit within
the context of an abiding modernist empiricism. Behavioralism permeated the
Nuffield election studies when David Butler began to collaborate with Donald
Stokes to make more use of the statistical techniques for studying voting behavior
that had been developed at Michigan. Behavioralism influenced various attempts
to craft a political sociology that would create general or mid-level theories
applicable across cultures. And behavioralism inspired much of the work on
behavior and processes that flourished at the Universities of Essex and Strathclyde
under Jean Blondel and Richard Rose (Blondel, 1969; Butler and Stokes, 1969;
Dowse and Hughes, 1972; Rose, 1980). The impact of behavioralism generated
new data, much of which seemed to be at odds with the Westminster model
(Berrington, 1973; Jackson, 1968).Yet British political scientists often remained
wedded to this model, arguing only that the new data showed the need for
modernizing reforms to enable parliament better to fulfill its role.
Modernist empiricists redefined their approach yet again at the close of the
twentieth century, partly in response to the rise of rational choice theory. Rational
choice theory replicated many of the features of behavioralism that had chal-
lenged modernist empiricism; it too offered an abstract general theory of more or
less universal scope from which other theories or hypotheses could then be
deduced, applied and tested (Amadae, 2003). Equally, however, rational choice
theory replaced the systems-level focus of behavioral theory with one on micro-
level foundations. It posed forcefully the question of what micro-theory could
make sense of neo-statism – and modernist empiricism more generally – with its
dependence on analytic induction, variables, classifications and correlations.
Margaret Levi unwittingly echoed the old behavioralist complaint that modernist
empiricism led to hyper-factualism when she complained of neo-statists ‘stock-
piling case studies’, but she did so alongside a novel call for more attention to be
paid to micro-level theory (Levi, 1988, p. 197).
Neo-statists and other modernist empiricists responded to the challenge of
rational choice theory by rearticulating their approach as the ‘new institutional-
ism’. But William Riker and others were already calling for a new analysis of
institutions through rational choice theory itself (Riker, 1980). Hence, neo-statists
and other modernist empiricists quickly tried to distinguish different strands
within new institutionalism, identifying with a ‘sociological’ or ‘historical’ insti-
tutionalism in contrast to a ‘rational choice’ one (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Thelen
and Steinmo, 1992). Here, modernist empiricists defined their new institution-
alism using many of the buzzwords with which they had earlier described
neo-statism. They described it as a comparative and historical approach to the
analytic and inductive construction of mid-range theories out of case studies and
small-N studies. Once again, however, the self-characterisation of modernist
empiricists makes sense only in contrast to a universal and deductive approach
now associated with rational choice theory. It obscures the new institutionalists’
continuing commitment to atomisation and analysis – even explicit appeals to
dependent and independent variables – as methods of generating correlations and
typologies.16 The new institutionalists’ rejection of historicism appears in their
characteristic difficulties when addressing the very micro-level issues that rational
choice theory poses so forcefully. Sometimes they simply wish these issues away
by pronouncing them unhelpful obstacles to our tackling big substantive prob-
lems. At other times they unpack their approach in terms of the micro theory of
rational choice, thereby undermining the very distinctions they had been so
concerned to draw. They almost never decenter institutions in terms of a micro
theory of contingent and competing beliefs and actions, for, if they did so, they
would undermine the possibility of treating institutions as stable objects that can
be known through correlations and classifications (Pierson, 2000; Pierson and
Skocpol, 2002).
Today social scientists have two dominant ways of studying politics. First, rational
choice theorists, like the behavioralists, explain the character and policies of
nation states by reference to universal theories and hypotheses deduced from
them.They have even studied the very existence of nations and nationalisms as a
species of collective action problem; they try to explain group identities and
attachments by reference to the utility-maximizing behavior of self-interested
individuals (Breton et al., 1996). More generally, universal theories encourage
social scientists to downplay particular national histories, identities and practices,
and to foreground questions of how to locate such particularities within a general
theory. Second, new institutionalists, like earlier modernist empiricists, explain the
character and policies of nation states in terms of correlations and typologies that
provide macro-historical, comparative contexts for diverse cases.Tilly has argued,
for example, that all states strive principally to expand, and to protect themselves
from the expansion of others. In this context, he continues, the increasingly
capital intensive nature of warfare correlates with the decline of city states,
empires and the like, before the rise of the now ubiquitous nation state (Tilly,
1992). More generally, modernist empiricists use collective categories covering
diverse states as the main variables or ideal-types in mid-level explanations of
particular histories, identities and practices.
A Return to Narrative?
Although social scientists imply that the elder developmental narratives are false,
their emphasis falls less on such skepticism than on the alleged correctness of their
596 MARK BEVIR
alternative approaches to the study of politics. What is more, even if popular

understandings of politics remain attached to elder narratives – and we might
question the extent to which they do – the studies that most influence public
policy and corporate affairs increasingly consist of the ahistorical typologies,
correlations and models of social scientists. As such, social science is less a source
of skepticism than a target for it. The source of skepticism lies in developments
within historicism. It lies in a radical historicism that arose as philosophers and
human scientists redefined narrative to embrace the absence of assumptions about
continuity and progress and the absence of principles of nationality and freedom.
Radical historicism, like modernist empiricism, arose in part as a response to the
loss of faith in progress and reason that began in the late nineteenth century and
became widespread following the First World War.17 Historicists such as Ernst
Troeltsch and Benedetto Croce rejected the developmental perspective that
tamed context and change by postulating a continuous development of key
principles. Equally, however, they had little use for the analyses, correlations and
typologies of modernist empiricists because these rarely allowed adequately for
context or change.The radical historicists implied that beliefs, actions and events
are profoundly contingent in that the moment of choice is open and indetermi-
nate. In their view, developmental historicism elided indeterminacy by locating
choices in an apparently stable narrative of progress. Because they queried
continuity, they raised the possibility of skepticism about the very possibility of
objective historical knowledge. Croce emphasized that history reflects the inter-
ests and perspective of the present; in this view, developmental historicism hides
its retroactive construction of the stability in its narratives. Radical historicists
believed, more generally, that the ubiquity of change meant that the present might
have little, if anything, in common with the past – historical events have their own
particular contexts.This belief led both to concerns about a corrosive skepticism
and to various efforts to avoid such skepticism through appeals to history itself.
Croce’s radical historicism had little immediate impact on anglophone human
sciences.Yet, it was an important influence on philosophers opposed to positivism.
R. G. Collingwood remained a rare champion of a type of idealist historicism,
indebted to Croce, at the time when logical positivism swept through Oxford
(Collingwood, 1940; 1946; Rubinoff, 1996). Charles Taylor drew on similar
idealist, phenomenological and historicist ideas to challenge behavioralism
(Taylor, 1985). Later, Collingwood and Taylor inspired various anglophone forms
of radical historicism in the human sciences as exemplified by their impact upon,
respectively, Quentin Skinner and Clifford Geertz.These latter radical historicists
then inspired a return to narrative.To begin with, they typically suggested that the
ubiquity of change meant that practices, and the clusters of beliefs or ideas that
informed them, were specific historical or cultural achievements that had little, if
anything, in common with our own ways of life.They renounced the possibility
of either a universal theory or ahistorical correlations and typologies. In addition,
they argued that if we are to understand and explain actions and beliefs, we have
to grasp how they fit within wider practices and webs of meaning.They empha-
sised contextualization in contrast to both deduction and atomization and analy-
sis. Radical historicists thus promoted forms of understanding and explanation
that, like the narratives of developmental historicists, are inductive studies of
human life in relation to historical contexts, but which, unlike the narratives of
developmental historicists, do not appeal to fixed principles or to reason and
progress in order to define the relevant contexts and relate them to the present.
The British New Left inspired another strand of radical historicism. There are
clear links between the New Left and the radical historicists we have already
discussed. Taylor had been active in the New Left, as had Alisdair MacIntyre, a
philosophical critic of positivist social science who provided Skinner with a
model of how to write a contextual history. Likewise, several members of the
New Left drew indirectly on Croce by way of Antonio Gramsci as they sought
to develop a dialectical Marxism that broke with mechanical materialism and
economism. E. P.Thompson and Raymond Williams granted some autonomy to
consciousness, culture and agency, while still regarding them as sites of the
contradictions and conflicts associated with capitalism.Then, in the 1970s, Stuart
Hall used such Marxism explicitly to define cultural studies as historicist critique.
Because the members of the New Left allowed autonomy to culture, they focused
on the beliefs and meanings that infuse actions and practices. As Williams wrote,
‘our way of seeing things is literally our way of living’: it is the ‘sharing of
common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes; the offering,
reception and comparison of new meanings, leading to tensions and achievements
of growth and change’ (Williams, 1961, p. 55). Because the members of the New
Left took culture to be a complex web of meanings and practices, they empha-
sized the active relationship between meaning and context; they too located
beliefs in culture understood as a way of life, although, especially following
Thompson’s critique of Williams, they insisted that society contains struggles
and contests between different ways of life (Thompson, 1961). Here too radical
historicism inspired narratives of human life in particular contexts and without
reference to the fixed principles by which developmental historicists had tied past
contexts to the present.The New Left challenged bourgeois concepts of progress
and high culture for imposing a spurious unity on culture and history. It defined
culture, in Williams’ words, as ‘part of the general process which creates conven-
tions and institutions, through which the meanings that are valued by the
community are shared and made active’ (Williams, 1961, p. 55).
There are differences between the New Left and radical historicists such as Geertz
and Skinner. Perhaps the New Left continued to exhibit a lingering attachment
to forms of reductionism, even if they pushed them back to the last instance.
Perhaps other radical historicists are too sanguine in their appeals to unity and
community instead of conflict and difference. However, despite such differences,
they all expressed a radical historicism that has inspired not just a return to
narrative but also our skepticism. Their historicist critique of positivism leads to
598 MARK BEVIR
skepticism toward the typologies, correlations and models of social science; they
portray these representations as objectifications that hide the historicity of the
objects they depict and the modes by which they do so. Similarly, the radical
nature of their historicism leads to skepticism toward the narratives of develop-
mental historicists. Radical historicists replace principles of reason, character and
progress with sensitivity to dispersal, difference and discontinuity. For example,
they reinterpret Locke’s Two Treatises as a party-political pamphlet intended to
advance Shaftesbury’s opposition to the arbitrariness of the king’s policy, rather
than the defining statement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the con-
stitutional settlement of 1689 (Laslett, 1960). Radical historicists also portray the
narratives of developmental historicists as products of particular intellectual or
ideological contexts. For example, they narrate the rise of Whig historiography,
and later changes within it, as contingent responses to particular debates about
matters such as commerce, rather than as the unfolding of historical truth
(Pocock, 1985).
While radical historicism constitutes one source of skepticism, another owes little
to theorists such as Croce, Collingwood, MacIntyre and Taylor. Our skepticism
derives too from post-structuralist critiques of the structuralism of Claude Levi-
Strauss and Louis Althusser, which itself arose out of Ferdinand de Saussure’s early
defence of a modernist science of linguistics that would replace developmental,
diachronic studies with analysis and atomization in relation to ahistorical, syn-
chronic typologies, correlations or systems. The structuralists studied language,
mind and society as objects that were determined by the internal relations among
the units within them. They hoped to unravel causal logics based on the often
unrecognized categories and frameworks that they associated with these relations.
Their post-structuralist critics complained that structures are inherently unde-
cidable and unstable. Jacques Derrida even extended this complaint to cover all of
Western philosophy; he argued that our philosophy privileges stable origins and
presences but it still cannot efface all traces of otherness and instability. Post-
structuralism thus inspires skeptical attempts to show how typologies, correlations
and especially structures exhibit traces of their own incompleteness. It prompts
skeptical studies of the ways the narratives of the developmental historicists elide
the violence and arbitrariness of the origins and evolution of the principles that
lend to them a spurious stability. Derrida argues, for example, that while the ‘we’
of the American Declaration of Independence purports to speak for a people, the
people ‘do not exist as an entity ... before this declaration’; the signature invents
the subject on behalf of which it claims to speak (Derrida, 1986, p. 10).
Post-structuralist skepticism often remains indebted to structuralism in a way that
distances it somewhat from radical historicism.18 Deconstruction in particular
takes from structuralism a view of culture as constructed in accord with categories
or frameworks; it just unpacks these categories in terms of a logic of otherness
rather than one of presence.This logic of otherness informs a largely ahistorical
critique of representation; it inspires attempts to show how modes of knowing fail
to achieve the closure they seek precisely because they cannot escape this
universal logic of otherness. Deconstruction exhibits the limitations of a mode of
knowing by referring to a quasi-structure that is meant to govern all thought,
rather than by appealing to the historical specificity of that particular mode of
knowing. Although post-structuralists and radical historicists share a skeptical
emphasis on dispersal, difference and discontinuity, the former often invoke
invariant categories, albeit these are often put under erasure, whereas the latter
appeal to particularity, change and experience. What is more, post-structuralists
often take from structuralism a related dismissal of subjectivity and agency.They
portray their invariant categories as being built into language, thought or the
unconscious, from whence they define human actions and practices. Whereas
radical historicists typically portray people as active agents in the making of their
own history, the post-structuralists often portray them as bearers of the discourses
or quasi-structures that speak and persist through them.
Although radical historicists and post-structuralists differ in some respects, they
give us overlapping narratives exhibiting skepticism toward representations of the
nation state. We have seen that they offer skeptical narratives of other represen-
tations of nation states. They debunk these representations by exhibiting their
historical contingency and by showing how they hide their own instability.This
debunking appears in studies of the production of national identities in the
heritage industry, the history of historiography, national imaginaries and popular
culture.19 Still, such debunking ought not to obscure the fact that radical histori-
cists and post-structuralists also offer their own representations of states, or at least
of peoples; after all, the critical tone of their skepticism relies on the implication
that other representations fail to capture all of the varied peoples they purport to,
and so on a narrative of the actual plurality of nation states.
Radical historicists and post-structuralists offer new narratives of nation states.
They do so using the same themes of dispersal, difference and discontinuity with
which they challenge principles of reason, character and progress. Dispersal
implies a concern to explore scattered regions and domains within a nation state:
the history of the British state is now that of four nations, not one, while the early
territoriality of the American colonies appears as that of regional folkways, each
of which had a distinct British antecedent (Davies, 1999; Fischer, 1989; Samuel,
1999). Difference implies a concern to explore how dominant identities elide, or
even define themselves against, competing ones of, say, religion, gender and race:
British and American identities were forged in opposition to a Catholicism
associated respectively with the French and Mexicans (Colley, 1992; Smith,
1995, particularly pp. 237–9). Discontinuity implies a concern with the ways in
which all these varied identities are created and transformed over time. Shifts in
the British nation appear to involve novel projections back on to the past,
not a continuous development of core themes; they take us from the sense of
Englishness forged in Tudor times through the Britishness that arose in wars
against France, on to the invention of an imperial mission, the elegiac invocation
600 MARK BEVIR
of the shires and, we might now add, New Labour’s vision of ‘Cool Britannia’
(compare, Colley, 1992; Jones, 1998; Rich, 1986; Samuel, 1989). Similarly, the
American nation has projected its past discontinuously as a puritan elect, virtuous
and civic-minded small-farmers defending liberty, an Anglo-Saxon people
pursing national-origins legislation and, we might add, the comparatively recent
dominance of a melting pot (Schrag, 1970; Smith, 1995).
Because radical historicists and post-structuralists often represent the nation state
as dispersed, differentiated and discontinuous, their narratives can appear to be
beyond or without the nation state. In this view, radical historicists and post-
structuralists offer narratives of networks of peoples. Their use of dispersal chal-
lenges the nation state by highlighting transnational links. Ideas, customs and
norms flow across boundaries. Peoples are embedded in all kinds of traditions and
practices that are themselves located in overlapping local, regional and global
contexts (compare Gilroy, 1993). The concern with difference decenters the
nation state into pluralistic peoples. When human scientists invoke collective
categories – the principles and characters of developmental historicists or the
institutions and ideal-types of social science – these categories are liable to hide,
willfully or otherwise, the diverse beliefs and desires that motivate the people they
purport to cover. Peoples include racial and gender differences, and differences
within races and genders, which are neglected if we lump them together as a
more unified nation (compare Gilroy, 1991). The interest in discontinuity chal-
lenges the nation state by revealing as contingent and contestable any identity it
might appear to possess across time.20
Conclusion
We have today an increasing number of skeptical studies of the ways in which the
allegedly fixed characteristics of states are actually historical constructions that
tend to elide the facts of dispersal, difference and discontinuity. This skepticism
inspires new narratives that are post-national and perhaps post-statist. It represents
networks of peoples through new narratives that stand in contrast to the typolo-
gies, correlations and models of social science, and to the elder narratives of a
gradual unfolding of principles or character. Its leading motifs are dispersal,
difference and discontinuity, all of which appear in the prominence given to
transnationalism, pluralism and contingency. However, while this new mode of
knowledge is now a common way of comprehending our world, it is neither
devoid of ambiguity nor the only possibility currently on offer. To conclude,
therefore, I want briefly to mention two of the main challenges that confront
those who deploy such skeptical narratives.
One challenge is to clear up an ambiguity about the dispersals, differences and
discontinuities they invoke. As we have seen, there is a tension here between
radical historicism and at least some types of post-structuralism. These skeptics
agree that a belief in dispersal, difference and discontinuity derives from philo-
sophical principles. Thereafter post-structuralists are inclined to identify the

content of particular instances of dispersal, difference and discontinuity as them-
selves consequences of the internal relations of a discourse or language or even as
built into the nature of representation itself: the east is defined structurally against
the west, or male against female. In sharp contrast, radical historicists typically
ascribe such content to the activity of agents who use and deploy language to
express ideas and beliefs, albeit that they reach these beliefs only under the
influence of an inherited tradition or discourse. We need, it seems, to be clearer
about what, if any, role we would ascribe to agency.
Another challenge is effectively to engage social scientists, most of whom still
favor typologies, correlations and models, rather than skeptical narratives. Many
social scientists are aware that their modes of knowledge create distortions and
simplifications. They just regard these problems as necessary consequences of
crafting generalizations that are capable of guiding action in the world. It is not
effective, therefore, to point to the elisions of dispersal, difference and disconti-
nuity in their work: they know these are there; they just do not see any alternative.
What is more, post-structuralists and radical historicists would appear to agree
with these social scientists in so far as their skepticism implies that all represen-
tation elides dispersal, difference and discontinuity.We need, it seems, to be clear
how our skepticism might connect to alternative modes of knowledge and so
alternative approaches to public policy.
(Accepted: 10 October 2005)
About the Author

Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1950, USA;
email: [email protected]
Notes
I thank all those involved in the project on ‘Historicizing Politics’ for discussions that helped me to think through many
of the issues discussed here. Alas, this general acknowledgement will have to suffice since my debts to them are far too
numerous and complex to be individuated. For details of the project see Adcock, Bevir and Stimson (forthcoming).
Despite my massive debt to them, they should not be held responsible for what I argue here; from the same discussions
I know many of them would disagree with significant portions of my argument.
1 On the triumph of a Whiggish inductive approach over a Benthamite deductive one see Collini et al. (1983).
2 Bryce (1909). For a longer exposition of these themes see Lecky (1892).
3 For an explicit statement of the importance of ‘philosophy’ in ordering historical facts see Burgess (1897).
4 On the idea of the state see Farr (1991). On German historicism see Herbst (1965).
5 A key figure here was, of course, Henry Maine with his theory of progress from status to contract and his account
of village communities. See Maine (1917) and Maine (1871). For just one attempt to locate these English
characteristics at the founding of America, see Bryce (1921, vol. 2, pp. 7–8). For American versions of the argument
see Adams (1882) and Burgess (1891). On the transnational links at play here see den Otter (2002).
6 On civilizational and racialist strands in developmental historicism see, respectively, Mandler (2000) and Stapleton
(2000).
7 America even appeared as both inheriting the English love of liberty and as being a utopian beginning when it was
argued that the early colonists had been, through a process of self-selection, precisely those English who most loved
liberty and so most desired to escape the yoke.

602 MARK BEVIR
8 An early example is Bancroft (1860–74).

9 On historico-politics in America see Adcock (2003) and Ross (1991). On the Whiggish nature of the study of
politics in Britain see Collini et al. (1983).
10 The classic example of this contrast is Radcliffe-Brown (1924).
11 For studies of this nostalgia see Pederson and Mandler (1994) and Stapleton (1994).
12 Compare Adcock (2003) and Ross (1991). The idea of objectivity at work here has been explored by Novick
(Novick, 1988). On the sense of the otherness of the past see Blaas (1978).
13 On historiographies of behavioralism see Farr (1995).
14 See Evans et al. (1985); and on how neo-statism allegedly entailed a return to history, see Katznelson (1994). For
examples of the substantive agendas see, respectively, Evans (1979), Skocpol (1978) and Skowronek (1982).
15 The result was, of course, a caricature of behavioralism, as was pointed out at the time by Almond (1988).
16 The persistent need to fend off universal, deductive theory surely explains why some new institutionalists want to
assimilate rational choice theory to structural-functionalism, as when Skocpol calls the structural-functionalists
‘forebears’ of rational choice theory, and rational choice theorists the ‘successors’ of the Grand Theorists of old. See
Skocpol (2000).
17 A broader account of radical historicism conceived as anti-metaphysics in the writing of history appears in Roberts
(1995).
18 It is arguable that Foucault offers a more historicist version of post-structuralism. While his earlier archaeological
studies appear to rely on a quasi-structural logic within any given mode of knowing, they present each mode of
knowing as something of a historical particular, and his later genealogical studies seem even more hostile to the idea
of a quasi-structural logic. For an earlier discussion of these two strands of post-structuralist skepticism see Said
(1978).
19 British examples include, respectively, Garrity (2003), Hewison (1987), Jones (1998) and Richards (1997). Related
American examples include Bosniak (1997), Kerman (1983) and Ross (1984).
20 Radical historicism is, in fact, peculiarly sensitive to both change and continuity.While it suggests that all allegedly
fixed beliefs or norms are in fact open to transformation, it also suggests that people always reach their beliefs against
the background of an inherited tradition, discourse or language, and it thus rejects the very idea of a complete break
or rupture with the past.
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Political Studies As Narrative and Science, 1880-2000

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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 0 6 VO L 5 4 , 5 8 3 – 6 0 6

Political Studies as Narrative and Science,

Developmental Historicism, cc. 1880–1920

Developmental historicism also owed much to an organic or romantic outlook

science deployed an inductive historical method to trace the history of political

Modernist Empiricism, cc. 1920–1960

War, Lawrence Lowell used his mathematical training to undertake a statistical

Varieties of Social Science, cc. 1960–2000

tied it instead to atomization, classification and quantification. By 1960, the social

either on general relationships between variables or on cross-national typologies;

alternative approaches to the study of politics. What is more, even if popular

sophical principles. Thereafter post-structuralists are inclined to identify the

About the Author

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association

8 An early example is Bancroft (1860–74).

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Political Studies Association

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