Making Political Science Matter

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.A significant and thoughtful discussion of key issues in the philosophy of social science, one designed to encourage a richer variety of methodological work in political science. --Kristen Renwick Monroe, editor of Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political ScienceA bold call to rethink political science. The authors imagine a discipline that challenges power, challenges society, and challenges the ways we think. Making Political Science Matter is a wise, erudite, broad-ranging, sometimes witty gauntlet tossed before contemporary scholarship. It is more than a book, it is a movement.--James A. Morone, author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American HistoryMaking Political Science Matter brings together a number of prominent scholars to discuss the state of the field of Political Science. In particular, these scholars are interested in ways to reinvigorate the discipline by connecting it to present day political struggles. Uniformly well-written and steeped in a strong sense of history, the contributors consider such important topics as: the usefulness of rational choice theory; the ethical limits of pluralism; the use (and misuse) of empirical research in political science; the present-day divorce between political theory and empirical science; the connection between political science scholarship and political struggles, and the future of the discipline. This volume builds on the debate in the discipline over the significance of the work of Bent Flyvbjerg, whose book Making Social Science Matter has been characterized as a manifesto for the Perestroika Movement that has roiled the field in recent years.Contributors include: Brian Caterino, Stewart Clegg, Bent Flyvbjerg, Mary Hawkesworth, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Gregory J. Kasza, David Kettler, David D. Laitin, Timothy W. Luke, Theodore R. Schatzki, Sanford F. Schram, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, Corey S. Shdaimah, Roland W. Stahl, and Leslie Paul Thiele.