How can we best understand the major debates and recent movements in contemporary empirical political theory? In this volume, the contributors, including four past presidents of the APSA and one past president of the IPSA, present their views of the central core, methodologies and development of empirical political science. Their disparate views of the unifying themes of the discipline reflect different theoretical orientations, from behavioralism to rational choice, cultural theory to postmodernism, and feminism to Marxism. Is there a human nature on which we can construct scientific theories of political life? What is the role of culture in shaping any such nature? How objective and value-free can political theories be? These are only a few of the issues the volume addresses. By assessing where we have traveled intellectually as a discipline and asking what remains of lasting significance in the various theoretical approaches that have engulfed the profession, Contemporary Empirical Political Theory provides an important evaluation of the current state of empirical political theory and a valuable guide to future developments in political science.
CONTRIBUTORS: Gabriel Almond, David Easton, Murray Edelman, J. Peter Euben, Bernard Grofman, John Gunnell, Russell Hardin, Edward Harpham, Nancy Hartsock, Jean Laponce, Theodore Lowi, Kristen Monroe, William Riker, Ian Shapiro, Alexander Wendt, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent books are The Heart of Altruism, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the edited volume, The Economic Approach to Politics.
"A formidable accomplishment. . . . A comprehensive representation of most of social theory and its vicissitudes in the second half of the twentieth century as they have fused and invigorated the discipline."—Neil Smelser, Director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
"This is an enlightening and highly readable guide to the turf wars in political science. It gives us insights on what our field is all about and how and what its leaders think."—Nancy Bermeo, Dept. of Politics, Princeton University
"The editor has done a magnificent job in of getting a baker's dozen of knowledgeable top scholars to discuss the development of empirical political theory. . . I learned something from virtually every essay, and I think other social and political scientists concerned with the status and character of empirical theory in their field, whatever their specialty and whatever their familiarity with its problems, will too. Reading and learning from this work is made even more enjoyable by the editor's and author's relaxed, lucid, literate, and often witty presentation of their concepts and thoughts, however complex."—John C. Wahlke, University of Arizona
"In the early 1950's David Easton made a plea and an argument for an empirical political science not simply cognizant of political theory but informed and shaped by it. Since then that plea has been more often acknowledged in lip-service than in practice. The essays collected in this volume give some hope that both the gulf between political science and political theory has begun to narrow—to the profit of both groups."—Tracy B. Strong, UCSD
338 pp.6 x 9
9780520308749$49.95|£42.00Paper
May 2022