Title Pages

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Title Pages
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

(p.i) Interpretive Social Science (p.ii)

(p.iii) Interpretive Social Science

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Title Pages

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Page 2 of 2
Introduction

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Introduction
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

Readers are introduced to the major philosophical paradigms shaping social
science research today, including hermeneutics and naturalism. The pervasive
influence of naturalism on social scientific research is explained and the
interpretive alternative is sketched. As part of this, readers are offered an
account of the philosophical origins of today’s social science disciplines with a
special focus on the case of political science. At the beginning of the twentieth
century a modern, ahistorical, and formal paradigm for the study of politics was
formed as scholars increasingly rejected the developmental historical narratives
and Hegelianism of the nineteenth century. The chapter concludes with a brief
overview of the argument of the book.

Keywords:   naturalism, hermeneutics, philosophy of social science, political science, Hegelianism

This book is written for anyone who wishes to understand human behavior
better. Some readers might be students and scholars in the social sciences—
political scientists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and psychologists.
Others might be political theorists, philosophers, or free-spirited experts in the
humanities or natural sciences. Still others may be policy analysts, political
actors, and strategists coping with the world of action. But this book is not
merely written for experts and elites. It is also intended for ordinary citizens:
tenacious laypeople, inquisitive undergraduates, curious autodidacts, and
amateur seekers. No one can live for very long without needing to decode and
grasp the behavior of those around them.

Page 1 of 19
Introduction

One purpose of this book is to argue that anyone who really desires to
understand and explain human agency must adopt a “hermeneutic” or
interpretive philosophical perspective. But what is an interpretive approach to
the social sciences? Many people in the social sciences already think they know
the answer. So the most widely read introductions to political science often give
a familiar but misleading reply: namely, interpretivism is a “qualitative” method
favored by researchers who have a squishy, touchy-feely view of the world. This
means interpretivism is just one among various tools (one with a strength for
focusing on the analysis of meanings and beliefs) that social scientists can opt in
or out of depending on their disposition and research goals.1 On this view, an
interpretive approach is basically reducible to activities like conducting long-
form interviews, hunting in archives, beefing up on foreign languages, doing
ethnography, and traveling to foreign countries for case studies. Interpretivism
is instrumental because it is a means for achieving some further research goal or
aim. It is optional because those who do not share a particular research goal can
safely ignore it (much like a piano tuner does not need to bother with a wrecking
ball or a jackhammer).

But as we hope to show, this standard conception of interpretivism is seriously

wrong. Hermeneutics is non-optional. Anyone from a social scientist to a
layperson who truly wishes to grasp human behavior needs hermeneutics. This
is because hermeneutics is an entire philosophical paradigm, with consequences
for nearly every aspect of the study of human behavior and politics. Specifically,
hermeneutics maintains that the study of human beliefs and actions is historical,
cultural, and narrative in form. Studying human agency inescapably requires the
interpretation of meanings—relating beliefs, actions, and practices to further
webs of meaning. Because hermeneutics or interpretivism is a philosophy, it
must either be accepted or rejected as a whole. As we (p.2) will show at length
in the coming chapters, an interpretive approach cannot be picked up and put
down instrumentally without falling into serious confusion and incoherence that
does damage to social scientific inquiry.

A second major concern of this book is that although we believe interpretivism is

the best philosophical approach to the social sciences, it is also true that
interpretive philosophy is itself a broad plethora of often rival approaches
developed as part of the “interpretive turn” in the last century or so.2 Indeed,
philosophers and social scientists from a wide range of competing and not
always compatible traditions have converged on hermeneutics—including
phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, Hegelians, American pragmatists,
British New Left Marxists, post-structuralists, neo-Aristotelians, social
constructivists, and social material relations theorists, to name only a few.3 One
of our book’s goals is to identify the family resemblances across some of the
major interpretive approaches to research, while at the same time arguing that
what we call an “anti-naturalist” framework for interpretive research provides
the most consistent, coherent basis for this paradigm. By doing this, our hope is
Page 2 of 19
Introduction

to vindicate the work of the many brilliant interpretive philosophers and social
theorists of the last century while also critically clarifying for readers how an
anti-naturalist articulation of this philosophy has an impact on nearly every
aspect of social scientific research, from concept formation and methods to
empirical inquiry and public policy. Indeed, so profound is the effect of
interpretive philosophy on the social sciences that it even opens new areas for
empirical study and ethical engagement. Our particular anti-naturalist approach
also sheds light on some of the most important social science findings of the last
fifty years—placing major contributions to our understanding of social,
psychological, economic, and political reality within a coherent philosophical
framework. But we are running ahead of ourselves.

For now the first step is identifying the nature of hermeneutics and the
interpretive turn. This involves discerning what interpretive philosophy is
“turning” away from; what it is rejecting. Indeed, interpretive philosophy
originated as a critical response to the dominant philosophical paradigm in the
social sciences—a movement known to philosophers as “naturalism.” Anyone
who wishes to fully grasp the interpretive turn must first understand the critical
dialogue between hermeneutics and naturalism.

Naturalism and the modern social sciences

Naturalism is the general philosophical view that the study of human behavior is
analogous to the natural sciences—hence the name “naturalism.” Naturalists
have attempted to revolutionize the social sciences by making them look more
like the natural sciences in countless ways; these include: searching for (p.3)
ahistorical causal laws; eliminating values and political engagement from the
study of human behavior; removing or demoting the role of meanings and
purposes in favor of synchronic formalism and quantification; and treating social
reality as reducible to brute, verifiable facts in need of minimal interpretation.
Because naturalism (like hermeneutics) is a philosophy and not simply a method,
it is all-pervasive and capable of innumerable variations. Once taken on board,
naturalism colors and informs almost every aspect of what are otherwise starkly
different research programs and agendas in the social sciences. Naturalism’s
protean ability to shape social science concepts, explanation, description, and
research will be dealt with in detail throughout the coming chapters. But first we
will briefly narrate how naturalism came to dominate the social sciences in order
to better understand the current situation and how it has provoked the
hermeneutic backlash.

Naturalism’s deepest historical roots reach back to the seventeenth century and
the attempt by a group of European intellectuals to model knowledge of ethical
and political life on the newly emergent revolution in the natural sciences.4
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is a classic, early example of this ambition. Hobbes
opens with a famous attempt to construct a purely materialist psychology of
human sense perception by discussing the way an organ like the eye apprehends

Page 3 of 19
Introduction

material objects. Hobbes linked this materialist account of visual perception to

an entire anthropology of the state of nature and a theory of political
sovereignty. His goal in doing so was to achieve the same kind of epistemological
certainty for the study of human beings found in Descartes’ geometry and
Galileo’s scientia.5 Joining the new advances in mathematics to those of the new
natural sciences, Hobbes believed he had discovered a science of politics built
purely on material causes and clear logical deductions.

Hobbes is only one of the earliest and most influential attempts to found a
science of human behavior modeled on the natural sciences. But many ingenious
forms of naturalism were devised and advanced by intellectuals during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For our purposes, we do not need to take
a deep dive into naturalism’s past or familiarize ourselves with all its astonishing
varietals. Instead, we only need to focus on the birth of the contemporary social
sciences, and the particular versions of naturalism used to philosophically orient
many of today’s disciplines. The key shift toward the current reign of naturalism
occurred near the end of the nineteenth century, when many intellectuals turned
away from the historical narratives that had shaped the study of politics and
society for a century.6 Specifically, they renounced the nineteenth-century study
of human behavior via grand historical narratives of the development of politics
and society through organic phases.

Part of the success of this nineteenth-century developmental paradigm had been

its ability to encompass many of the otherwise unbridgeable intellectual divides
of that age. So, idealists inspired by Hegel sought to explain social and political
life as the unfolding of an idea, Geist, or even Providence through (p.4) history,
while at the same time their more materialistically minded adversaries wove
grand narratives inspired by Darwinism and evolutionary theory.7 Similarly,
Victorian students of politics sought laws of historical progress and evolutionist
accounts of the societies around them.8 And English Whigs like J. R. Green,
William Stubbs, and Edward Freeman conceptualized history as a gradualist
culmination toward liberty and the fulfillment of national identity.9 In the United
States, Herbert Adams and John Burgess also constructed big, developmental
narratives—in their case encapsulating a progressive view of the democratic
nation-state that unsurprisingly gave their own country pride of place.10 Even
positivists in this century, like Auguste Comte, thought the study of society was
organized by constructing grand historical narratives of development. So Comte
argued there was a “law of human development” which passed through three
historical stages, reaching a culminating form of scientific society.11 To this
diverse assemblage of social theorists must also be added Karl Marx, one of the
most momentous thinkers of the nineteenth century. Marx famously unfolded a
monumental historical narrative that argued history passed through a complex
dialectic of economic phases of production and politics, climaxing in a crisis of
capitalism and a global communist revolution.12 History had a definite, fixed

Page 4 of 19
Introduction

trajectory, and understanding human society without unlocking this trajectory

was impossible.

In short, among the enormous diversity and conflict of nineteenth-century

intellectual life, there was nonetheless an underlying broad consensus that
students of human society needed to construct a developmental historical
narrative, a system of the past culminating in present institutions, beliefs, and
practices. Thus, despite the impressive variety and major differences
distinguishing the social theories of this age, a linear, developmental view of
history nonetheless proved almost ubiquitous. These thinkers made no basic
distinction between the study of politics and that of history. Politics unfolded
through historical time and (in their own arcane form of naturalism) according
to the dictates of some logic of development akin to the stages of maturation for
a creature in biology.

Although they have never disappeared entirely, what is certain is that very few
professional social scientists today are interested in building such culminating,
quasi-organic narratives of the past. To the contrary, the kind of naturalism that
currently dominates the social sciences was born out of a rejection of
developmental historicism in favor of ahistorical and formal modes of
explanation and analysis. Indeed, the naturalists who set up the foundations of
disciplines like political science, economics, and sociology drew on
countertrends in the nineteenth century. One crucial source of the break away
from developmental historicism was utilitarianism. Although utilitarians like J. S.
Mill seemed to accept a developmental view of human liberty, creative
dispositions, and capacities, utilitarianism also provided resources for a more
synchronic study of society. For example, William Stanley Jevons took (p.5)
utilitarianism’s ahistorical notions of rational preference selection as well as its
emphasis on quantification in order to develop a neoclassical theory of
economics. Jevons’ view of economics stressed formalism, mathematization, and
static systems as opposed to grand historical developments and changes.13
Although neoclassical economists sometimes still linked their theories to
historical narratives, a decided shift away from history and toward ahistorical
formalism was taking place.14

During the first half of the twentieth century developmental historicist

approaches were gradually replaced by methodological approaches committed
to formalism, quantification, ahistorical analysis, and atomism.15 Historians have
now traced in detail the way in which a naturalist desire to make the social
sciences more scientific fueled this turn away from an earlier emphasis on
history. In making this shift, entirely new naturalistic conceptions of economics,
psychology, anthropology, sociology, and the other human sciences were
created.16 But for the sake of brevity, we will focus more narrowly on sketching
how this movement took hold of the study of politics and shaped it into the
contemporary discipline of political “science” that now dominates. Parallel

Page 5 of 19
Introduction

histories exist in each of the other major disciplines of the social sciences,
meaning that the transformation of political science stands in for a wider
revolution in the human sciences. Interpretivists, as we shall see, are responding
critically to the transformation of the human sciences as a whole.

Early reformers of the study of politics were skeptical of the nineteenth

century’s optimistic narratives of civilizational progress. The catastrophic
experience of the First World War in particular helped motivate a generational
shift away from the prior century’s meta-narratives of progress in favor of the
empirical analysis of discrete, discontinuous atomistic units of political reality.
For example, Herman Finer devised an analytic index so students of comparative
government could compare institutions across states. This was part of a wider
shift away from concerns with historical evolution and in favor of isolating
institutional features of political reality and treating them as synchronic, formal
systems, whose historical past and development were largely irrelevant.17

Finer was symptomatic of a larger trend afoot to modernize the study of politics
by making it more naturalistic. The notion of a nation-state that was expressive
of some basic ethical unity, a Hegelian Geist, a single Whiggish value, or
somehow the culmination of the arc of history was replaced by that of a
government as a collection of competing interests and beliefs. Rather than focus
on history, students of government looked to psychology. Behavior—conceived of
as simply the empirical analysis of human action free of ethical or historical
depth—became central to the study of politics. The concept of behavior as an
ahistorical field of human action would become crucial to all the modern social
sciences.

For example, in England Graham Wallas rejected idealist historicism and tried to
create a political science that relied solely on the quantitative study of (p.6)
behavior, dropping deeper historical meanings.18 Meanwhile in America, Charles
Merriam, one of the key figures in the founding of political science as a
discipline, shared Wallas’s goal of a form of inquiry that used surveys and
statistics to analytically categorize and relate isolated beliefs and actions.
Merriam insisted that the new political science use “instruments of social
observation in statistics” together with “the analytic technique and results of
psychology.”19 His approach helped shape what came to be known as the
Chicago school of political science, which trained many of the leading political
scientists of the next generation.20

The effort to make politics into a more thoroughgoing naturalistic science was
also helped along by the burgeoning interest in survey research. Researchers
like Walter Lippmann focused on aggregating public opinion analyzed in terms
of census data and statistics.21 Major survey institutes began opening at
universities across the country at midcentury.22 These survey institutes sought
to promote the study of public opinion and political behavior as an ahistorical,

Page 6 of 19
Introduction

atomistic, formal enterprise. Again, deeper historical inheritances or the active

power of the past on the present were underemphasized or ignored. A more
genuinely scientific study of politics meant generating data about social reality
in terms of immanent, discrete units of space and time disconnected from a
strong historical dimension. Likewise, these historically muted units were freed
from the surrounding noise of meanings, beliefs, and interpretive context. In
other words, the role of culture was largely sidelined or else devolved into the
aggregate of individual, ahistorical units of belief.

During this time many universities opened what they dubbed “political science”
departments, which increasingly replaced the historical political studies of the
prior era.23 This is not to say that the new movement to modernize the study of
politics was all of apiece. To the contrary, the new political science was
characterized by certain deep divisions that persist today. The most important of
these was advanced by theorists who had been influenced by a positivist
conception of science. For instance, at the University of Chicago, David Easton
led a growing number of political scientists who believed that the new shift to an
ahistorical, formal political science involved too much collection of facts and not
enough general theoretical explanation. Easton helped advanced the so-called
behavioral revolution in political science in which deductive theories of general,
law-like rules were constructed and subsequently assessed in light of individual
facts.24

The response by many to this behavioral revolution was in part a reassertion of

the earlier empiricist insistence on induction and midlevel theorizing. What
never gained mainstream traction, however, was a return to more historical and
narrative forms of study that had been typical of the nineteenth century. Instead,
the discipline became divided between empirically minded, midlevel theorists
who focused on case studies and gathering facts within particular (p.7) polities,
and more positivistic theory-builders who hypothesized certain generalizations
and then tested these in light of sets of facts.

Against this historical background many of the divisions of contemporary

political science become more intelligible. Consider, for instance, the research
program known as historical institutionalism, which is often openly skeptical of
general theories and large-N statistics. Despite their skepticism of more
positivist theorizing, thus far historical institutionalists have remained tacitly
committed to the larger philosophical currents of naturalism by rejecting
nineteenth-century historicist themes and advocating “analytical induction” in
which midlevel theories are still constructed in relation to ahistorical typologies,
classifications, and correlations of atomistic bits of social reality.25 Deep
historicizing of social reality is not part of this form of inquiry; as a result, the
disagreement between historical institutionalism and behavioralists does not
mark a break on either side from the naturalist weltanschauung. This means that
the major opposing research programs that have formed in modern political

Page 7 of 19
Introduction

science—in spite of all their important differences—remain competing forms of

naturalism and not alternatives to it.

A similar philosophical point might be made about a research paradigm like

rational choice theory, which has largely been adopted by political scientists who
admire the advances of neoclassical economics. We will have much more to say
about rational choice in Chapter 5. Indeed, we believe that as a method
interpretivists can use rational choice theory, large-N statistics, and midlevel
case studies pragmatically to advance their own research concerns, provided
they steer clear of philosophical naturalism. They can even use rational choice
and other more positivistic methods “as if” they were true—Colin Hay’s
provocative argument—so long as certain distortive costs and dangers are
carefully weighed and considered.26 Nonetheless, in its current form the method
of rational choice is too often combined with naturalism in a way that remains
completely unaware of the philosophical ramifications and pitfalls. The historical
roots of rational choice are found in the American Cold War attempts to develop
a science of decision-making that would help win the strategic standoff between
two nuclear-armed states.27 Yet this method was also rapidly adopted by
economists who were steeped in the neoclassical revolution and sought to reject
historical narratives and thick cultural meanings in favor of synchronic, formal
conceptions of human rationality.28 This means rational choice theory (as well as
much of mainstream economics) has an importantly different and more
rationalist intellectual lineage from the positivism of the behavioral revolution
and the empiricism of the early turn away from the nineteenth-century focus on
historical narratives. Like the behavioral revolution, rational choice theorists
often criticize historical institutionalists for the “stockpiling of concrete case
studies,” which they insist are “not the solution” to the problem of achieving (p.
8) true scientific generalizations.29 Instead of beginning from empirical cases,
rational choice theorists deduce from certain axioms of an idealized conception
of human agency.30 This is an important difference. But at the same time
advocates of rational choice theory also tend to justify their approach in terms of
some empirical claim about their model’s ability to describe or capture some
important feature of the political or economic world (at the very least, as we will
see, they claim that the value of the model is its predictive capacity).31
Moreover, rational choice theorists and with them many neoclassical economists
reject the notion that historical narratives and thick interpretive engagement are
central to social scientific explanation. Thus, in their own unique way, rational
choice theorists also share in the philosophical naturalism of historical
institutionalism and the behavioral revolution. This implies that the three main
research camps in political science today (and the dominant theoretical premises
of neoclassical economics) are, philosophically speaking, various forms of
naturalism.

Page 8 of 19
Introduction

Making this claim does not negate the deeply important differences in methods,
training, and aims embodied by the various empiricist, positivist, and rational
choice branches of contemporary political science. Nor are we trying to suggest
that modern economics is reducible to rational choice. To the contrary, there are
undoubtedly extremely important differences dividing these and many other
research traditions and communities.32 But it does mean that philosophically the
mainstream in these disciplines embodies rival attempts to achieve the
naturalist goal of an ahistorical science of society, and not a full-blown
interpretive alternative. The three-cornered debate between forms of political
science concerned primarily with universal theory building through the use of
large-N statistics versus an idealization of human rationality versus those
concerned with the accumulation of regional case studies in order to induce
certain midlevel correlations and analytic classifications continues to the present
day. What they all share at the philosophical level is the break away from
historical narrative and holistic treatments of meaning, in favor of formalism,
atomism, and units of analysis that remain historically silent. In short, the major
research programs of contemporary political science are heirs to the project of
modernizing the discipline by cleansing it of the noise of interpretive
phenomena. The messy nature of interpreting meanings—its lack of
susceptibility to a fixed method or reduction to a science—remains largely
hidden from view. Rather than the study of politics being concerned with history
and narrative, it is presented as a science closer to the formal quantifications
and ahistoricism of the physical sciences.

This attempt to free (albeit to differing degrees) the study of human life of
strongly historical and thick meaning dimensions forms the main impetus of the
interpretive critique of naturalism across the social sciences. Rather than a
formal, synchronic knowledge, hermeneutics sees the social sciences as
primarily engaged with webs of meaning, beliefs, and significances. Rather than
(p.9) searching for ahistorical correlations, typologies, or causal laws,
hermeneuticists and interpretivists maintain that social science must construct
narratives of the contingency and holistic complexity of the meanings and
cultures comprising social reality. These are all points that will be developed at
length (in Chapters 2 and 3). But this much should be clear: interpretive
philosophy emerges as a repudiation and a turning away from naturalism’s
increasingly dominant conception of social science which was spreading with
astonishing speed throughout the universities of modern society.

Interpretive philosophy and anti-naturalism

Interpretive or hermeneutic philosophy holds that the study of human behavior—
and thus all the social sciences—ought to be historical, employing narratives as
explanations, and not neglecting the meanings and beliefs of the relevant
agents. One of the chief goals of this book is not only to gather and make sense
of the varying iterations and justifications of interpretive philosophy, but also to
argue that a particular articulation of that philosophy (what we call anti-
Page 9 of 19
Introduction

naturalism) best clarifies the interpretive turn and helps political and social
scientists achieve a comprehensively distinct research agenda. The goal of this
book is thus to provide a basis for turning away from the highly ingrained and
pervasive naturalism that dominated the twentieth century and continues to
reign supreme in the intellectual culture of modern societies. The research
paradigm presented here is the basis for a transformed conception of the human
sciences—but one that can absorb, learn from, and accept much from the
methodological rigor, empirical research, and investigations currently conducted
by working social scientists. The interpretive turn does not call for wholesale
rejections of current research and findings in the social sciences, but rather for
gaining greater clarity about how to ground, understand, and explain the
growing trove of knowledge about human beings and their societies. What parts
of contemporary social science are accepted, rejected, and reformed by those
undergoing the interpretive turn will become clearer as our argument
progresses. The basic structure of our argument in favor of hermeneutic or
interpretive philosophy will be as follows.

First we offer readers a basic primer in the key philosophical concepts of the
hermeneutic tradition. How should social scientists think about an interpretive
approach to their chosen discipline of social science? What are the basic
features of the interpretive turn that color the other aspects of empirical
research and study? Chapter 2 is devoted to explaining the basic philosophical
concepts and features of the interpretive turn. Philosophical reflection is needed
in order to decide the concepts and forms of reasoning that are appropriate to a
given domain of study. Interpretive philosophy governs the (p.10) approach
social scientists take to research and what kinds of topics they favor. This will be
contrasted with some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions found in
naturalist approaches to social science.

The interpretive turn has been advocated by an impressive array of philosophical

traditions and individual philosophical virtuosos. Why should working social
scientists adopt a specifically anti-naturalist framework for advancing the
interpretive turn? Chapter 3 considers some of the classic philosophical
justifications that have been offered to establish the need for an interpretive
turn in the social sciences—including phenomenology and post-structuralism.
Although we are philosophical pluralists and affirm that a wide variety of
positions (pragmatism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, social
constructivism, and so on) have validly established the need for an interpretive
approach to the social sciences, we nonetheless also believe that our anti-
naturalist framework can effectively sort through and ground these claims.
Specifically, anti-naturalism corrects the tendency of some advocates of the
interpretive turn to drift back into naturalist concepts as well as to distort the
proper conception of human agency. This is where we begin to develop a
recurrent theme: namely, that an anti-naturalist framework is especially helpful
in philosophically clarifying how social scientists ought to think about the
Page 10 of 19
Introduction

interpretive turn. This is a claim that we hope gains continual nuance and
complexity as layers of argument are added to the thesis in each ensuing
chapter.

How is it the case that an interpretive and anti-naturalist approach informs all
aspects of social scientific research? Chapter 4 is crucial for furthering the claim
that interpretive philosophy is not simply a method that working social scientists
can treat neutrally like a tool that they pick up and put down at will. This is
because the basic ways in which researchers conceptualize social and political
reality can either take naturalist forms or more philosophically defensible anti-
naturalist forms. Concept formation is inescapably philosophical and social
scientists cannot study political reality without making some tacit assumptions
about the relevant concepts. The question then becomes: which concepts are
proper to the human sciences? To answer this question, Chapter 4 draws on
some of the most influential political science methodology literature as well as
top research programs of empirical political science (including critical
discussions of voter behavior, so-called “contentious politics,” democratic peace,
and selectorate theory, to name a few). As part of this argument, readers will
also see how naturalist versus anti-naturalist philosophy is not simply a method
but pervades all aspects of research.

What is the role of methods in interpretive research? After all, most students of
social science today will spend a significant portion of their education and
training learning to become experts in a particular set of methods—statistics and
regression analysis; foreign languages and ethnography; decision theory
frameworks; or various forms of polling, surveys, and interviews. Do
interpretivists need to wed a particular set of methods? We (p.11) have already
proclaimed that we are methodological pluralists. That is, we believe that
researchers can select whichever method or methods best serve their research
interests. This contrasts with naturalism and interpretivism, which are not
methods, but rather philosophical worldviews or approaches. Whereas methods
can be used by social scientists on a completely pragmatic basis depending on
their research goals and the constraints on their time and resources,
philosophical assumptions are omnipresent and inescapable. Chapter 5 draws on
the latest methodological literature in order to elaborate these crucial claims
and show how an anti-naturalist framework justifies multi-methods reigning
supreme. Here we also justify our claim that interpretive social scientists can
make use of what are sometimes dubbed “quantitative” and “qualitative”
methods like mass surveys, random sampling, regression analysis, statistics,
rational choice modeling, ethnography, archival research, and long-form
interviewing. Chapter 5 will also show readers how to avoid naturalist pitfalls
when employing methods in their research. Important to understanding our
discussion of methods is our belief that methodology (or the tools used for
empirical inquiry) is distinct from philosophical questions. Our hope is that our
anti-naturalist approach will help methodological debates take a more
Page 11 of 19
Introduction

philosophical direction. Researchers should be much more concerned about

philosophical differences than methodological ones.

Is there anything distinct or special about an interpretive research agenda? How

does it generate a particular set of empirical concerns or particular ways of
looking at social and political reality? Chapters 6 and 7 explain how
interpretivism unlocks a range of empirical concerns that remain inaccessible to
those making use of naturalist concepts. The empirical topics taken up by
interpretive social scientists are not accidental or random, but reflect their
philosophical commitments. Chapter 6 focuses on synchronic research topics (or
those pertaining to a single snapshot of time) and argues that anti-naturalism
generates distinctive ways of studying beliefs, identities, cultural practices,
traditions, and political resistance. Examples are drawn from cutting-edge
interpretive research into subjects like the politics of Islam, race, globalization,
and democratic civic engagement.

By contrast, Chapter 7 focuses on large-scale, diachronic research topics (or

those developing across time). Contrary to widespread belief, the interpretive
approach to political science is not limited to the small-scale study of single
cases. Rather, anti-naturalist philosophy can ground empirical research of large-
scale and diachronic historical sociologies. Once again, hermeneutics generates
a distinctive approach to empirical study—in this case one that is genealogical
and narrative, rejecting naturalist attempts to reduce explanation to
classification, formal modeling, or ahistorical causal mechanisms. Exploring
some of the most urgent domains of social scientific research today (including
topics such as violence, religion, secularism, nationalism, economic history, and
the state), we show how justifying interpretive inquiry with an (p.12) anti-
naturalist framework makes for a conceptually and empirically superior
approach. The result is a clear picture of what anti-naturalist empirical research
in the social sciences looks like.

Can students and scholars who wish to explain human behavior also engage in
ideological and ethical critique? When and how do values enter into social
scientific research? One of naturalism’s most serious limitations results from its
disavowal of ethical engagement, ideology, political theory, and the critical
analysis of values. Inspired by the natural sciences, naturalist philosophy
encourages social scientists to believe they have no intrinsic contribution to
make in debates over values and ideology. Instead, their research must remain
value-free, an instrumental repository of facts, and never engage in ethical,
ideological, or political criticism. By contrast, most interpretive philosophers
reject this strict dichotomy between facts and values. But once again, our anti-
naturalist framework can clarify the ways in which political and social scientists
are free to engage values if they are so inclined.

Page 12 of 19
Introduction

Specifically, Chapter 8 shows how political scientists working within an

interpretive, anti-naturalist framework can legitimately take an interest in
ethical critique. An anti-naturalist framework opens the way to ethically and
politically engaged research by giving a distinct account of values that reveals
the uses of critical sociologies and the ethical significance of history, and shares
certain affinities with deliberative and democratic forms of political theory. As
will be made clear, this does not imply that political or social science is
synonymous with ethics and political critique. To the contrary, social science is
broadly concerned with the study and explanation of human behavior, which
need not develop particular ethical or political claims. But it does mean that
social scientists who take the interpretive turn are free to wrestle with values
and normative critique as one possible concern. In this way Chapter 8
complicates naturalism’s aping of chemistry, physics, and the hard sciences by
dichotomizing facts and values. The work of ethical philosophers, political
theorists, and social scientists has overlapping zones of concern.

Is the interpretive turn limited to the concerns of academic researchers? Is there

no impact on the actual workings of real-world politics? Chapter 9 rejects the
cliché response that philosophy in general and hermeneutics in particular are
purely academic or scholarly pursuits with no wider impact. It considers how an
anti-naturalist framework can ground a distinctively deliberative and
interpretive turn in public policy and generate a more humanistic conception of
power in society. Over the last three decades there has been an important shift
among a minority of public policy scholars toward interpretive and deliberative
modes that are critical of naturalism’s justification of technocracy and rule by
supposedly scientific experts of human behavior. Like the interpretive turn more
generally, this deliberative remaking of public policy has drawn on a great
diversity of philosophical sources, including phenomenology, discourse theory,
Dewey’s pragmatism, and post-structuralism. (p.13) While we embrace the fact
that this transformation of policy discourse and practice can be reached by a
variety of philosophical routes, we also argue that our anti-naturalist framework
dispels certain confusions that cloud these debates. Once again, readers will see
how an anti-naturalist approach to social scientific inquiry reshapes the field,
generating criticisms of the naturalist assumptions that currently dominate. In
this chapter we also return to Colin Hay’s important point that naturalism might
still be used by social scientists and public administrators “as if” it were true,
provided they recognize its philosophical limitations.33 Ultimately our
philosophical arguments substantively demonstrate why social science and
public policy scholars ought to take an interpretive turn away from the present
naturalist consensus.

A few important provisos are necessary, however, before beginning our analysis.
First, as we have already mentioned, our conception of the interpretive turn
allows for philosophical pluralism. The chapters that follow explore the critique
of naturalism and the shift to more interpretive forms of social science. When it
Page 13 of 19
Introduction

comes to this paradigm shift, there is much shared ground among post-
structuralists, phenomenologists, American pragmatists, analytic philosophers,
social constructivists, and others. Different traditions generate a variety of
reasons and arguments for making this turn. Specifically, the interpretive turn
allows philosophical pluralism in the domains of ontology and epistemology.
Readers can accept our case for the interpretive turn and remain either realists
or anti-realists when it comes to ontology; empiricists or anti-empiricists when it
comes to epistemology.34 Indeed, some of the most prominent proponents of the
interpretive turn (especially those hailing from the phenomenological tradition
like Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer) have argued that explanation in
political science is based on intrinsic, ontological features of the object of
inquiry. As we will touch on again in later chapters, Taylor famously claimed that
interpretive study in the social sciences is justified by the ontological claim that
humans are “self-interpreting animals.”35 In a different vein, social
constructivists like John Searle and others have made ontological claims about
the nature of institutions as distinct from the brute facts of the natural
sciences.36 But the interpretive turn has also been justified by those who are
more philosophically reluctant to make ontological claims. For example, Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson have emphasized the kinds of explanations
that are appropriate to human behavior as the grammar of a particular
language.37 These linguistic arguments are about the logic of conceptual
languages and not about the nature of being or ontology. Yet other advocates of
the interpretive turn have drawn on pragmatic arguments stemming from John
Dewey.38 This means that our arguments in subsequent chapters withstanding,
the interpretive turn can rest on a variety of philosophical claims: from
ontological claims about how human beings are in reality to linguistic claims
about the grammar or logic of certain language games.39 We leave these
questions for individual readers to decide for (p.14) themselves. What we do
argue, however, is that whatever the fundamental philosophical commitments
generating the interpretive turn, they ought to have a certain general shape and
form. This shape and form is what we call “anti-naturalism.”

The interpretive turn thus allows for a far wider range of philosophical
commitments than many of its own proponents realize. Our anti-naturalist
approach in this book affirms this broad-tent notion of interpretivism that can
embrace positions that otherwise disagree on other key questions in philosophy.
However, this philosophical pluralism has certain necessary limits. There is no
way for us to philosophically affirm naturalism as an acceptable pluralism. This
is because—as will be substantively established in each chapter—naturalism and
interpretivism are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Both cannot be
affirmed without contradiction.

Getting a little ahead of ourselves, our claim that the study of human behavior
must properly reckon with meanings doesn’t entail that social scientists are
prohibited from the use of statistics, regression analyses, and mass polling if
Page 14 of 19
Introduction

these prove handy for their research. We agree, therefore, with Bent Flyvbjerg’s
argument that determining which methods are appropriate to a research project
depends on exercising judgment within context (Flyvbjerg follows Aristotle in
dubbing this “phronesis”).40 At the level of practical day-to-day research,
mastering particular methods is difficult and time-consuming. Social scientists
currently spend years mastering a method like regression analysis or
ethnographic immersion into a foreign culture. The sophistication of modern
methods means that future social science may need to engage in more
collaborative work across methodological lines for sheer practical purposes in
order to advance certain research goals. Ethnographers and statisticians may
yet learn to work in tandem, and produce insights out of dialogue and
collaboration with one another, as opposed to the closed silos of inquiry that too
often predominate in the modern university. However, all will receive fuller
treatment in the coming pages.

We believe an anti-naturalist framework is helpful in clarifying what is at stake

in the interpretive turn. Moreover, we believe that interpretivism is the most
philosophically cogent approach currently on offer in the social sciences. The
lessons of this book therefore amount to nothing more or less than a dramatic
remaking of the study and application of knowledge about human beings. We are
far from the first people to have made this call, but we believe our work
systematically articulating and elaborating an anti-naturalist approach has the
potential to be the most comprehensive.

Social science is in some senses still catching up with history. Certain

breakthroughs in philosophy advanced by pioneers hailing from traditions as
diverse as Hegelianism, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, New
Left humanism, post-structuralism, social constructivism, and many others have
yet to be appreciated and understood by the wider social scientific (p.15)
community, let alone the wider political culture of modern society. Social science
and civil society must catch up to philosophy. Like a flash of lightning that
illuminates the sky, many are still waiting for the thunder.

Notes:
(1.) See, for example, David E. McNabb, Research Methods for Political Science:
Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015) xix,
287–8.

(2.) For important collections of interpretive philosophy, see: Michael Gibbons,

Interpreting Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Paul Rabinow and William
M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1979).

(3.) Examples, of phenomenology: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd

ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum,

Page 15 of 19
Introduction

2004); Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George
Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1967); analytic philosophy: Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); Hegelianism: R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of
History, ed. T. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946); American pragmatism: Richard
Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); New Left Marxism: E. P. Thompson,
“Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines,” New Reasoner 1 (1957):
105–43; post-structuralism: Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds. Hubert Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983); neo-
Aristotelianism: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); social constructivism: Colin Hay, Political
Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Colin
Hay, “Social Constructivism,” in Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political
Science, eds. Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes (New York: Routledge 2016), 99–
112; Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999); social material relations: Bruno Latour, Science in
Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Andrew Pickering, The
Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press, 1995).

(4.) Charles Taylor, “Introduction,” in Human Agency and Language:

Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2.

(5.) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Leviathan, with Selected Variants From the
Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994).

(6.) What follows draws heavily on the work of the scholars in: Mark Bevir, ed.,
Modernism and the Social Sciences: Anglo-American Exchanges, c. 1918–1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

(7.) See: Mark Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000,”
Political Studies 54 (2006): 584–8.

(8.) J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1966).

(9.) J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

(10.) Herbert Adams, “Special Methods of Historical Study,” Johns Hopkins

University Studies in Historical and Political Science 1 (1884); John Burgess,
Reminiscences of an American Scholar (New York: Columbia University Press,
1934).

Page 16 of 19
Introduction

(11.) Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 1., ed. and
trans. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896), 1–18.

(12.) Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1978).

(13.) Margaret Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons and
the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990).

(14.) See: Donald Winch, Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of
Political Economy in Britain, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009).

(15.) William Everdell, First Moderns (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1997); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science
and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Dorothy Ross,
The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), chs. 8–10.

(16.) See the essays collected in: Bevir, Modernism and the Social Sciences.

(17.) Herman Finer, Foreign Governments at Work: An Introductory Study (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1921); Herman Finer, The Theory and Practice of
Modern Government, 2 vols. (New York: The Dial Press, 1932).

(18.) Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London: Archibald Constable,

1908).

(19.) Charles Merriam, “The Present State of the Study of Politics (1921),” in
New Aspects of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 82–3.

(20.) Barry Karl, Charles Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1974) viii–ix, ch. 8.

(21.) Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
1922).

(22.) Susan Herbst, “Polling in Politics and Industry,” in The Modern Social
Sciences. Vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Science, eds. Theodore Porter and
Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 577–90.

(23.) James Farr, “Political Science,” in The Modern Social Sciences. Vol. 7 of The
Cambridge History of Science, eds. Theodore Porter and Dorothy Ross
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 315.

(24.) David Eason, The Political System (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1953), 24–5, 65–6.
Page 17 of 19
Introduction

(25.) For example: Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of
Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter B.
Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 3–43.

(26.) Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The

Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public
Administration 82:1 (2004): 39–62; Hay, Political Analysis, 40.

(27.) S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins

of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

(28.) Schabas, A World Ruled by Number.

(29.) Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1988), 198.

(30.) Jon Elster, ed., Rational Choice (New York: New York University Press,
1986); Kristen Renwick Monroe, ed., The Economic Approach to Politics (New
York: Harper Collins, 1991).

(31.) For two seminal examples from economics—the first arguing that
something essential about human behavior is captured by rational choice
modeling, the second claiming that its value is chiefly predictive—see: Gary S.
Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1976); Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive
Economics,” in The Philosophy of Economics, 3rd ed., ed. Daniel Hausman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 145–78.

(32.) For an insightful discussion, see: Hay, Political Analysis, chap. 1.

(33.) Hay, Political Analysis, 40; Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-
Fulfilling Prophecy?”

(34.) For a detailed philosophical justification of this claim to acceptable

pluralism of competing positions among interpretivists in areas such as ontology,
epistemology, and even explanation, see: Mark Bevir, “Meta-Methodology:
Clearing the Underbrush,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology,
eds. Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Henry Brady, and David Collier (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 48–70.

(35.) Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and

Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45–76.

(36.) John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995);
John Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization

Page 18 of 19
Introduction

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Colin Hay, “Social Constructivism,” 99–
105, 110.

(37.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle

River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958); Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and
Causes,” in The Essential Davidson, eds. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2006), 23–36.

(38.) For example: Frank Fischer, Democracy and Expertise (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009).

(39.) Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).

(40.) Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 87.

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Philosophical roots

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Philosophical roots
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explains the basic philosophical concepts and features of the
interpretive turn, including: meaning holism, the hermeneutic circle, self-
interpretation, the social background, and contingent causality. Sociologists,
economists, political scientists, psychologists, and other social scientists can no
longer afford to ignore philosophy. This is because philosophical reflection is
needed in order to decide the concepts and forms of reasoning that are
appropriate to a given domain of empirical study. Interpretive philosophy ought
to govern the approach social scientists take to research and what kinds of study
they favor. This will be contrasted with some of the fundamental philosophical
assumptions found in naturalist approaches to social science.

Keywords:   meaning holism, self-interpretation, hermeneutic circle, contingent causality, law-like

explanation

There is a lot of philosophical confusion over how to conduct research in the

social sciences today. On the one hand, naturalists envision the social sciences
as analogous to the hard sciences. In the naturalist view, the social sciences are
presumed to be gradually climbing up the tower of knowledge toward the lofty
heights of physics, chemistry, and the other natural sciences. Yet on the other
hand, far from converging on a single, recognized paradigm, rival theories
proliferate and multiply with each decade (for example, cognitive psychology,
sociobiology, neoclassical economics, structuralism, institutionalism, behavioral
genetics, behavioral economics, behavioralism, neurocomputationalism,
neurosociology, and the list goes on). Meanwhile, certain forms of naturalism

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Philosophical roots

become faddish, crowned in the public square as the standard-bearers of science

(for example, Alex Pentland’s “social physics”) at the same time that bygone
forms are discarded and condemned to the curiosity heap of history (for
example, Auguste Comte’s “social physics”).1 So the commitment to a science of
human behavior coincides with the explosion of conflicting claims to true
science. The intellectual culture of naturalism thus generates deep, often
unspoken anxieties about pseudoscience.

But what if this entire babble of tongues is the consequence of a philosophical

mistake—an error and bewitchment by a false analogy? To understand how
interpretivists and anti-naturalists think, one must be willing to seriously
entertain this possibility and view the world from this perspective. Indeed, the
falseness of the analogy between the human and natural sciences is one of the
central claims of anti-naturalism. For this reason, anti-naturalists believe the
disorderly jumble of “sciences” that populate today’s social science departments
are often the result of a philosophical misunderstanding. This chapter takes the
first steps in breaking the naturalist spell.

What is the anti-naturalist approach to the study of human behavior? In what

follows, we articulate the basics of the anti-naturalist perspective in order to
help illuminate the philosophical features motivating the interpretive turn across
the human sciences. Determining which concepts and forms of reasoning are
appropriate to an empirical domain of study is largely a philosophical task. For
this reason, it is no accident that at the roots of all disciplines of knowledge we
find an assemblage of philosophical and theoretical considerations. Social
science is no exception. At its most basic level anti-naturalism is a claim about
what concepts and forms of reasoning ought to be adopted by working social
scientists. Without this philosophical understanding, social science runs the risk
of compromising and distorting otherwise well-intentioned research efforts.

(p.19) The interpretive turn calls on social scientists to radically reform their
approach to the study of social and political reality. Our anti-naturalist
framework synthesizes claims made by phenomenologists, analytic philosophers,
social constructivists, Hegelians, pragmatists, post-structuralists, and many
others who have gone before us in advocating an interpretive turn. At the same
time, anti-naturalist premises can also be used to draw critical contrasts
between our approach and some of the other major advocates of interpretivism.
In the first part of this chapter we introduce readers to some of the basic
philosophical features of the anti-naturalist approach, including meaning holism,
the relationship between beliefs and actions, the self-interpreting aspects of
human agency, the role of the social background, and the importance of history.
Along the way we also show how anti-naturalist philosophy implies social
constructivism, bottom-up studies, and historical explanations (terms which will
be defined).

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Philosophical roots

In the second part of the chapter we contrast anti-naturalist concepts like

meaning holism and historical contingency with the basic philosophical concepts
characteristic of naturalism. Contrasting naturalism with anti-naturalism will
help shine a light on what is at stake in these debates and controversies. But it
will also alert readers to the creeping dangers of naturalist modes of thought,
which can distort, undermine, and otherwise invalidate good social science
research. This will provide vital premises for our arguments in later chapters
about anti-naturalism’s impact on concept formation, methods, ethics,
democracy, and public policy.

Before we start we need to make one brief point about our use of the term
“naturalism.” In philosophy this term often refers to the overriding authority of
the natural sciences over the social ones.2 But in some areas of sociology and
particularly ethnography, the term “naturalism” instead refers to a rejection of
scientism in favor of beginning from the natural, conversational life-world of
social agents.3 Such a confusing reversal of a word’s usage across academic
communities is unfortunate, especially if it leads to misunderstandings and a
failure to build larger intellectual solidarities. But as long as readers keep in
mind that our use of the word is born out of the philosophy of social science and
not to be confused with other deployments, this basic misunderstanding should
be averted.

Anti-naturalism’s basic philosophical features

Perhaps the central claim of anti-naturalists is that the human beliefs, actions,
and practices constituting social reality are no less expressive of meanings than
the spoken word or written text. Indeed, much like the words of a language,
anti-naturalists believe social reality embodies the meanings of the individuals
(p.20) who helped create it. In this sense, social reality is a matrix of meanings,
continually and collaboratively composed by the people who inhabit it. The latter
implies social constructivism, or the idea that in its very being social reality is
constructed through human activity (a point articulated by a number of social
constructivist philosophers).4

Because social reality itself is constructed out of meaningful phenomena, social

scientists (no less than literary scholars, legal theorists, or historians) must
engage in the activity of interpretation. Indeed, social science chiefly consists of
the interpretive explanation of the meanings comprising social, psychological,
economic, and political life. But how ought social scientists go about this task?
This is one of the central questions of this book and we hope to add a great deal
of nuance and complexity to our answer. However, at the most general level we
can say that the activity of interpretation is characterized by a basic pattern that
hermeneutic philosophers have dubbed “the hermeneutic circle.”

As Hans-Georg Gadamer, perhaps the most important interpretive theorist to

have worked in the phenomenological tradition, put it, the hermeneutic circle is

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Philosophical roots

the principle that “we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the
detail in terms of the whole” such that there is a circular structure to the “art of
understanding.”5 In other words, this view implies that meanings are not
atomistic and freestanding in nature but rather are the function of holistic
relationships between parts. This holistic nature of meaning is of great
importance to an anti-naturalist approach to social science and we will elaborate
upon it throughout the course of this chapter. Specifically, we will do so by
examining four major assumptions of anti-naturalism: first, that human beliefs
and actions are holistic in nature; second, that these beliefs are subject to
continual change; third, that individuals are always embedded within a larger
social background; and fourth, that history is the horizon of human meanings.

Human beliefs and actions are holistic in nature

Social scientists generally focus on studying the beliefs and actions of particular
individuals and groups. But how are they to think about and treat such beliefs
and actions? Are human beliefs and actions immediately and unproblematically
observable to any reasonably attentive onlooker? Or do they require some
special background knowledge and approach?

Let us begin by analyzing beliefs and then afterwards consider the case of
actions. Anti-naturalists believe that human beliefs might be understood in light
of the philosophical doctrine of meaning holism—a doctrine that emerged out of
debates in analytic philosophy of language and epistemology (p.21) over the
last century (especially in the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein) but which has
important consequences for social science research.6 According to meaning
holism, beliefs simply hold no meaning in perfect, atomistic isolation. Rather, the
meaning of beliefs is a function of their place within a wider context or web of
beliefs that sustain and inform them. The status of this hugely important claim
can be clarified with an example that is also pertinent to social science research.

Consider the case of a social scientist who wishes to understand the fascist
slogan “el silencio es salud” (silence is health) expressed by so many Argentines
living under the military junta during that country’s Dirty War.7 At the most basic
level, the very meaning of the slogan el silencio es salud requires some
background knowledge of the meanings of words and grammar in the Spanish
language. Although such background knowledge normally remains tacit to social
inquiry, it is no less true that the content of these beliefs is filled out in relation
to such wider webs of belief. But our inquirer into this fascist slogan cannot stop
at webs of belief concerning the Spanish language. Rather, the meaning of this
belief also needs to be related to the relevant historical and social contexts—
things like Argentine ultra-nationalism in the 1970s and 80s, practices of state
terrorism, the Cold War, and so on. More concretely, this might mean relating
the slogan el silencio es salud to any number of related beliefs that were part of
the Dirty War—beliefs captured in such terms as los desaparecidos, tratamiento,
and vuelo. The point is that because the meaning of particular beliefs is only

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Philosophical roots

filled out in relation to other beliefs, social scientists will often need knowledge
not only of the languages but also of the social milieus and ways of life that
inform particular beliefs. Because beliefs are holistic in this way, social scientists
are necessarily involved in an interpretive act—that is in the hermeneutic circle
of relating parts to various wholes.

Of course, everything we have presented thus far might be readily conceded by

social scientists that are otherwise hostile to anti-naturalism. Such critics might
accept that the meaning of particular beliefs must be grasped by placing them
within wider webs of belief. However, such critics might then draw a distinction
between explanation and understanding, noting that while interpretation is an
essential part of understanding beliefs, it is not indispensable to explaining
them. Explaining beliefs might then take a more natural scientific form, like
inferring a general causal mechanism by correlating the beliefs with some other
feature of social reality (for instance, demographics, an ahistorical structure of
rationality, or stimuli-triggers in the environment). But anti-naturalists hold that
drawing this distinction between explanation and understanding in fact misses
how we should explain beliefs. Anti-naturalists point out that normally we
explain why people hold a certain belief by appealing to the reasons they have
that support it. This means that in normal cases (we will return to abnormal ones
shortly) beliefs are explicated by reconstructing the particular webs of belief
that sustain and inform reasons.

(p.22) Thus, to return to our example, the explanation for why different
Argentines adopted the authoritarian slogan el silencio es salud will vary
depending on the particular reasons of individuals. So, in one case, an
individual’s reasons for adopting the slogan “silence is health” might be
explained by referring to his belief that Argentina’s national security is being
undermined by noisy dissenters and subversives. For such an individual the
silencing of dissidents in the form of intimidation, torture, and killings is the
“health” of the Argentine nation, ensuring its restoration to greatness and
underwriting a politics of terror. By contrast, another person’s reasons for
espousing this slogan might be very different—for example, driven by the belief
that life is about survival at all costs, and that surviving in a police state means
quietly conforming to the will of the powerful. In such a case, this slogan might
be held ironically to mean that one’s own silencio is necessary for preserving
one’s own salud. The crucial point for social science is that the reasons for
espousing this slogan change along with the varying web of supporting beliefs.
And as meaning holism would lead us to expect, a change in the relevant web of
beliefs can also lead to important shifts in the very meaning of the slogan (i.e.,
from a fascist expression of terroristic intimidation to a cowardly and ironic
expression of self-preservation).

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Anti-naturalists therefore insist that the holistic nature of beliefs renders social
science an interpretive discipline—one in which meanings are ascertained
through the hermeneutic circle of relating parts to wholes. At its furthest
extreme, the consequence of abandoning holism is that there is no access
whatsoever to a slogan like el silencio es salud. But a more common error among
contemporary social scientists is to isolate a given belief from the relevant webs
that inform it. For instance, social scientists might mistakenly rush to assume
the expression el silencio es salud means the same thing across a subset of
individuals, when in fact the meanings are quite different. Such a lack of
sensitivity to the holistic nature of beliefs is essentially a failure of
interpretation. But it is also a failure to properly achieve social science. The
lesson for social scientists is that in order to keep their research and findings
from the warping effects of wrongly imposed meanings, they must cultivate a
heightened awareness of the holistic nature of particular beliefs. That is, they
should be careful not to rush to the conclusion that beliefs that at first blush
appear the same necessarily translate across different webs. The latter also
means that anti-naturalists tend to prefer inquiries into social reality that are
sensitive to belief formation at the local level, working from the bottom up. As
we will see in Chapters 5 and 7 on methods and historical sociologies, this
doesn’t mean that social scientists cannot make grand generalizations, use mass
surveys, or employ large-N statistics in their explanations. It simply means that
whether they work on small or large-scale studies, they will need to remain
sensitive to the way that beliefs are formed in local contexts and thus be aware
that all generalizations (p.23) form from the bottom upward and are not to be
ahistorically imposed by the social scientist from the top down.

Yet at this point those resistant to anti-naturalist approaches might put in a

further objection: namely, although beliefs perhaps must be explained in light of
wider webs of belief, the same is not true for actions. After all, these critics
might argue, it is possible to simply observe actions (for instance, voting,
running a campaign, fighting a war, or shopping for a particular commodity)
without reference to the web of beliefs. Actions, in other words, are observable
in a straightforward, empirical way without the need to descend into the holistic
dimensions of meaning.

The problem with this response, however, is that it involves a faulty conception
of human action. Anti-naturalists hold that actions are not simply brute givens
that can be plainly observed. Rather, actions are expressive of beliefs, and so no
less holistic than beliefs themselves. Specifically, anti-naturalists hold that
beliefs are constitutive of actions, such that changes in belief can transform the
identity of actions.

How is this so? One way that anti-naturalists commonly argue for the
constitutive relationship between beliefs and actions is by drawing a basic
distinction between actions versus movements. Take, for example, the

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involuntary spasm of a tired runner’s leg. Such a spasm can be explained

without reference to the particular beliefs and meanings that the marathon
runner holds. It might be symptomatic of fatigue or low levels of potassium, but
this movement does not make any essential reference to the beliefs or attitudes
of the athlete.

By contrast, properly identifying an action requires grasping the relevant beliefs

or meanings of the person. Imagine, in this vein, a covert spy hand signaling a
fellow spy in East Berlin in 1961. Identifying this hand signal as a certain action
requires grasping some of the relevant webs of belief that inform it—including
beliefs about the Cold War, the practices of espionage, the particular aims of a
given rendezvous, and so on. Indeed, without any sense of the beliefs informing
this gesture, it might dissolve again in appearance to a mere physical tick. Anti-
naturalists believe what is true of signaling a fellow spy is no less true of voting,
marching in a battalion, smoking a cigarette, inaugurating a president, and
indeed the entire world of human actions. Namely, properly identifying the
action requires correctly identifying the relevant beliefs. It follows that human
action—as a medium of meaning and expressive of particular beliefs—is also
holistic. Human agency can therefore embody as many subtleties, gradations,
nuances, and variations as are possible within human belief itself. So, for
example, dancing might be expressive of an individual’s belief that it is the polite
thing to do when attending a wedding or it might, like Sufi whirling, be an effort
at spiritual transcendence. Such differences will depend on the relevant webs of
belief. As with the slogan el silencio es salud, the web of supporting meanings
matters hugely. After all, even a spy against the government could use the
opposition’s very slogan to (p.24) identify with another person in the
resistance, subverting its meaning and radically changing the explanation for its
usage.

One crucially important aspect of our discussion so far is that both actions and
beliefs are a function of the human capacity for self-interpretation. Because
beliefs always come bundled in webs, when individuals alter and modify one
belief it has the power to alter and modify the meaning of related beliefs and
actions. And there are at least two important consequences of self-interpretation
for social scientific research.

First, as the hermeneutic philosopher Charles Taylor has influentially argued,

the phenomenon of self-interpretation suggests a basic ontological distinction
between the objects of the social versus the natural sciences.8 Geology, physics,
and chemistry, for example, do not study objects whose very identity undergoes
transformation through processes of self-interpretation. Yet the social sciences
are chiefly concerned with the actions and artifacts of just such a being. The
social sciences therefore consist of a “double hermeneutic” in which
interpretations are advanced of phenomena that themselves change and are
shaped via self-interpretation. This is a conclusion reached by neo-Hegelian

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philosophers as well as philosophers working in the analytic tradition: namely,

social science consists of the interpretation of interpretations.9 It is therefore
vital that social scientists learn to employ approaches that sensitively unlock
meanings and avoid atomizing or otherwise distorting them.

Second, self-interpretation is closely linked to the importance of the narrative

form for the social sciences. Many philosophers have followed the great
phenomenologists of the last century, like Martin Heidegger and later Paul
Ricoeur, in arguing that human action is oriented by narrative sequences.10 That
is, human beliefs and actions are not carried out in utterly disconnected
segments, but rather are unified by a context of goals and desires that relate the
past, present, and future to one another. In this way human agency continually
gathers and orders temporally remote episodes of belief and action into an
orienting narrative stream. For this reason, anti-naturalists hold that human
agency actually embodies a narrative, and that human beings are, as the neo-
Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “a story-telling animal” that
continually enacts stories.11

The importance of this point for social science is that rendering beliefs and
actions intelligible requires placing them in the context of such enacted
sequences. A person may have adopted the slogan el silencio es salud on a
particular occasion because he hopes to avoid being persecuted by his
neighbors, while another might express it repeatedly in pursuit of his goal of
bullying those around him into political conformity and complicity. Beliefs and
actions occur within a wider narrative stream, such that social scientists are
faced with the task of constructing narratives about actual, lived-out narratives.
What they do not face is a series of isolated facts upon which they impose a
narrative for aesthetic or some other reasons of their own.12 (p.25) Rather, the
stories told by social scientists succeed or fail, to varying degrees, in capturing
the enacted sequences of beliefs and actions that are the ongoing stuff of social
life. A story explains a given slice of social reality. Sometimes a social scientist’s
story will reinforce, sometimes extend, sometimes question, sometimes
contradict the conscious, official stories told by those studied. But making sense
of human beliefs and actions requires some sense for the spontaneously
narrative dimension of human agency itself. Explanation in the social sciences—
as in history and literature—is narrative.

Human beliefs continually change and modify

So far we have argued that anti-naturalists explain a particular belief or action
by reconstructing the web of beliefs that supports it and telling a story about it.
But this much only gives us a small, frozen snapshot of beliefs and actions. How
are we to explain the continual and ongoing flux that is so characteristic of
human beliefs? We believe there are two general ways that social scientists
might explain changes in belief, which in turn transform actions, identities,
practices, and social reality itself. The first type is dilemmatic change, which

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explains how rational modifications in webs of belief occur. The second is

pathologic, which encompasses cases of disease, self-deception, irrationality, and
other forms of distortion.

Because human beings hold beliefs for particular reasons, those beliefs are
vulnerable to change whenever the supporting webs of belief are challenged,
pressured, invalidated, or in any other way presented with dilemmas. Dilemmas,
in this sense, are any authoritative understanding that puts pressure on existing
beliefs. Because new beliefs can be generated by any experience, any experience
is capable of generating a dilemma. Thus, dilemmas in our sense of the term
mark the entry of any new belief or beliefs that challenge an existent web, and
can set off all kinds of revisions from the utterly trivial to the dramatic and life
changing. The anti-naturalist concept of a dilemma is therefore helpful for social
scientists seeking to explain why humans alter their beliefs in particular cases.
To say that humans hold beliefs for specific reasons is not the same as
subscribing to a rationalist view of the human mind in which every belief has
been subject to systemic rational interrogation. On the contrary, reasons are
often loosely, inconsistently, or vaguely held as simply an inherited way of being
in the world or a form of embodying certain understandings.13 Readers should
make no mistake: interpretive philosophers in general, and anti-naturalists in
particular, are not committed to some ultra-rationalist conception of the human
mind or social life. Rational is being used here in a very weak sense to simply
indicate beliefs and actions that are the result of other beliefs, reasons,
intentions, and desires.

(p.26) The evocation of desires brings us to another feature of human agency.

After all, it is a commonplace since at least Saint Augustine that human beings
often do not know their own desires and will that which they do not desire, while
desiring that which they do not will. For this reason it is important to see that
dilemmatic changes in webs of belief are also sometimes influenced by distortive
and pathological occurrences. Pathologies, in this sense, can have an
innumerably wide variety of sources, including but certainly not limited to:
disease, injury, narcotic influence, self-deception, irrationality, emotional
disorder, and so on. For example, an inebriate often wills actions he or she does
not desire (e.g., driving through a stop light) and desires actions he or she
cannot will (e.g., sounding eloquent and sober before the bartender). Likewise,
the paranoia that distorts the beliefs of schizophrenics or the memory loss
experienced by victims of head trauma are both instances of physiological
pathologies. The explanation of such changes in belief involves invoking the
appropriate natural processes in the brain and human physiology.14 As anti-
naturalists we are happy to concede that medicine, biology, and the other
natural sciences have an authoritative role to play in describing and explaining
the necessary physiological conditions that allow for healthy, undistorted self-
interpretation. What we strenuously object to (as we will explain below) is the

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reduction of the central phenomenon of the social sciences to modes of

explanation that neglect meanings.

Of much more central concern to social scientists, however, are the pathological
effects of ideology, repression, rogue desires, and other like phenomena which
interact and enmesh with normal belief formation. Such distortions of belief can
be understood as forms of self-deception—that is, as changes in belief that are
driven by unacknowledged or hidden motives. The cause of such repressed
changes in belief might be a hidden desire, physical need, or reason that leads
the individual to form an entire sub-system or web of inauthentic rationalizing
beliefs, while remaining unaware of the unconscious driving motive.15 For
example, a social scientist might try to argue that a given group’s belief in
libertarian ideology as a highly rationalized system of meanings might reflect a
post-hoc justification for an underlying, not fully acknowledged desire to retain
disappearing class privileges.16 Famously, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons
catalogued an enormous variety of such unacknowledged reasons or beliefs
generating commitments to the increasingly radical political ideologies of late
nineteenth-century Russia.17 The point is not whether any of these cases of
ideological distortion are persuasive on their own account. Rather, the point is
philosophical: that some systems of belief are accommodated within an existing
web of beliefs in a normal way while nonetheless being distinguished by the fact
that the change is driven by a pathological process or repressed motive (i.e.,
some hidden need, desire, or unacknowledged reason).

For a clear case of this phenomenon consider the Nazi or “Aryan physics”
developed by Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, two world-renowned (p.27)
physicists and Noble laureates. In such a case, a social scientist might wish to
argue that Lenard’s and Stark’s development of this Aryan physics was distorted
by a repressed or unacknowledged motive that led them to unreasonably
discount the contributions of Jewish physicists like Albert Einstein. Social
scientists could argue that although otherwise excellent in their field, Lenard
and Stark developed a sub-system of rationalizing beliefs (i.e., Aryan physics)
that were driven by an irrational resentment and unwillingness to accept Jewish
contributions to human culture and science. Note that in such a case the
acquisition of anti-Semitic beliefs might still be explained in dilemmatic terms.
But the important difference is that the motivating force of such a sub-system of
rationalizing beliefs remains self-deceptively operative. So, where Lenard and
Stark might have thought Aryan physics was simply another way of saying
“good” or “proper” physics, a social scientist could claim that they were in fact
carrying out the development of a system of beliefs under a kind of false
consciousness or inability to see the true, distortive sources of their own
thoughts. This suggests that social scientists might explain ideology, neurosis,
and other forms of distorted rationalization as cases of self-deception (one of
Dostoevsky’s literary obsessions).

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Clearly, if true, the foregoing discussion of dilemmatic and pathological sources

of beliefs has important consequences for research in the social sciences. This is
because social scientists must remain alert to the question of distortion, self-
deception, ideology, neurosis, and the social criticism that the diagnosis of these
conditions entails. In a later chapter we will show how anti-naturalism offers a
critically and ethically engaged form of social scientific inquiry. Specifically, anti-
naturalism has evaluative implications for ethics, ideology, public policy, and
democratic theory. This means that anti-naturalists do not accept the widespread
view that social science is an utterly value-neutral domain. But for now it is
important to register that interpretive social scientists cannot fully evade the
task of evaluating reasonably versus unreasonably held beliefs, and that this has
an ideological component to it.18 What should also be clear is how these
concepts help anti-naturalist social scientists explain changes in belief, action,
and human social life more generally. As part of this, anti-naturalists must also
remain highly sensitive to the specifically historical dimensions of human
behavior.

Individuals are embedded in a social background

So far our emphasis on self-interpretation might create the impression that
individuals are largely autonomous in terms of their beliefs, actions, and
identities. But this would be a mistake. Anti-naturalists do not believe self-
interpretation entails autonomy. To the contrary, anti-naturalists emphasize (p.
28) that there is an inescapable social background in which individuals always
find themselves embedded. Likewise, so far our emphasis on the ever-changing
nature of human beliefs might create the impression that there are no stable,
regularized features within social reality. But this would also be a mistake. Anti-
naturalists do not believe that the continual flux of human beliefs entails an
absence of long-term patterns, stability, and regularity. To the contrary, human
beings develop reliable patterns of order, language, institution, law, religion, and
government. These stable features are part of a larger, inherited social
background. This key concept requires more definition.

The social background is a source of stability and regularity that also places
strong limits on human autonomy. It is composed in part out of complex matrices
of practices and inter-subjective beliefs. Practices are any collective or shared
pattern of human action that remains relatively stable across time. Democratic
elections, car ownership, duels, the English language, chess tournaments, social
networks, holiday shopping, and even various forms of warfare are all examples
of practices. That is, they are all stable forms of patterned action into which
individuals are socialized.

Practices are also expressive of inter-subjective beliefs or meanings. These are

beliefs and meanings that are not reducible to the minds of single subjects
because they are expressed (often implicitly) in shared patterns of activity or
practice. So, although an individual participant in elections may not be able to

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bring the inter-subjective beliefs that inform his practice into articulacy,
nevertheless he is sharing in the expression of a certain conception of freedom,
individuality, sovereignty, and so on. Likewise we often make use of our language
in patterned ways, without being able to bring into full articulacy the shared
meanings and beliefs that inform our words or grammar. So, for example, a man
might be quite fond of the adage “time is money,” and repeat it often, while
being unable to give full articulacy to the inter-subjective beliefs and practices
that make this adage attractive to him (e.g., the emergence of capitalism, the
Protestant-Calvinist ethos of individual productivity, neoliberal notions of
efficiency, etc.).

The social background thus helps comprise the particular worlds within which
individuals are socialized. Some philosophers have been so impressed by the
inescapability of the social background that they have argued human agency is
essentially determined or limited by it. In Chapter 3 we will argue that such
views (particularly among post-structuralists) have gone astray and that our
anti-naturalist framework offers a better conceptual basis for studying social
science. For now it is enough to emphasize that we heartily affirm post-
structuralism’s insistence that individuals are not autonomous over the
meanings they express and that the social background should never be
neglected in the study of society and politics. We also affirm the tremendous
genius and creativity of Michel Foucault in particular in studying such
background matrices of meaning.

(p.29) But why are individuals limited in their autonomy by the social
background? Individuals are not fully autonomous in terms of their meanings
because some social background is the inescapable starting point for all
individual belief formation. This is not only due to the obvious fact that
individuals are born and socialized into communities of meaning and languages
that precede them. It is also because, as we saw in the case of dilemmatic belief
formation, individuals always form new beliefs against a background of existent
beliefs. Some readers may have noticed that the latter claim presents us with a
kind of paradox. Namely, if beliefs must always exist in webs, then how does
anyone come to hold any one belief in the first place? Wouldn’t they need to
begin with just one belief and then add onto it one belief at a time?

This apparent paradox is dissolved because human beings always inherit a great
number of their beliefs from a particular social background or tradition.19 This is
most apparent in the case of languages, which are never the product of a single
mind, but instead the fruit of a history of social interaction. But it is no less true
of any other domain of life. So, some of us may spend much conscious energy
revising our inherited beliefs within a particular area, say, astrophysics,
automotive repair, or American government. But in most domains we will largely
adopt complexes of inherited beliefs and traditions.

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As has been rightly stressed by Gadamer, this inheritance of background beliefs

is not necessarily irrational. To the contrary, because beliefs must always exist in
webs, inheriting them is absolutely necessary in order to form any further beliefs
in the first place.20 Of course, as we have seen, individuals are capable of
suspending, modifying, or even radically changing parts of their social
inheritance. Tradition is not destiny. But Gadamer is right to insist that
cognitively speaking the starting point for all individual understanding of the
world is just such a traditional inheritance.

Because individuals always begin from some social inheritance or tradition,

social scientists can explain present beliefs by identifying the relevant tradition
—or background web of meanings—from which they stem. Likewise, social
scientists can explain changes in a tradition by considering how a given tradition
was altered by individuals who grappled with dilemmas or perhaps were driven
by some unconscious, distortive desire or pathology. The social background
therefore presents a crucial feature not only of individual human action and
belief formation but also of social scientific explanation.

History is the horizon of human meanings

For all its inescapability, the social background is itself subject to continual
ongoing transformation. Indeed, this transformation is what accounts not (p.30)
only for the different forms of social background that exist across cultures
today, but also for the historical rise and fall of entire ways of life (e.g.,
Hellenistic, Medieval, Imperial Chinese, Pueblo Indian, and so on). The Hegelian
insight that human beings are dwellers in historical worlds of meaning finds
explanation within an anti-naturalist framework. The social background is a
product of history. This is because the social background, while more stable and
permanent than individual beliefs and actions, is in fact also ultimately the
product of self-interpretation. And self-interpretative activity—which relentlessly
guides and modifies beliefs, actions, identities, practices, and social worlds—is
what drives history. So although interpretivism does not hold that history is the
reflection of one, transcendent interpreting spirit or Geist that gives human life
fixed developmental stages (as discussed in Chapter 1’s treatment of nineteenth-
century developmental historicism), it does affirm that history is a complex
process of meaning formation and negation as past meanings and practices are
abandoned and new ones are generated and created.

Anti-naturalism thus gives central importance to the role of history. Indeed, it

would not be an exaggeration to say that, according to anti-naturalism, historical
explanation is basic to the social sciences. This is because all the forms of
human meaning, which together constitute social reality, emerge historically.
Thus, to finally explain a given set of meanings is to explain how and why they
arose—be they in the individual story or biography of a single person or the

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large-scale narrative or chronicle history of a group, society, civilization, or

people.

Anti-naturalism stresses two features of the historical process in particular—

contingency and power. Contingency is an ineliminable feature of social life
because no practice, norm, or social background is able to exhaustively fix the
way individuals will act, let alone how they will innovate and respond to novel
situations. We have seen that under normal, undistorted conditions, changes in
belief are the result of individuals responding to dilemmas. It is because
individuals can creatively accommodate new beliefs in response to dilemmas
that history does not follow any logically determined path of development as
nineteenth-century social science imagined. Rather, history is the contingent
process of the alteration of social and political life through self-interpretive
action.

Contingency also suggests that social scientists can critically unmask or

“denaturalize” accounts of social life that are wedded to fixed forms of human
reasoning, the path-dependency of institutions, or the supposed inevitability of
social developments. Take, for example, the view common among social theorists
(from Max Weber to Steve Bruce) that modern history is subject to an inevitable
process of decline in religious beliefs and practices. This is often called the
“secularization” or “disenchantment” thesis, and has recently been subject to a
powerful denaturalizing critique by a number of critics, most (p.31) notably
Charles Taylor. Against the picture of a determined path, Taylor has argued that
such secularization narratives are unable to account for the actual contingent
features of modern history. So, for example, such narratives have difficulty
explaining the mass mobilization of denominational and lay movements in the
nineteenth century, the persistence of politicized religious identities in the
twentieth, and the explosion of individualist spiritualities in the twenty-first.21
On top of this, Taylor argues that secularity itself is a historically contingent
cluster of beliefs and so cannot be explained as some inevitable end-station for
modern human belief.22 Of course, the point here is not whether Taylor is right
in all the details, but rather to give readers a sense for how the contingencies of
history can be harnessed to undermine supposedly ineluctable, fixed accounts of
human belief formation.

The fact that contingency can be deployed critically against various forms of
historical determinism does not preclude the power of history to shape and limit
human subjectivity. Indeed, we have already seen that self-interpretive activity
does not entail the absolute autonomy of the human subject. Rather, history has
the power to shape and form particular subjects through the practices and inter-
subjective beliefs that comprise a given tradition or social background.

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This conception of power allows social scientists to give both critical and
vindicatory accounts of history. So, for example, the genealogies developed first
by Friedrich Nietzsche and later by Foucault are critical histories of the way in
which the past contingencies of history shape, distort, and inhibit present human
practice.23 But likewise, social scientists might instead attempt to vindicate the
shaping power of past traditions or practices and seek to justify their
influence.24 We will have much more to say about the anti-naturalist conception
of genealogy and the important contributions of Nietzsche and Foucault in a
later chapter. For now the point is that anti-naturalists believe history is both
contingent and exercises a certain power over human agents who find
themselves circumscribed within an existing ambit of meanings and practices.

The reader will recall that we began our analysis with arguments about the
holistic nature of beliefs and actions, then noted the role of narratives in
orienting human agency, which itself is embedded in a social background. We
have now seen why anti-naturalism maintains that all these forms of human
meaning are the result of contingent historical change. In this way, individual
beliefs and actions fit in various widening concentric circles with history as their
outermost horizon. Indeed, history is even the horizon that inscribes the beliefs,
practices, and inter-subjective presuppositions of the social scientist.25 To
engage in social science is therefore to seek the explanation of particular
historical processes from within the historical process itself. History—in both its
contingencies and shaping power—marks the horizon of human meanings and
understanding.

(p.32) The contrast with naturalism

Perhaps some readers of our account so far will find the basic precepts of anti-
naturalism commonsensical, even obvious. But although we agree that anti-
naturalism overlaps with many of individuals’ everyday understandings about
the world, the claim that it is simply commonsense must be treated more
cautiously. For while it is true that many philosophers have grounded their
defense of interpretive approaches in ordinary, everyday forms of understanding
(for example, phenomenologists and folk psychologists), simply reducing these
insights to “commonsense” is problematic in at least two ways. First, the
historicism entailed by interpretive approaches implies that there is no such
thing as an ahistorical “commonsense,” accessible in all places and all ages, free
of the protean transformations of self-interpretation. Second, anti-naturalism
itself is clearly a historical tradition that formed in reaction to rival traditions. In
this regard, anti-naturalism’s main antagonist has been a family of modern
theories that American pragmatists like Richard Bernstein helped dub
“naturalism.”26 Contrasting naturalism with anti-naturalism will not only help us
see what is at stake in the philosophical debates that have fueled the
interpretive turn, but it will also set up the critical arguments we wish to
advance in later chapters concerning how to study social reality.

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As has already been mentioned, naturalism consists of a highly heterogeneous

group of philosophical theories and social scientific research programs that
nevertheless share a common resemblance. Specifically, this family shares the
basic assumption that the methods of the natural sciences are in some sense the
model for all valid knowledge about the world. Naturalists therefore hold that
the social sciences must be remade in their image.

From a contemporary philosophical perspective, the twentieth century saw the

rise of one particularly influential strain of naturalism known as the unity of
science movement, which rejected idealism’s older division between the human
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences.27 The fundamental
aspiration of the unity of science movement was succinctly expressed by A. J.
Ayer, the famous advocate of logical positivism: “There is no field of experience
which cannot, in principle, be brought under some form of scientific law, and no
type of speculative knowledge about the world which it is, in principle, beyond
the power of science to give.”28

Naturalists, then, are philosophers, social scientists, and laypeople that assume
that a mechanistic, law-like form of explanation inspired by the natural sciences
is in some senses universal and hegemonic. This assumption is what brings them
into conflict with anti-naturalists. For anti-naturalists are philosophers, social
scientists, and laypeople that assume there is a basic difference in the forms of
explanation appropriate to the human versus the natural sciences. In particular,
anti-naturalists reject various recurrent premises of naturalist research
programs. We will critically examine three (p.33) such recurrent assumptions,
in light of the concepts developed in the first part of the chapter, including the
assumptions that: human beliefs and actions can be treated as a kind of brute
data; human life is governed by causal laws; and the goal of social science is
prediction and social engineering. Having explained why anti-naturalism rejects
these doctrines, our opening exposition of anti-naturalism will be complete.
However, in later chapters we will see just how complex and multi-faceted the
anti-naturalist rejection of naturalism really is. In some senses, each subsequent
chapter will add a new layer to this determinate negation of naturalism.

First naturalist assumption: human beliefs and actions are identifiable as

brute facts
Naturalist assumptions in the social sciences often inspire researchers to reduce
human beliefs and actions to verifiable, brute facts. Such researchers often
concede that the social sciences deal with meanings. However, unlike anti-
naturalists, they believe meanings do not require deeper hermeneutic
deciphering so much as verification. In this way naturalist researchers reduce
meanings to a kind of brute given, assuming that “there is knowledge only from
experience, which rests on what is immediately given” and “sets the limits for
the content of legitimate science.”29

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But we have already seen there is a fatal problem with this naturalist attempt.
Namely, meaning is the function of holistic relations that requires entering the
hermeneutic circle. In the case of beliefs and actions, social scientists must
explain them in light of a wider web that links them to further, sustaining
reasons and beliefs, embedded in a particular social background. Meaning is a
holistic set of relations, such that, strictly speaking, perfectly atomized units of
belief and action have no meaning. Verification of brute data is therefore not the
proper model for grasping and explaining beliefs and actions.

In order for critics to show anti-naturalism is mistaken on this point, they might
try to overturn meaning holism, showing that in fact there are pure experiences,
which comprise the foundational units of language. Philosophically speaking,
such critics would have to show that words and concepts directly represent
objects. This would then allow them to argue that human beliefs and actions can
be treated as brute data because they are not holistic in nature, but rather
atomistic bits of language that directly relate to atomistic bits of reality. The
problem with this rebuttal, however, is that so far this move has not been shown
to be a philosophically valid conception of meaning. To the contrary, (p.34) the
philosophical edifice that sustains such atomistic views has more or less
collapsed. Instead, a commonplace within various leading schools of philosophy
today has been the truth of meaning holism.30

Alternatively, naturalists might offer a language that systematically eliminates

the need for any reference to human beliefs and intentions. Such is the hope of a
number of physicalist research agendas that seek to replace our familiar
concepts of belief, reasons, desires, etc. with a complete explanatory language
derived from, say, cognitive science or neurophysiology.31 Anti-naturalists cannot
rule out a priori the arrival of such a language. However, at present there is no
such system that is able to comprehensibly and completely replace our
dependence on the concepts of beliefs, reasons, desires, purposes, and so on
when explaining human social life. Moreover, past attempts to achieve this goal,
like psychological behaviorism (despite being systematically carried out and well
funded by the leading research institutions of our time), have either collapsed or
not yet reached their goal.32

There have also been much more recent attempts to reduce meanings to brute
facts. The famed MIT computer scientist, Alex Pentland, has claimed to discover
a predictive science of human behavior he calls “social physics” that is largely
built on the ability to aggregate data on an unprecedented scale. For Pentland
the only obstacle to developing a predictive science of human behavior is having
enough data to capture the complexity of social reality. What the new era of “big
data” offers are the computing tools and data troves (“call records, credit card
transactions, and GPS location fixes, among others”) to finally “view society in
all its complexity” and render human behavior predictable.33 However, from the
above discussion we can see that Pentland’s mistake is philosophical: namely, to

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neglect the way in which data is not rendered meaningful or explanatory until it
is interpreted within a wider web of meanings and against a historical
background. In this sense, more or less data is neither here nor there in
achieving the naturalist goal of a science of society. Bits of data can be important
to interpretive inquiry but they must be integrated into narratives capturing the
contingency of human belief within a social world. Pentland’s claims on behalf of
“big data” are at best exaggerated.

At present, then, the aspiration toward a total science of human behavior based
on indisputable brute facts remains a goal or hope but not an actual present
reality.34 In the meantime, anti-naturalism is well within its philosophical rights
to continue to see further corroboration of its own views in naturalism’s inability
to produce a brute-data-based science of human behavior. Indeed, one of the
best reasons for social scientists to adopt anti-naturalism is precisely this
inability of naturalism to provide an alternative that does not make recourse to
interpretive forms of explanation. Anti-naturalists have for this reason often
argued that even those who most wish to rid the social sciences of interpretive
influence are in reality thus far unable to ever fully free themselves of its most
basic concepts.35 Hermeneutics (p.35) continues to be inescapable. Even social
scientists who refuse to let it in through the front of the house must secretly let
it in through the back door. Otherwise, their sociological data (big or not) would
be bereft of all meaning.

Second naturalist assumption: scientific explanation seeks general causal

laws
The assumption that human beliefs and actions are explained in terms of general
causal laws is another frequent feature of naturalist philosophy. It appears, for
example, in some versions of Marxism, analytic philosophy of science, as well as
in the mainstream of American behavioral political science.36 What knits these
otherwise disparate and incompatible groups together is the naturalist
conviction that in social science, “as anywhere else in empirical science, the
explanation of a phenomenon consists in subsuming it under general empirical
laws.”37

Anti-naturalism offers a number of reasons for rejecting naturalism’s ongoing

quest for the laws of human behavior. We will restrict ourselves to only two that
draw on our prior analysis. We have already seen that explaining a given belief
or action requires citing the other beliefs that inform it. This means viewing
human behavior as the product of a process of creative agency or (weak)
reasoning. But the explanation of beliefs in light of reasons is logically
incompatible with the determinism of general causal laws. This is because
viewing human behavior as the product of reasoning implies that individuals
could have reasoned differently, leading to different outcomes. Therefore, so

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long as we retain the explanation of beliefs in light of reasons and beliefs, we

cannot subsume human behavior under determinate causal laws.

This draws attention to a second, closely related problem with the naturalist
attempt at general laws of explanation—namely, the inadequacy of the concept
of cause that formulating such laws involves. The naturalist conception of cause
is ahistorical in that it attempts to establish the way certain antecedent
conditions are connected to consequent outcomes by a necessary causal link.
General laws thus take the form of “whenever a given set of antecedent
conditions X are obtaining (all other things being equal), a given consequent
event Y follows.” But as we have seen, this necessary causal link runs afoul of
the historically contingent nature of human beliefs. Human beliefs are not the
result of ahistorical causal links, but rather have contingent, context-specific
origins that reflect particular webs of meanings. Because beliefs and actions are
contingent and context specific, we cannot adequately subsume them under
purportedly trans-historical causal mechanisms. The historical contingency (p.
36) that informs belief formation is incompatible with naturalism’s ahistorical
notion of cause.

Naturalists are perhaps led to erroneously reduce the explanation of human

behavior to mechanistic causes by beginning from the correct assumption that
explanation does indeed involve relating one thing to another. However, because
of the allure of the natural sciences, naturalists then tend to draw the conclusion
that such relationships must be necessary, mechanistic, and law-like as opposed
to the result of contingent links. But this is not a valid inference. Of course, once
again, anti-naturalism must concede that some future research program might
yet eliminate the need for contingent forms of causal explanation in terms of
reasons and beliefs. In the wake of such an historic event, anti-naturalist
arguments would be negated and the interpretive turn would have to be
abandoned. But at present such a naturalist system of mechanistic causal laws
explaining human social and political action remains elusive. There exists a
plurality of causal bonds that differentiate the social from the natural sciences.
Naturalists have been wrong to reduce the human sphere to the mechanistic,
necessary causal bond and not see a special kind of historical, contingent
causality that retains a place for the creative agency of human persons.

Third naturalist assumption: the goal of scientific knowledge is predictive

power
We have seen that naturalists often assume that human beliefs and actions are
reducible to brute verifiable data, which in turn can be forged into general
causal laws that govern and determine social reality. Yet the driving force of this
purely scientific agenda is often a very practical and understandable goal: the
discovery of a science that enables predictive power and thereby the ability to
control (or at least forecast) social and political outcomes.38 The phenomenon of
technocracy will be discussed in greater depth in Chapters 8 and 9 on ethics,

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democracy, and public policy. But one egregious example should suffice for
present purposes. The contemporary field of behavioral genetics, which has vied
(albeit not always successfully) for a kind of symbolic power over public policy
and discourse, generates a particular claim to technocracy. According to Aaron
Panofsky’s detailed critique, behavioral genetics has made a power grab that has
been tied to the popular rise of a “geneticized” discourse, in which the broader
public treats genes as fully determinant of human behavior, and a kind of
“astrological genetics” pervades public discourse.39 These claims to genetic
expertise over human behavior have been marshaled to varying ends—by
elements of the American Right to advance racist ideas of intelligence and (p.
37) by sectors of the American Left to scientifically resolve the controversies
over sexual orientation.40 But generally it has been more broadly tied to efforts
to neoliberalize and marketize the public sector by claiming that behavior is
fundamentally individually determined such that social programs attempting to
reshape behavioral outcomes are predictably futile.41

Beyond the many problems with behavioral genetics’ claims to scientific status,
there are at least two deeper philosophical problems with the naturalist goal of
strong prediction. First, it does not in fact seem possible to gain a strong form of
predictive power, and second, when this is linked to a program of social
engineering or technocracy, it becomes anti-democratic and anti-humanistic as a
politics. The predictive goals of naturalism are unlikely insofar as even our most
reliable social science generalizations have not furnished a strong form of
prediction. Some anti-naturalists have attributed this failure to ineliminable
sources of unpredictability within social life—most of these arguments center on
the human capacity to creatively change beliefs and radically innovate in a way
underdetermined by the antecedent set of conditions.42 Nearly all theorists
involved (both anti-naturalists and naturalists) see the question of strong
prediction in the social sciences as ultimately resting on whether determinate,
law-like generalizations governing social reality can indeed be formulated. And
as we have discussed, anti-naturalists believe the prospects of such laws are
unlikely at best because they misunderstand the nature of human beliefs—their
contingency and holism.

Instead, anti-naturalism holds that prediction in the social sciences is at most

still a form of educated guess work. An informed social inquirer can predict with
some degree of success the regularities of individual and communal behavior
(indeed, without a weak form of predictable regularity, no social order would be
possible). But the prediction of such patterned regularities is not of the same
kind as the exact or strong form of prediction found in the natural sciences.
Rather, social science generalizations are always susceptible to counter-
examples, anomalies, and other forms of fallibility. Moreover, as MacIntyre has
argued at length, in the social sciences such fallibility is not necessarily a sign of
the quality of the predictive statements, but reflects the nature of the
phenomena.43 Human beliefs and actions cannot be determined by a necessary
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set of antecedent conditions. The conditions do not lock belief or action into
place. Rather, because of the human ability to weigh different beliefs, the result
could always have been otherwise than it is. This contingency makes the
formulation of necessary causal laws (and with it strong, scientific prediction) in
the domain of human social and political life impossible.

Some naturalist social scientists have responded to this problem by

acknowledging that individual behavior is unpredictable but then claiming that
predictability emerges via large-scale statistical aggregates that form patterns
and regularities. As Colin Hay has perceptively discussed, this is an attempt to
discover a predictive science of politics “in which there is no recognition of the
(p.38) role of agents as anything other than the carriers of behaviors which
aggregate to form a particular pattern.”44 As Hay also rightly argues, the
problem with this attempt to rescue a predictive science of human behavior is
that it cannot infer mechanistic, causal laws from its statistical data without
falling into serious distortions of social reality. The underlying philosophical
problem remains the attempt to move from observing correlations to positing
general causal laws.45 General mechanistic covering laws simply do not capture
the contingent, creative form of causality that actually explains human beliefs
and actions. Therefore, even supposedly aggregate predictive patterns are foiled
by sudden, dramatic political changes and upheavals. Although statistical
aggregation may be a useful method (a point we return to in Chapter 5 on
methods), the attempt to infer general causal laws from such aggregations is
destined to fail.

Indeed, Hay makes a similar point about naturalist uses of rational choice theory
in which social scientists assume that “structure determines agency” because “a
rational actor in a given context will always choose precisely the same course of
action” that optimizes their strategy.46 We will have much more to say (and much
nuance to add) to our views of rational choice theory in later chapters. For now
it is worth noting that this kind of predictive deployment of rational choice
theory is very common in both contemporary political science and especially
economics.47 Yet it falls short of its own goals for similar reasons as other
naturalist approaches—namely, it neglects the contingency of human belief
formation, assuming instead that there are necessary causal mechanisms that
must be the case within certain incentive environments. Hay notes that a big
irony of rational choice used in this way is that what appears to be a theory of
rationality (and thereby freedom) is actually being subordinated to an
“opportunity structure [that] dictates the rational choice…for any agent in any
context.”48 In other words, the rational choice model assumes a predictive
determinacy. Indeed, even indeterminacy in rational choice games is conceived
of naturalistically as dictated by the context itself and not by human creative
agency.49

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A further irony of the naturalist quest for a strong form of prediction is that anti-
naturalist approaches not only remain better at accounting for the kinds of weak
prediction we in fact have at our disposal when facing social reality, but they are
also able to explain (even predict) the ongoing failure of naturalism to reach its
own goals. So, for example, anti-naturalists are not surprised in the least by the
fact that all major paradigms of international relations failed to predict the
collapse of the Soviet Union.50 Nor are anti-naturalists bewildered by the
ongoing failure of the social sciences from anthropology to economics to achieve
strongly predictive power. Indeed, the most recent empirical studies have found
that social science experts claiming predictive expertise are no better at
predicting phenomena like GDP growth or election outcomes than are well-
informed amateurs or even random algorithms.51 And (p.39) yet despite anti-
naturalism’s superiority in this regard, the allure of the predictive powers
promised by naturalism remains strong. Indeed, the persistence of naturalist
research programs might well have more to do with the promise of such
predictive powers than with its ability to actually deliver on its goals at present.

This brings us to a second problem with the goal of strongly predictive,

naturalist social science—one we will only barely mention now, and will delve
into in much more detail later in the book when we discuss democracy and
ethics. Namely, naturalism has a subtle philosophical link to anti-democratic and
anti-humanistic politics. Naturalism is anti-democratic insofar as it underwrites
rule by technocrats, managers, and other forms of experts that can manipulate
and predict outcomes by engineering antecedent conditions. A science of strong
prediction would rationally justify a hierarchical form of expert authority.
Naturalism is also anti-humanistic insofar as it conceptualizes the study of
human beings as in principle much the same as the study of brute physical
objects. By contrast, because it rejects naturalism’s claims to mechanistic laws,
necessary causal links, and predictive knowledge, anti-naturalism also rejects
the authority of rule by experts. In doing so anti-naturalism can be linked to
participatory and deliberative forms of democratic theory and political
organization. Likewise, anti-naturalists are often humanists insofar as they insist
there is something unique about the explanation of human agency within the
wider order of things. Human beings cannot be treated analogously to objects
reducible to mechanistic sciences. Instead human beings are creative, rational
creatures, whose lives are imbued with meanings, and not simply reducible to
brute machines. Much more needs to be said to substantiate this series of
claims. Indeed, the foregoing principles will all be elaborated upon, argued, and
further substantiated throughout this book.

In this chapter the goal has simply been to argumentatively outline some of the
central philosophical features of anti-naturalism and contrast it with its main foil
—this will provide crucial premises for later arguments. We will see that in fact
the conflict with naturalism is far more complex than this starting point. Anti-
naturalism does not simply challenge naturalism’s philosophical starting points,
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Philosophical roots

and offer an alternative set of principles. It offers a completely different set of

substantive concepts, agenda of empirical research, view of methods, theory of
ethics, politics, and public policy. In doing so, anti-naturalism offers an entire
paradigm shift in the approach to studying human life.

However, before seeing how this is so, there is still a little more basic
philosophical work to be done. Thus far we have articulated our anti-naturalist
framework by relating our position to the work of other interpretive
philosophers and social scientists. This has helped highlight that there are many
family resemblances across the different philosophical schools pushing for an
(p.40) interpretive turn. However, in Chapter 3 we will turn our attention to the
philosophical differences among thinkers and approaches that are otherwise
unified in their rejection of naturalism. This means examining some of the main
philosophical debates internal to the interpretive turn, which have a major
bearing on social scientific practice. Our claim will be that anti-naturalism is the
best framework on offer, drawing insights from but also contrasting with rival
philosophies justifying hermeneutics and the interpretive turn.

Notes:
(1.) Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter
(New York: Penguin Books, 2014); Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of
Auguste Comte, vol. 1., ed. and trans. Harriet Martineau (London: George Bell &
Sons, 1896).

(2.) For a highly influential early discussion see: Richard Bernstein, The
Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1976) 117–18, 138.

(3.) Yvonna S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills, CA:
SAGE Publications, 1985).

(4.) For one elaboration of this important point see social constructivists like:
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995); John
Searle, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010); Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Colin Hay, Political Analysis:
A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Colin Hay, “Social
Constructivism,” in Routledge Handbook of Interpretive Political Science, eds.
Mark Bevir and R. A. W. Rhodes (New York: Routledge, 2016) 99–112.

(5.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (second, revised edition), trans.
Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004) 291.

(6.) For a classic philosophical defense of meaning holism see: Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958).

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(7.) This slogan is related in Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror:

Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

(8.) Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language:

Philosophy Papers 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

(9.) Compare: R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, ed. T. Knox (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1946) 285–8; Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975) 1–107; Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

(10.) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1996) 292–304; Paul Ricoeur, Time and
Narrative, 3 vols., trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1984–8).

(11.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2007) 216, 211–12.

(12.) Cf. Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical

Theory,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 26–57.

(13.) For a provocative attempt to grapple with such embodied understandings

see: S. D. Noam Cook and Hendrik Wagenaar, “Navigating the Eternally
Unfolding Present: Toward an Epistemology of Practice,” The American Review
of Public Administration 42:1 (2012): 3–38.

(14.) However, it is important to note that even in the case of some overriding
physiological factors, the content of particular beliefs might not necessarily be
fixed. Thus although physiological determinants might pervade and distort belief
formation in predictable ways, just exactly what the content of, say, a given
schizophrenic’s paranoid delusions are might continue to depend on contingent
belief formation (this is, of course, a question for psychologists to determine).

(15.) For further justification of this position see: Mark Bevir, The Logic of the
History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) ch. 7.

(16.) For an example of something like this claim, see: Nancy MacLean,
Democracy in Chains (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017) 39.

(17.) Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Peevear and Larissa

Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994).

(18.) For a detailed version of this argument, see: Jason Blakely, “The Forgotten
Alasdair MacIntyre: Beyond Value Neutrality in the Social Sciences,” Polity 45:3
(2013): 445–63.

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Philosophical roots

(19.) The reader might then wonder if the paradox has not been pushed back on
the entire human species. Would not some generation of homo sapiens need to
have been born without a social background and therefore formed beliefs prior
to any inherited web or tradition? But this again is a false paradox, as it assumes
that inherited traditions are something definite, rather than a phenomenon that
arises along a continuum with other forms of inherited behavior like birds
migrating, chimpanzees cooperating to capture other monkeys, and hunter-
gatherers following weather patterns. For this argument see: Bevir, The Logic of
the History of Ideas, 193–5.

(20.) Gadamer famously argued this case in terms of the necessary role of both
“tradition” and “prejudice” in human understanding: Truth and Method, 265–85.

(21.) Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007) chs. 12–14.

(22.) Taylor, A Secular Age, 22.

(23.) See for example: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

(24.) Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2002) 36.

(25.) See: Gadamer, Truth and Method, 300–7.

(26.) See, for example, the pragmatist treatment of this by Richard Bernstein,
The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1976) 117–18, 138.

(27.) For example, compare with Otto Neurath, “Physicalism: The Philosophy of
the Viennese Circle,” in Philosophical Papers: 1913–1946, eds. and trans. Robert
Cohen and Marie Neurath (Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983) 48;
as well as the manifesto of the Vienna Circle: Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and
Otto Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis,” in The
Emergence of Logical Empiricism, ed. Sahotra Sarkear (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1996) 331.

(28.) A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, second edition (New York: Dover
Publications, 1952) 48. Despite the pervasiveness of such a sentiment, it is
important to emphasize that naturalism is neither monolithic nor is it an
uncontroversial way to conceptualize the natural sciences. Indeed, there are
those who dispute naturalism is even the correct view of how the natural
sciences carry out their practice. See for example the exchanges between
Hubert Dreyfus, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty, in David R. Hiley, James F.
Bohman, and Richard Shusterman, eds., The Interpretive Turn (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1991).

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(29.) Carnap, Hahn, and Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung,” 331.

(30.) In analytic philosophy this is evident in the late work of Ludwig

Wittgenstein and Willard Van Orman Quine as well as the turn toward
pragmatism by philosophers like Richard Rorty. In phenomenology this has been
advanced by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

(31.) For a neurophysiological version of this position see: Paul Churchland,

“Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” The Journal of
Philosophy 78 (February 1981).

(32.) This is the importance (beyond mere historical interest) in the dramatic
collapse of early behaviorist psychology, which loomed large over the human
sciences of the early and mid-twentieth century. For a devastating critique of
this research program see: Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behavior (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).

(33.) Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter
(New York: Penguin Books, 2014) 8, 11.

(34.) Such hope was prefigured (as was so much of naturalism) in the path-
breaking work of the Vienna Circle. It is evident, for example, in the
overcharged rhetoric of their manifesto: “Everything is accessible to man; and
man is the measure of all things…The arrangement of the concepts of the
various branches of science into the constitutive system can already be
discerned in outline today, but much remains to be done.” Carnap, Hahn, and
Neurath, “Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung,” 328, 331.

(35.) For an extended defense of this claim, see: Jason Blakely, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political
Theory and Social Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2016) ch. 3.

(36.) See, for example, Karl Marx, “Preface to A Critique of Political Economy,”
in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press) 388–91. Of course, Marx is also often read as a historicist. For more on
these two Marxs, see Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) 7–8, 31–2. For this naturalist
assumption among analytic philosophers see: Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic,
48; Carl Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” in Aspects of
Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965); Neurath, “Sociology in
the Framework of Physicalism,” in Philosophical Papers. For a historical account
of the importance of Hempel’s views for the “behavioral approach” in
mainstream political science see John Gunnell, Philosophy, Science and Political
Inquiry (Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1975) 65–7, 84.

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(37.) Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,” 240.

(38.) For example, compare: Hempel, “The Function of General Laws in History,”
234.

(39.) Aaron Panofsky, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of

Behavior Genetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014) 215.

(40.) Panofsky, Misbehaving Science, 1–5, 173, 209–10, 217.

(41.) Panofsky, Misbehaving Science, 217, 219–21.

(42.) See: Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in

Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985) 55–6. For further arguments see: Bevir, The
Logic of the History of Ideas, 239, 242, 250.

(43.) Compare MacIntyre, After Virtue, ch. 8.

(44.) Hay, Political Analysis, 51.

(45.) Hay, Political Analysis, 78–9.

(46.) Hay, Political Analysis, 53.

(47.) For a famous defense of rational choice modeling as predictive, see: Milton
Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in The Philosophy of
Economics, 3rd edition, ed. Daniel Hausman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008) 145–78. For examples of the influence of neoclassical
understandings of rational choice in political science, see: Anthony Downs, An
Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper Collins Publishers
Incorporated, 1957); David R. Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

(48.) Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The

Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public
Administration 82:1 (2004): 39.

(49.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 51–5.

(50.) Hay, Political Analysis, 198.

(51.) Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We
Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)). For a further
philosophical discussion of this point see also: MacIntyre, After Virtue, ch. 8.

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Philosophical debates

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Philosophical debates
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter considers some of the major philosophical traditions that have
established the need for an interpretive turn in the social sciences—including
phenomenology, post-structuralism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and social
constructivism. We reject the view that there is only one privileged philosophical
route to an interpretive social science. Instead, the philosophical pluralism of the
interpretive turn is defended albeit from a uniquely anti-naturalist perspective.
Specifically, anti-naturalism corrects the tendency of some advocates of the
interpretive turn to drift back into naturalist concepts as well as to distort the
proper conception of human agency. Major philosophers of the interpretive turn
are critically engaged, including Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, Charles
Taylor, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Keywords:   interpretive turn, anti-naturalism, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Michel Foucault, Hans-
Georg Gadamer, Charles Taylor

In Chapter 2 we drew on a wide array of interpretive and hermeneutic

philosophers to establish some of the basic arguments supporting an anti-
naturalist approach to the social sciences. We now turn our attention to the way
in which anti-naturalism stakes out a unique position within the wider field of
philosophical schools calling for an interpretive turn. Although we are
philosophical pluralists and believe many schools of thought (including
phenomenology, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, neo-Hegelianism, social
constructivism, and post-structuralism) have made tremendously important and
substantive contributions to the debates over the interpretive turn, we also

Page 1 of 23
Philosophical debates

maintain that an anti-naturalist approach holds certain advantages when

compared and contrasted to otherwise allied positions. In particular, anti-
naturalism clearly overcomes two wayward tendencies among the philosophies
calling for an interpretive turn.

The first wayward tendency is toward ahistorical, quasi-naturalist concepts.

Sometimes even the most sophisticated and historically influential exponents of
an interpretive turn remain entangled in naturalist tendrils. This is most notably
evident in the work of two old-style phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and
Alfred Schutz. These two thinkers have made enormous contributions to the
debates over social science, inspiring social science research programs that are
both humanistic and interpretive. Indeed, in the last century Husserl’s and
Schutz’s phenomenology has formed the theoretical basis for important
interpretive research paradigms like ethnomethodology and phenomenological
sociology.1 Nonetheless, although there is undoubtedly still much to learn from
their work, the approach of these thinkers is sometimes compromised by a
lingering naturalism and ahistoricism. Against this ahistorical tendency we will
argue for a more radically historicist anti-naturalism as can be found, for
instance, in the works of later German phenomenologists like Hans-Georg
Gadamer, post-structuralists like Michel Foucault, as well as recent
hermeneuticists like Charles Taylor.

The second wayward tendency we wish to criticize in philosophies otherwise

friendly to an interpretive turn is anti-humanism. This tendency is probably most
pronounced in the writings of post-structuralists who affirm Foucault’s doctrine
of the “death of the subject” (which we explain below). In this and later chapters
we affirm an enormous debt to Foucault, not only for his innovations within
genealogy as a form of inquiry, but also for rightly criticizing elder
phenomenology’s pretensions toward an ahistorical, universal subject. However,
an anti-naturalist approach also must take issue with Foucault’s proclivity
toward anti-humanism—expressed especially in his (p.45) early works and
arguably resurfacing in his later writings as well. Once again, our anti-naturalist
critique draws on the support of both later phenomenologists who followed
Martin Heidegger and Anglophone thinkers influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Anti-naturalist philosophy is equally historical and humanistic. This contrast with

other approaches will be explored in four different topic areas that are of crucial
importance to the social sciences: subjectivity, explanation, objectivity, and the
role of normative political critique in empirical research. By arguing against
lingering ahistorical and anti-humanistic tendencies in the interpretive turn, this
chapter advocates for a particular philosophical approach to the research and
methods questions we explore in later chapters. We believe anti-naturalism
represents the best theoretical framework currently on offer, equipping social
scientists with unique ways of thinking about subjectivity, explanation,
objectivity, and critique. By the end of this chapter readers should have a deeper,

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enriched sense of what it means to work within the anti-naturalist approach that
builds on the philosophical roots elaborated in Chapter 2.

However, before beginning, one brief disclaimer is in order: namely, our critical
dialogue with thinkers like Husserl, Schutz, and Foucault in this chapter is part
of our wider goal of clarifying certain theoretical points about an anti-naturalist
approach to the social sciences. In this regard, these thinkers serve as points of
contrast to the type of anti-naturalism we wish to promote. But we are perfectly
happy to concede from the outset that Husserl, Schutz, and Foucault are subject
to a wide and plural set of readings. There are multiple Foucaults and Husserls
out there, not just one. Different readings of these thinkers might well render
them closer to the anti-naturalist position we prefer. Indeed, toward the end of
his life, Foucault appeared to be moving toward a more humanistic conception of
agency that we find amenable.2 Our goal here, however, is not a survey of the
rival interpretations of Husserl and Foucault, but rather to philosophically clarify
certain features of anti-naturalism as an approach. These anti-naturalist
positions will be both explicitly and tacitly evoked in the subsequent arguments
made throughout the book.

Subjectivity
All social science assumes some basic view of the human subject. In particular,
how much agency we grant the human subject is of great consequence to our
explanations of social and political life. So, for example, if human beings are
considered little more than cogs in social and political structures, then this will
undoubtedly shape the kinds of explanations we offer about their lives. Likewise,
if we assume individuals are fully autonomous, absolute (p.46) sovereigns over
their beliefs and actions, then our explanations will look accordingly different.

Anti-naturalism is no exception in this regard. It too must come to terms with the
puzzle of how much agency, if any, to credit to the human subject. Within
interpretive debates this problem often arises in the context of questions of
meaning. We have already noted that anti-naturalism views the social sciences
as interpretive because social reality is expressive of meanings in a way that is
not true of the natural sciences. But the many philosophical schools advocating
for an interpretive turn also differ sharply over how to parse the relationship of
the individual subject to these social meanings. Are individual subjects fully
autonomous over the meanings expressed in social and political reality? Or are
the meanings encoded in these realities limiting or somehow determinant of
individual expression?

Although there are diverse views in these debates among interpretive

philosophers, there are also two opposite poles or camps that have formed in
response to such questions. On one side are old-style phenomenologists who
argue that meaning is largely the product of an autonomous, individual subject.

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On the other are post-structuralists who argue that systems of social meaning
and discourses severely limit the agency of individual subjects.

Older forms of phenomenology, as espoused by Husserl and Schutz, often took a

view of the human subject as autonomous in relation to meaning. Although
Husserl and Schutz agreed with the basic anti-naturalist position that the social
sciences have a uniquely “subject-related” object of study, they also advanced
theories of language in which meaning was the product of independent,
individual reflection.3 In this vein, Husserl wrote that meaning is largely the
creation of an autonomous, “primal ‘I’” who “stand[s] above all natural existence
that has meaning.”4 Similarly, Schutz believed that “meaning lies in the attitude
of the Ego toward that part of its stream of consciousness which has already
flowed by,” such that meaning is simply the product of how the individual “Ego
regards its experience.”5 In this way the phenomenology of Husserl and Schutz
defended a theory of meaning in which a largely sovereign ego confers sense
onto the world.

The problem with this individually autonomous view of meaning will perhaps be
made clear if we temporarily shift our attention to the opposing camp of
interpretive philosophers—one that rejects individual autonomy in terms of
meaning in favor of an anti-humanistic vision of life. Foucault is widely held to be
the most notable thinker to have arisen out of French post-structuralism and its
famous, anti-humanist call for the “death of the subject.” According to Foucault,
historical inquiry reveals all human subjectivity to be the product of collective
systems of meaning, epistemes, or regimes of power that comprise a given social
background. In Chapter 2 we noted that anti-naturalism holds the view that
humans live against a background of some social inheritance or tradition that
makes belief formation possible. Foucault is (p.47) notable for pushing the role
of the social background to a radical conclusion, arguing that it essentially
abolishes independent subjectivity.6 Thus, during his early “archaeological”
years Foucault argued that researchers should eliminate the role of human
agency from their investigations, instead focusing on epistemes or discourses as
determinant of particular historical subjectivities.7 This hostility to the human
subject also remained present at times in Foucault’s later genealogical writings,
where he exhorted researchers to “get rid of the subject” and pursue genealogy
as “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges,
discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a
subject.”8

Foucault’s approach to interpretive theory was thus anti-humanistic because it

denied any special status or dignity to human beings as creative, rational, or
otherwise uniquely purposive agents. Instead, he advocated a view of humans as
determined by larger systems of meaning (be they epistemes, discourses, or
regimes of power). It is important to see that if Foucault was right about this,
then social scientists must drop human agency in favor of the analysis of systems

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of meaning. We will return to the problems with Foucault’s position shortly, but
first it is worth noting how his critique of the subject draws attention to a fatal
flaw in phenomenology’s autonomous theories of the subject. Namely, Foucault
makes us aware of the way that Husserl’s and Schutz’s theories of meaning fail
to account for the role of the social background. To posit meaning as the fruit of
autonomous self-reflection not only ignores the social dimensions of language, it
also occludes them with the illusory picture of an ego creating meaning in
herculean isolation. In this way, overly autonomous accounts of human agency
largely erase the social features of language and belief formation. Meaning
suddenly becomes the ahistorical achievement of individual psyches, as opposed
to the shared and ongoing inheritance of particular language communities. Part
of the value of Foucault’s radical critique of Husserl and early phenomenology’s
autonomous subject is that it forces far more suspicion about such claims to
ahistorical autonomy, drawing attention to the power and shaping influence of
the social background.

Yet despite the undoubted importance of Foucault’s critique, his anti-humanist

call for the abolition of the subject is equally problematic. Specifically, Foucault’s
vision of social and political life loses sight of the fact that ultimately people
create meanings and practices, not the other way around. In Foucault’s histories
individual subjects often seem reducible to their location within a particular
discourse or ritual of power. But this fails to take into account that while a given
social background may present an initial horizon of meaning, it is never
sufficient to determine particular beliefs. It loses sight of the humanist insight
that human beings are capable of the creative exercise of their linguistic
capacities so that they can play with and innovate upon their social inheritance.

(p.48) The problem with Foucault’s anti-humanist position can be shown by the
fact that wherever a given social background or tradition is the same,
individuals may still hold vastly different beliefs. So, for example, two individuals
who are shaped by a given tradition (or episteme or discourse) X, and therefore
share beliefs A, B, and C, may still hold incompatible beliefs D, E, and F. The
existence of such differences in belief implies that post-structuralists should
allow that individuals can at least to some degree reason creatively against their
inherited social background. Discourses, epistemes, and other such concepts do
not over-determine the content of particular beliefs. Therefore, the subject’s
agency is not reducible to a discourse. The discourse is the starting point for
understanding a given individual’s beliefs, but it can never be the full story.
Instead, human beliefs must be looked at on their own terms, albeit always
deeply sensitive to the inherited social background.

A related problem with Foucault’s anti-humanist dismantling of the subject is

that it simply displaces the problem of agency from individuals and onto entire
discourses, epistemes, or regimes of power. As Charles Taylor has argued,
regimes of power in Foucault’s view have a “strategic logic” that “cannot be

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attributed to anyone as their plan, as their conscious purpose”—and yet it is

never made clear how such a disembodied “purposefulness without purpose”
might work.9 Indeed, in Foucault’s later writings the human subject is often
portrayed as the outcome of practices and strategies of power that are deployed
by no one in particular. Power appears as an ever-changing system or strategy
that produces subjects who are rendered its mere effects. So, for example,
Foucault writes that power has a “logic” that is “perfectly clear, the aims
decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented
them.”10 But as Taylor has argued, how such a disembodied, dispersed agency
works remains unresolved in Foucault’s work.

Fortunately, it is possible to embrace Foucault’s critique of an autonomous

subject without following him in abolishing the weaker notion of agency.
Likewise, it is possible to be humanistic like Husserl and Schutz without falling
into the error of erecting a sovereign ego that creates meaning above the given
historical context. What is needed, as Colin Hay has rightly noted, is an option
that falls into the problems of neither autonomous voluntarism nor deterministic
structuralism.11 Our way of formulating a solution is through the anti-naturalist
concept of a situated agency, or the assumption that while meaning is always
part of an inherited social background, nevertheless individuals can modify and
creatively alter any one of their beliefs.

In doing so, anti-naturalism follows those like Gadamer who have argued that all
human belief formation occurs against a background of an inherited tradition. As
we discussed in Chapter 2, a tradition in this sense is an ideational background
against which individuals adopt an initial web of beliefs. Traditions thus capture
the way our inherited social background can strongly influence the beliefs we
hold without utterly determining them. So Gadamer (p.49) emphasizes the way
in which human understanding and agency exist on the “horizon” of a given
tradition. The concept of a horizon metaphorically captures the way in which
individuals are born into the limits of some historically inherited tradition, but
these limits can change and move as individuals creatively choose their own
paths within belief. Our horizon, as Gadamer notes, travels with us.12

The concepts of horizon and tradition are central to an anti-naturalist social

science because they help us understand how human subjectivity is always
dependent upon a historically inherited social context (and therefore not
autonomous) while also not being reducible to it. Rather, human agency is
capable of the creative innovation and play of local reasoning. Local reasoning is
“local” because it always takes place against the background of a certain
tradition. Although the specific beliefs that form the background tradition may
vary from case to case, it is not possible for human reason to be free or outside
of any background whatsoever. An individual cannot break out of all historical
horizons. Local reasoning therefore bars autonomous forms of reasoning and
subjectivity, emphasizing the way beliefs form contingently against a particular

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background. There is no exit from history for human belief, action, practice, and
thought.

Thus, the anti-naturalist point of the foregoing debate is now clear. Social
science must resist twin temptations. First, it must be careful not to treat human
subjectivity as autonomous and ahistorical, free of all social backgrounds. But
second, and no less important, it must avoid the anti-humanist temptation of
dissolving subjectivity altogether in favor of impersonal systems of power,
meaning, or other such mechanistic devices. Rather, an anti-naturalist approach
that is humanistic and historicist must keep in mind that people are the source
of beliefs and practices, while at the same time affirming that all human life
begins from an inherited history of beliefs and practices. In this way, the
concepts of situated agency, local reasoning, and tradition help social scientists
avoid the philosophical problems of an ahistorical subjectivity on one side, and
the anti-humanist reduction of the subject to the social background on the other.

Explanation
Controversies over human agency are closely related to a second area of great
importance to any social science—namely, how to explain social reality. Once
again, we maintain that anti-naturalism’s assumptions are philosophically
superior to the tendency to render the explanation of human life either
somewhat ahistorical (Schutz) or somewhat anti-humanistic (Foucault). Once
again, we accept that there are rival interpretations of these thinkers (p.50)
that are not susceptible to our critiques. If other scholars are able to reformulate
Schutz’s or Foucault’s philosophies so as to make them more compatible with
anti-naturalist insights, then we are happy to affirm their philosophical validity.
The point, however, is to see the way that ahistoricism and anti-humanism, no
matter where they arise, are philosophically problematic. Interpretive social
science is thereby best justified by anti-naturalist insights.

Early on in their tradition, phenomenologists often tried to combine interpretive

insights with more ahistorical and naturalistic forms of explanation. The work of
Schutz is emblematic in this regard. Schutz argued that an interpretive
approach to social science was also fully compatible with naturalistic forms of
explanation that we examined in Chapter 2. As an advocate of an interpretive
turn, Schutz began from the premise that social scientists must engage the self-
understandings of those they study. For Schutz this interpretive requirement
was a result of the fact that “the constructs of the social sciences are, so to
speak, constructs of the second degree, that is, constructs of the constructs
made by the actors on the social scene.”13 However, Schutz also went on to
argue that these interpretive constructs could be reconciled with a social
science that adopted mostly formal, ahistorical models of explanation.

Inspired by Max Weber’s notion of ideal types, Schutz argued that what he
called “puppets” could reconcile the interpretive constructs of social reality with

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the naturalist goal of general, universal forms of explanation. Puppets, according

to Schutz, were abstractions constructed by social scientists in order to capture
some shared feature of a given group of people. All such puppets or modeled
abstractions were answerable to the concrete, historical meanings, purposes,
and beliefs of the actors they purported to represent. But Schutz also believed
that once a particular characteristic of an entire class of individuals had been
validly captured, such puppets could then be placed into formal systems of
interaction that transcended particular historical contexts and explained social
behavior. As Schutz put it, the social scientist “thus ascribes to this fictitious
consciousness a set of typical notions, purposes, goals, which are assumed to be
invariant…This homunculus or puppet is supposed to be interrelated in
interaction patterns to other homunculi or puppets constructed in a similar
way.”14

Schutz believed that these abstracted puppets, interacting in an idealized model

of social reality, made possible naturalist scientific explanation. So Schutz wrote
that “it is possible to predict how such a puppet or system of puppets might
behave under certain conditions and to discover certain ‘determinate relations
between a set of variables, in terms of which…empirically ascertainable
regularities…can be explained.’”15 In this way Schutz argued that abstracted
characteristics of human agency (so long as they were carefully crafted out of
interpretations of individual purposes and beliefs) could explain human action
across historical contexts and yield predictive power. (p.51) Explanation was
thereby a form of general causal prediction that transcended historical context.

We will return to the question of ideal types and other such aggregate concepts
for the social scientific enterprise in our discussion of anti-naturalist concept
formation as well as in our critical treatment of neoclassical economics and
rational choice. For now we wish to show that the problem with Schutz’s
proposal does not reside in his notion of abstraction per se. Rather the problem
is his attempt to legitimize naturalism’s ahistorical approach as the standard
model of explanation for the social sciences. For as we argued in Chapter 2,
naturalistic explanation may be appropriate in outlying cases of physiological
pathology, but otherwise it fails to deal with the contingent or volitional links
that inform human beliefs and actions. The reader will recall that we argued
beliefs and actions are the result of contingent streams of reasoning and
cognition, not of necessary, law-like bonds. But the naturalist model of
explanation, championed by Schutz, assumes regularities between variables that
have necessary links. Schutz’s effort at squaring interpretive approaches with
naturalist explanations therefore runs afoul of this basic conceptual distinction.
That is, Schutz fails to recognize that naturalist and interpretive modes of
explanation are philosophically antithetical because the former assumes
necessary links between beliefs, and the latter contingent ones.16 Social
scientists should not follow Schutz’s lead because it is contradictory at the
conceptual level. Research programs built on such assumptions will therefore be
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plagued by confusions and inconsistencies. The effort to find necessary causal

links predicting human behavior will be perpetually frustrated. Moreover,
insofar as social scientists adopt naturalism, they will distort the true,
contingent nature of human beliefs and actions by positing over-arching
ahistorical explanations that are supposedly necessary and law-like. This will
obscure what is actually going on in social and political life.

We have already noted that Foucault is one of the most creative and
thoroughgoing historicists of the last century. His works investigating the
historical nature of social meanings are nearly unrivaled. For this reason it is
especially ironic that when it comes to social explanations, Foucault’s post-
structuralist approach sometimes goes awry in a similar way to Schutz. This
irony is made even deeper by the fact that in Foucault’s case it is the very anti-
humanist quest to demolish the subject (and abandon early phenomenology’s
transcendental ego) that leads to an overly formal and synchronic form of
explanation that neglects historical context.

For example, in his early, archaeological period Foucault sought to explain social
reality in terms of formal discursive rules that governed the beliefs and actions
of individuals across varied contexts without their being aware of it. As Foucault
put it, the rules of a discourse do not operate primarily “in the mind or
consciousness of individuals, but in discourse itself…according to a sort of
uniform anonymity, on all individuals who undertake to speak in this (p.52)
discursive field.”17 Thus social science explanation focuses neither on “an
individual, nor…some kind of collective consciousness,” but rather on “an
anonymous field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking
subjects.”18 In this way, particular human beliefs and actions are reduced by
Foucault to a synchronic form of explanation that locates them like sites within
the larger map of the relevant discourse. Social scientific explanation consists of
placing the right belief, action, practice, or event within the proper discursive
scheme. Discourses in this way come to be abstract, transcendent entities,
neglecting the contingent meanings of more localized contexts. This synchronic
form of explanation thus neglects subtle variations in meaning at the individual
and local level.

Unfortunately, this tendency toward structures transcending individual

meanings persisted in Foucault’s later turn to the concept of power. For the late
Foucault the subject is not free “in relation to the power system, but on the
contrary…must be regarded as so many effects” of power.19 Power in this view
(similar to what we saw with discursive rules) is “nonsubjective” in that it does
not result “from the choice or decision of an individual subject.”20 Explaining
beliefs and actions therefore once again consists in locating them within the
proper synchronic field or background (albeit this time the background is
defined in terms of practices and rituals of power more than discursive rules). As
Foucault described this research, one must “provide oneself with a grid of

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analysis which makes possible an analytic of relations of power.”21 In this way,

Foucault’s crusade to rid social research of the human subject ends in his
attempting to identify formal grids, rules, or schemes of meaning that transcend
any one individual and fix the meanings of their beliefs and actions.

One reason Foucault’s form of explanation is inadequate to the social sciences is

that, like Schutz’s phenomenology, it fails to be adequately historical enough.
However, unlike Schutz’s recourse to naturalist law-like explanations, Foucault
instead evokes formal, synchronic concepts like epistemes, discourses, or
regimes of power that appear to transcend local contexts and the creativity of
particular agents, while also globally determining articulation and practice. So,
in books like The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish, discourses,
epistemes, regimes of power, and other such explanatory concepts appear to
bestride the social world like titans, seemingly determining every act and belief
of individuals that fall under their shadow. Such post-structuralist accounts thus
exhibit a lingering structuralism that is not yet historical enough.

But post-structuralism’s tendency to slouch toward an ahistorical structuralism

also leads to two other dilemmas that render it unfit for use by social scientists.
First, despite the historical profundity of his works, Foucault’s approach actually
struggles to explain historical change. Indeed, especially the early Foucault’s
account of discourse appears to imply determinism. For if individual beliefs and
actions are fixed by a disembodied discourse then those same individuals are
unable to fundamentally modify this discourse. But this (p.53) renders actual
historical modifications in discourse inexplicable. Is it the disembodied discourse
itself that is changing? And if so, how does such an impersonal form of agency
operate? Answers to this problem still remain problematic within Foucault’s
corpus. Indeed, the more explanatory work that concepts like discourse or
power are relied upon to carry out, the less intelligible particular changes in
belief and action become.

Second, those who adopt such explanatory frameworks appear unable to self-
narrate. That is, explanatory concepts like discourse and power seem inadequate
to the task of explaining why, for example, Foucault shifted emphasis after 1968
from a more archaeological-inflected approach to a genealogical one. But a form
of social explanation that cannot explain the very researcher’s own beliefs and
actions needs philosophical revision.

Some post-structuralists have tried to respond to these dilemmas by evoking the

inherent instability, volatility, and open-ended nature of structures like
discourses and regimes of power. Jacques Derrida, for example, has argued that
every discourse is inherently unstable and “is never absolutely present outside a
system of differences.”22 Similarly, Foucault has argued that a given network of
power is “constantly in tension, in activity”; it is “not univocal” and so is never
fully present, fixed, or realized.23 But unfortunately such responses pose the

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same questions. Namely, how do disembodied discourses, or matrices of power,

actually change? If the source is individual agency, then a mode of explanation
that gives at least some room to the individual subject must be reintroduced.
The human subject is no longer dead. Indeed, in the final years of his work,
Foucault himself appeared to increasingly appreciate the need for some role for
human individual agency.24 But the attempt to evoke instability or tension within
discourses elides whether we are to understand such instabilities as qualities of
disembodied structures or as the result of the contingent activity of agents. Until
post-structuralists can provide an adequate resolution to such problems, the
anti-humanist form of explanation and the death of the subject are not the right
path for social scientists wishing to move away from naturalism.

Fortunately, once again a social science that is at once humanistic and historicist
avoids being snagged in these traps. This can be seen by briefly revisiting the
form of explanation introduced in Chapter 2. In brief form, social explanation
ought to be conceptualized in terms of the humanistic conception of situated
agents and the historicist conception of a tradition. Explanation ought to consist
of seeking the contingent connections (as opposed to either law-like bonds or
structural determinants) that agents form between their beliefs. But social
scientists must also stay aware of the fact that agents always act within the
horizon of a historically inherited tradition. Individuals can creatively change
and modify that inheritance in the face of dilemmas, but they might also
transform their inherited beliefs in response to some pathology or distorted
unconscious process as discussed above.

(p.54) Because social explanation consists of reconstructing the contingent

beliefs of agents in the context of traditions, it follows that social science is
essentially a historical form of explanation. That is, social scientists must be
sensitive to the contingent historical reasons why a given set of beliefs, actions,
practices, and traditions emerged. They should seek to identify the various
practices and traditions that create a particular social background, while also
being on the lookout for the hidden effects of pathology and distortion. Because
social explanation deals with the contingent beliefs and actions of situated
agents, it implies (as we have already discussed) that social science is ultimately
narrative in form rather than a quest for decontextual laws or structures of
social behavior. Social science is essentially narrative because the contingent
linking of particular beliefs is a narrative task. To explain human social and
political life is nothing more than to narrate the beliefs, actions, practices, and
traditions that constitute a given area of concern. Social science, like history, is a
science that consists of finding the right stories.

In short, anti-naturalist philosophy opens a clear path forward through the

problems presented by the ahistoricity of old-style phenomenology on one side,
and the quasi-structuralism of Foucault’s anti-humanist framework on the other.
Social scientists should think of explanations as historical and narrative. This is

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because social reality is the product of situated agents who creatively modify
their beliefs and practices in light of shared traditions that form their ongoing
social inheritance.

Objectivity
One reason social scientists have been reluctant to accept the primacy of
narratives is that they can seem intellectually arbitrary and lacking in scientific
rigor. Are not stories a genre for children, one extending back to humanity’s
most primitive stages, and to be told around a campfire, not as a serious form of
scientific explanation? How could stories possibly make objective progress in the
knowledge of social and political reality? This skepticism about the relationship
between narratives and objectivity is widespread among naturalist social
scientists and even sometimes amid those otherwise sympathetic to an
interpretive turn. Yet anti-naturalist philosophy can help dispel this confusion by
providing social scientists with a clear justification for treating narrative and
interpretive inquiry as objectively rigorous. This anti-naturalist framework can in
turn be contrasted with two mistaken tendencies among advocates of
interpretivism: a return to naïve naturalistic views of the social world (as seen
sometimes in the work of Schutz) or an adoption of a radically skeptical anti-
humanism (sometimes evident in the thought of Foucault).

(p.55) Advocates of the interpretive turn have not always clearly broken away
from naturalist ideas. In search of a resolution to the problem of objectivity, old-
style phenomenologists like Schutz made recourse to an ahistorical, quasi-
naturalist approach. Specifically, Schutz hoped to treat meanings as if they were
immediately accessible facts about the world that could be straightforwardly
verified, more or less on par with empirical sense data. This led him to criticize
logical positivist philosophers for restricting empirical experience to sensory
observation alone. Instead, Schutz argued that what was considered
immediately and empirically given needed to be broadened to include the
meanings and actions of the social domain. Where our eyes were the organs of
observable sense perception, Schutz argued that meanings and actions were
perceived by “our commonsense thinking…without any difficulty” such that “the
experience of the existence of other human beings and of the meaning of their
actions is certainly the first and most original empirical observation man
makes.”25 Once the data of immediate experience had been expanded to include
the perception of meanings, Schutz believed that social science could be placed
on no less an objective footing than the natural sciences. As Schutz expressed it,
social scientific explanations “can be verified by empirical observation, provided
that we do not restrict this term to sensory perceptions of objects…but include
the experiential form by which commonsense thinking in everyday life
understands human actions.”26

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In other words, for Schutz objectivity consisted in the empirical adequacy with
which social scientists represented the meanings of those they studied. The key
was to remain sensitive to the fact that such constructions were the meanings of
other subjects. But once this was taken into account, there was nothing
especially tricky or vexed in picking out their objective meaning. This
straightforward empiricism concerning meanings was likewise adopted by those
who followed Schutz in the social sciences. So, for example, David Bidney
argued that the “life-world of a given society must be taken as empirically
given,” such that the task of a social scientist is largely to “describe in detail,
and ‘objectively,’ the life-world of his subjects as he has observed it.”27

If meanings were indeed apprehended in a straightforward, empirical manner

then the problem of objectivity in an interpretive social science would meet with
an easy resolution. Unfortunately, this bare appeal to a commonsense
empiricism is philosophically inadequate. The basic dilemma facing this form of
objectivity is that it relies on an appeal to pure experiences. But once one
accepts philosophy’s turn toward meaning holism, there cannot be any such
entreaty to pure units of experience. Rather, only further beliefs (and not some
pure experience) can serve as the basis for holding a particular belief. This does
not mean individuals lack direct experiences of the world per se but it does
imply that any such claim to direct experience is without epistemological weight.
Or rather, the only thing that gives these experiences weight is a belief
unpacked in terms of further beliefs. In brief form, this is (p.56) because our
appeal to experience is always itself theory-laden: any one particular belief is
always part of a bundle of supporting beliefs. In this way, the holism we explored
in Chapter 2 undermines any straightforward empiricism about meanings. For
holism implies that all appeals to observation entail a wider web of supporting
beliefs and meanings. So, for example, if a given observation X disproved a
theory B, the latter might still be retained by insisting that observation X rested
on a false web or theory. Likewise, if an observation Y proved theory C, the latter
might still be discarded by insisting that Y was similarly suspect. Theories, in
short, can be retained or discarded in light of any one piece of evidence by
evoking ad hoc arguments about the validity of any given datum. The
philosophical case against appeals to pure senses has been argued at length by
the likes of Donald Davidson, among others.28

That theories are buffered from any one empirical observation in this way should
not come as a surprise. Individuals often hold to a given theory with greater
certainty than any particular datum that might come along to disprove it. For
example, if one observes a shamelessly power-hungry politician suddenly make a
sweeping gesture of generosity and self-abnegation, this would not necessarily
upend the theory that this leader is calculating and self-serving. Instead, one
would likely fit the contradicting evidence into the wider theory. Perhaps this
leader was trying to recourse to populism, curry favor, or some other subterfuge.
Of course this does not mean that theories are utterly impregnable to new
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Philosophical debates

experiences (to the contrary, they might be undermined by any number of such
experiences); it simply means that the objectivity of a theory cannot be justified
by a straightforward appeal to empirical observation, but only by appealing to
further beliefs. Objectivity cannot rest on single commonsense units of
perception.

Schutz himself often seems to affirm this holistic, anti-foundational turn in

philosophy. He writes that “strictly speaking, there are no such things as facts,
pure and simple,” but rather in the natural as well as the social sciences there
are only “interpreted facts.”29 However, he seems less aware that this creates a
serious tension between his holistic commitments and his appeals to objectivity
on the basis of empirical validation. These two positions are philosophically
contradictory. A defender of Schutz could try to rescue his philosophy by taking
it more in the holistic direction and away from claims to simply verify meanings.
We would welcome advocates of Schutz taking this anti-naturalist stance. But
what cannot be affirmed is a form of objectivity in the social sciences that
appeals to quasi-empiricist processes of verification.

Another pitfall in the search for objectivity in the social sciences is to let holistic
and anti-foundational philosophical insights lead to relativism. We already noted
how Foucault’s hostility to humanism led to the demotion of subject agency in
favor of largely synchronic structures of discourses or power. Foucault often put
aside the philosophical problem of truth and objectivity in favor of the
sociological study of such structures of knowledge-power. Many of (p.57) these
sociological inquires have been nothing less than revolutionary. However, in
doing so Foucault sometimes came close to suggesting that social inquiry was
characterized by two forms of relativism: one based on a critique of individual
rationality and the other on incommensurability. We will look briefly at each one.

At times Foucault writes as though no one could have objective knowledge in the
social sciences because human beliefs are not rational but the product of non-
rational structures of power. So, for example, he famously wrote that: “Truth
isn’t outside power…each society has its own régime of truth, its ‘general
politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes
function as true.”30 One common interpretation of this passage is that truth has
been reduced to power. If this is the case then Foucault runs into the same
dilemma of the inability to self-narrate that we explained above. This position
would leave social scientists with no way to claim Foucault’s own works were
objectively better than the very rival historical narratives he did so much to
dispel.

However, arguably this criticism of Foucault is unfair, as he might instead be

read as uninterested in the philosophical question of truth, focusing instead on
the sociological question of how different practices of truth are developed in
differing societies. If this is the case, then Foucault does not present social

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Philosophical debates

scientists with a way to think about the objectivity of their own inquiries. If this
reading is correct then Foucault is not interested in the philosophical question of
how to establish truth. This means readers should not be surprised, angry, or
disappointed to find Foucault is of no help on the question of objectivity because
it is not his question.

A second form of relativism that can arguably be ascribed to Foucault rests on

the claim that meaning holism entails the incommensurability of competing
conceptual frameworks. Especially in his early, archaeological period, Foucault
sometimes seemed to imply that truth and objectivity were relative to particular
epistemes or discourses.31 In this view, although beliefs may form rationally,
what counts as rational is relative to the conceptual scheme governing a
particular discourse or language. Moreover, because the content of particular
beliefs is always filled out by a specific web or context, beliefs cannot be
transferred from one web to a radically different one without a fundamental
change in meaning taking place. The objectivity of particular beliefs therefore
can only be established internal to a given system or paradigm of thought. The
result of this philosophy is that there is no way to arbitrate between radically
incompatible schemes.

Anti-naturalist philosophy can be of some help in overcoming the impasse posed

by radical incommensurability. Specifically, anti-naturalism holds that the
existence of radically incompatible rival frameworks does not entail relativism.
To the contrary, the case for a form of objectivity that avoids both anti-humanist
forms of relativism as well as philosophically naturalist (p.58) appeals to given
data is one that has been advanced by a growing number of anti-naturalist
philosophers.32 This form of objectivity is possible because competing theories
need not be proven true in absolute terms, but rather can be objectively justified
through critical comparison with one another.

Crucially, comparison is possible by an appeal to shared or agreed-upon facts

that both rival theories recognize as valid. Although facts are always theory-
laden, it does not follow that theories determine facts to the point that there
cannot exist an overlapping consensus on certain facts between competing
theories. Take, for example, the heated debates in international relations over
“democratic peace theory” or the theory that democracies don’t go to war with
one another.33 Both proponents and critics of this theory no doubt agree on a
large assortment of shared facts; for instance, that the First World War was
fought between two warring alliances that included Austria-Hungary and
Germany on one side, and France, Britain, and Russia on the other. However, the
same proponents and critics of the theory might also disagree over whether
Germany at this time was a democracy. In such cases, a critic of the theory
might try appealing to further shared facts—for instance, certain neglected
features of Wilhelmine Germany’s political structure—in order to argue that it
was as democratic as its adversaries Britain and France were. In doing so this

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Philosophical debates

critic would pressure the proponent by arguing that democratic peace theory
had failed to comprehensively ascertain certain shared facts. The existence of
shared facts therefore allows social scientists to judge which theory best meets
criteria such as accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, and opening new
possibilities for inquiry.

But what about cases of more radical disagreement in which few if any facts are
agreed upon or serve to judge between theories? For example, what if the
proponent of democratic theory disputes the very facts cited by the critic? Such
an advocate of democratic theory might argue that the critic has distorted the
facts because his theory of democracy is faulty, leading him to a mistaken set of
facts.

Yet even in extreme cases, where there is radical disagreement over the very
nature of the facts in question, comparison is still possible. For instance, in such
cases theories might still be rationally assessed according to their ability to
resolve anomalies or dilemmas internal to a competitor’s own conceptual
framework. In this way, the move from theory X to theory Y might be considered
either an “error-reducing” move or else some kind of epistemic gain in
comparative terms.34 Here the criteria are not necessarily shared facts, but
rather the ability to deal with a rival’s dilemmas and anomalies. Such
comparative objectivity consists of an immanent assessment of each theory’s
ability to resolve problems and advance aims.

For example, critics of democratic peace theory might argue that the theory’s
very historical development betrays the continual tweaking of definitions in
order to exclude counter-examples (like the Spanish–American War (p.59) of
1898 and the U.S. Civil War). Critics might therefore hold that the career of the
theory suffers from the internal dilemma of definitional circularity. Such
circularity, they might add, does not reflect a concern with accurately defining
democracies but with buffering the theory from anomalies. Such a critic might
then argue that their own preferred theory of democracy allows for a more
historical account of democracy that does not suffer the dilemma of definitional
circularity. The point, of course, is not whether democratic peace theory is
wrong or right. It is rather that anti-naturalist philosophy makes clear how both
proponents and critics of particular social scientific theories have recourse to
comparative forms of objective justification that steer clear of the two pitfalls of
foundationalism and relativism.

Naturalists often conceive of objectivity in terms of certainty—some indubitable

pure experience or bedrock appeal to commonsense (this is likely due to the
effect of a certain vision of the natural sciences on epistemology). When
certainty proves impossible because of the holistic nature of beliefs, the
response is too often to swing toward an exaggerated relativism. But this is a
mistake. Rather than viewing objectivity in terms of certainty, the foregoing anti-

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naturalist arguments suggest four conclusions about objectivity in the social

sciences. First, because objectivity is ultimately comparative, our knowledge
does not rest on a simple or immediate appeal to some absolute criteria or
access to truth. Objectivity is a feature of comparing entire theoretical webs
with one another. Second, because objectivity is comparative and not absolute,
the claim to truth is always provisional and amounts to a best theory so far.
Because of the nature of beliefs, human knowledge never achieves an absolute
terminus or endpoint. Third, because our terms are provisional, we must always
remain reasonably open to the possibility that either a new theory (or an old
theory rethought) will reclaim superiority. In this way, objectivity takes the form
of an ongoing dialectical and historical process as opposed to an ahistorical
game of once-and-for-all or winner-take-all definitive proof. Finally, a
comparative form of objectivity appeals to the local, practical reasoning of
situated agents. That is, social scientists and others do not decide what theory is
better from outside of the historical process. Rather, they appraise the
objectivity of theories in light of the best alternative on hand. In this sense, the
best theory is not a flawless one, but simply one that represents a clear gain
over whatever else is on offer at a given time and place.

Some readers might be disappointed with anti-naturalism’s account of

objectivity because the goal of certainty seems so much more appealing. But it is
worth recalling that not even the natural sciences make claims to finality. To the
contrary, natural scientists often emphasize that their theories are simply the
best devised so far. In this regard, the mistake has been the quest for certainty.
And yet in domains like social and political theory the fear of relativism and
irrationalism has led some philosophers to call for a return to foundationalist
models of truth as the only bulwark against intellectual (p.60) nihilism. Allan
Bloom’s polemical The Closing of the American Mind is one of many such books
proposing a return to foundationalist certainties and away from the threats of
modern relativism.35 We hope we have shown readers that such reactions are an
exaggerated fear of inexistent bogeymen. In fact, it is often the very search for
foundationalist certainty that fuels a disappointed turn to relativism. Too often
relativists are nothing more than disappointed foundationalists. By contrast, the
future of interpretive social science rests with those who carry forth a
humanistic and historicist research agenda, justifying their theories in light of
shared facts and comparative assessments. Anti-naturalism therefore avoids the
dual threats of absolutism and relativism.

Critique
Objectivity, according to anti-naturalism, is a function of comparison. Appeals
are made not to absolute criteria, but to relative gains or losses in occupying one
position over another. Now we add that insofar as objectivity consists in making
arguments about the relative rationality versus irrationality of holding particular
positions, it has an inescapable evaluative streak. As anti-naturalist philosophers
have noted, there is an ad hominem dimension to this kind of objectivity insofar
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Philosophical debates

as it is directly aimed at the holders of some theory X, and rests on the claim
that “whatever else turns out to be true, you can improve your epistemic
position by moving from X to Y.”36 In this way, theories in social science are
justified by the comparative truth or falsity of rivals. Moreover, because political
actors are inevitably guided (whether implicitly or explicitly) by some kind of
theory about social reality, social scientific theories are always closely tied to the
critique of the rationality guiding actual political actors.

This is an argument we will return to and elaborate upon at far greater length in
our discussion of ethics and the fact–value dichotomy. For now it is important to
emphasize that this anti-naturalist line of reasoning runs directly against the
grain of much mainstream social science, which maintains that social research is
more or less independent of the project of political and normative critique. Yet
anti-naturalism also challenges the value-neutrality latent in both ahistorical and
anti-humanist forms of social science that otherwise support an interpretive
turn. Old-style phenomenologists, for instance, defended the naturalist doctrine
that scientists must cultivate a stance of value-neutrality. These theorists
contrasted the disengaged objectivity of the scientist with the normatively
engaged perspective of ordinary political actors. In this vein, Schutz wrote that
the social scientist must be a “disinterested scientific onlooker of the social
world,” who limits him or herself to trying to observe, describe, and classify
social reality “with the same detached equanimity as physicists contemplate
their experiments.”37

(p.61) But arguably a kind of value-neutrality has also crept in from time to
time in the work of post-structuralists like Foucault. This may be surprising
because it is undoubtedly true that Foucault is extremely sensitive to the
pervasiveness of normativity within social theory. Indeed, his many inquiries into
the intersection of knowledge and power have often illuminated how normativity
and science are subtly intertwined. Nevertheless, various scholars have
plausibly suggested that especially in his early, archaeological period, Foucault
had a tendency to slide into the mode of writing as if from a completely
descriptive, even ideological neutral vantage point.38 For example, this tendency
is evident in Foucault’s method of “archaeological description” as a way of
unearthing the “systematic description of a discourse-object” as well as his
bracketing of questions of normativity and ideology.39 Once again, this is partly
the result of Foucault’s anti-humanist campaign to eliminate the subject in favor
of impersonal explanatory structures like discourses and epistemes. For, once
human reality has been reduced to these “discourse-objects,” it seems that more
or less straight value-neutral description might be attainable.

In contrast to this flirtation with value-neutrality, anti-naturalism recognizes that

critical evaluation is never completely separable from social research. Rather,
social scientists must remain sensitive to evaluative or critical features of their
research in at least two ways. First, as we already noted, comparative forms of

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Philosophical debates

objectivity as ad hominem imply that ideology critique is to some degree implicit

whenever we claim that a rival’s social and political theory is defective. Because
the social sciences study people who are themselves guided by some theory of
social reality, social science necessarily clashes and has some critical purchase
over the actors it studies. Charles Taylor has argued that explanatory concepts
in the social sciences are shot through with evaluation because they inevitably
assume some norm of what counts as rational human agency.40 We develop this
argument at length with specific examples later. But for now the point is that
because explanations in the social sciences always assume some idea of what
counts as a legitimate or illegitimate, rational or irrational, normal or abnormal
human action, they imply an evaluative picture. As Taylor puts it, explanations in
the social sciences necessarily include some kind of “value slope.”41

Second, and related, anti-naturalist approaches in particular are inherently

critical of political ideologies that are guided by philosophically incompatible
assumptions, notably those premised on theories purporting foundationalist
truth. Note that this does not mean that anti-naturalist approaches are
determinate of a specific political viewpoint. To the contrary, anti-naturalism
implies a critical deconstruction of any version of an ideology (from fascism to
communism to liberalism) that claims justification on foundationalist grounds.
Likewise, anti-naturalism is compatible with any ideology that is able to justify
itself on its epistemological terms. But social scientists do need to remain alive
to the ways anti-naturalism is inherently critical of scientism, (p.62)
foundationalism, and other frameworks that might be used to justify particular
political ideologies, practices, institutions, authority, and other forms of power.
This will be discussed at length in later chapters in terms of anti-naturalism’s
critique of technocratic forms of political power.

We have argued that social scientists would do best to navigate debates within
the interpretive turn by adopting an anti-naturalist philosophical framework. In
the case of human subjectivity, this means social scientists should think of
human agency as situated, capable of creative agency while always embedded in
historical traditions. This situated view of human agency, moreover, suggests
that social scientists employ historical, narrative forms of explanation that
remain sensitive to the contingent reasons why agents form and inherit
particular beliefs. Anti-naturalist philosophy also helps social scientists avoid the
two pitfalls of foundationalist certainty and skeptical relativism. Rather,
objectivity is possible in the social sciences through comparing rival theories.
Finally, anti-naturalism points to a social science that is normatively engaged
and critical—this means moving beyond the naturalist assumption that inquiry
must be value-free. Indeed, social scientists should remain alive to the various
ways in which all forms of social explanation involve comparative judgments that
concern questions of rationality, irrationality, and ideology. Neither should they
forget that anti-naturalism itself is philosophically incompatible with, and
therefore implicitly critical of, absolutist forms of justification of political and
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Philosophical debates

moral life. In sum, the future of interpretive social science is humanist,

historicist, objective, and critical. All these themes will be elaborated and
explained in greater complexity in the coming chapters—opening up a wide
horizon of possible research for social scientists and political theorists. Anti-
naturalism will also provide the starting point for clarifying how the substantive
research of working social scientists—methodologically, empirically, normatively,
and in public policy—needs to be thoroughly reconceived.

Notes:
(1.) See: Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols.
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973); George Psathas, ed.,
Phenomenological Sociology (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1973).

(2.) Cf. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 225.

(3.) For Husserl in particular “to buttress humanistic science with natural
science so as to make it supposedly exact is absurd.” Edmund Husserl, “The
Attitude of Natural Science and the Attitude of Humanistic Science, Appendix
III” and “Vienna Lecture, Appendix I,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1970) 326, 272. Also, Brian Fay has written an insightful
historical summary of phenomenology and meaning in the social sciences, which
we are indebted to here: Brian Fay, “Phenomenology and Social Inquiry: From
Consciousness to Culture and Critique,” in The Blackwell Guide to the
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, eds. Stephen Turner and Paul Roth (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2003) 42–63.

(4.) Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 184–5.

(5.) Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh
and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967) 69,
cf. 31–44, 69–71. It is well known but important to note that late in his career
Schutz grew increasingly skeptical of Husserl’s transcendental subject.

(6.) Cf. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-

Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press,
1977) 142, 153.

(7.) Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan

Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 2010) 55, 122, 125, 203, 205.

(8.) Foucault, “Truth and Power,” interview by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale
Pasquino in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–
1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 117.

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(9.) Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” in Philosophy and the
Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985) 169–70.

(10.) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 95.

(11.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002) 205–8.

(12.) For further discussion see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev.
ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum,
2004) II:1.

(13.) Alfred Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,” in
Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, eds. Dorothy Emmet and
Alasdair MacIntyre (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970) 12.

(14.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 16–17.

(15.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 17.

(16.) Cf. Alfred Schutz, “The Problem of Rationality in the Social World,” in
Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, 96–7; Thomas Luckmann,
“Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life,” in Phenomenology and the Social
Sciences, vol. 1, 174, 179, 180. For a powerful critique of phenomenology’s
flirtation with ahistorical, natural kinds see: Richard Bernstein, The
Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1978) 158–61.

(17.) Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 63.

(18.) Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 122.

(19.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995) 27–8.

(20.) Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 94–5.

(21.) Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” interview by Alain

Grosrichard and others, in Power/Knowledge, 199.

(22.) Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human
Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard
Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970) 249.

(23.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26–7.

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Philosophical debates

(24.) Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 225.

(25.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 10.

(26.) Schutz, “Concept and Theory Formation,” 17.

(27.) David Bidney, “Phenomenological Method and the Anthropological Science

of the Cultural Life-World,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. 1,
134, 136.

(28.) For an extended technical discussion of the problem of appealing to pure

senses see: Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in
The Essential Davidson, eds. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2006) 225–41.

(29.) Alfred Schutz, “Common-Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human

Action,” in Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice
Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967) 5.

(30.) Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 131. See also: Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in
Power/Knowledge, 93; Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 150.

(31.) Cf. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. In the analytic context a similar

case for incommensurability has also been defended by: Thomas Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).

(32.) See for example: Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:
Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1983); Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative
and the Philosophy of Science,” in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays,
Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Charles Taylor,
“Explanation and Practical Reason,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 34–60.

(33.) For a standard reference book on these debates see the essays in: Michael
E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the
Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996).

(34.) Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” 51.

(35.) Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987).

(36.) Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” 54.

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Philosophical debates

(37.) Alfred Schutz, “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology,” in Collected

Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Broderson (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1964) 92; Schutz, “The Problem of Rationality in the Social World,” 94.
Schutz’s hostility toward normative critique in social science was also taken up
by his followers. So, for example, David Bidney recommended that
ethnographers employ a “method of cultural relativism” in which they remained
“impartial” when recording the “subjective life-world of a particular society.”
Bidney, “Phenomenological Method,” 137.

(38.) Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and

Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1:3 (1981): 272–87; Taylor,
“Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” 182.

(39.) Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 140; Foucault, “Truth and

Power,” 118.

(40.) Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” in Philosophy and the Human

Science: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
58–90.

(41.) Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” 73.

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Concept formation

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Concept formation
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords

Concept formation is inescapable because social scientists cannot study political
reality without making tacit assumptions about the basic relevant concepts. An
anti-naturalist approach offers a distinctive form of concept formation, one that
avoids naturalist distortions like essentialism, reification, and instrumentalism.
In order to make this case, this chapter draws on some of the most influential
political science methodology literature as well as top research programs of
empirical political science (including critical discussions of voter behavior, the
study of so-called “contentious politics,” democratic peace, and selectorate
theory, to name a few). The chapter concludes by elaborating on the way that an
interpretive social science forges concepts that are sensitive to meanings and
human agency.

Keywords:   interpretive concepts, anti-essentialism, voter behavior, contentious politics, critique of

democratic peace theory

Philosophy matters to the social sciences. Indeed, it matters so much that

working social scientists ignore the philosophical lessons of anti-naturalism at
the risk of compromising their empirical work. So far we have argued that
philosophical reflection can help philosophers and social scientists distinguish
between naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches, while also establishing the
superiority of a historicist and humanistic form of inquiry. Our anti-naturalist
framework serves as a coherent, systematic starting point for the interpretive
turn that avoids some of the problems with rival justifications for this move. To
be clear, as established in Chapters 2 and 3, social scientists might continue to

Page 1 of 25
Concept formation

favor a particular philosophical tradition (e.g., pragmatism, phenomenology,

post-structuralism, analytic philosophy, social constructivism) but our anti-
naturalist framework helps clarify what pitfalls should be avoided by adherents
to the interpretive turn. Philosophical pluralism is possible in this qualified
respect. What is not possible is a coherent or legitimate philosophical pluralism
between naturalism and anti-naturalism. This chapter will further clarify and
deepen our account of the basic logical incompatibility and why social scientists
and all those wishing to explain human behavior should be deeply concerned.

We would now like to show how the basic concepts used to describe and explain
social reality can either take a naturalist or anti-naturalist bent.1 This means
that neutrality about philosophy in empirical work is impossible. Social scientists
might ignore philosophy but this does not free them from philosophical
commitments and responsibilities. Our task is to draw off the arguments made
so far in order to demonstrate the problems with naturalist concept formation
and offer an anti-naturalist alternative for empirical research. In particular we
will focus on recent developments in the methodological debates in political
science—though these discussions will clearly have much broader implications.

In the last two decades concept formation has received significant attention
from qualitative political science methodologists such as Giovanni Sartori and
David Collier. These methodologists have articulated perhaps the most
sophisticated defense of a qualitative approach to concept formation to date.
And yet their treatment of concept formation remains entangled in certain
philosophical problems. Although Collier’s approach to concept formation is
more flexible than Sartori’s, both men remain attached to philosophical
naturalism. Specifically, we will claim that a lingering philosophical naturalism
has inspired leading political science methodologists to slip into three kinds of
(p.66) faulty concept formation, which we will analyze in detail: reification,
essentialism, and linguistic instrumentalism.

As part of our discussion of Sartori and Collier, we will also survey how these
faulty types of concept formation are evident in some of the most prominent
research programs of empirical political science. We will then conclude by
proposing an alternative set of anti-naturalist descriptive and explanatory
concepts. By the end of the chapter, the reader should have a clear sense of the
drawbacks of naturalist concept formation and the virtues of an anti-naturalist
alternative for empirical inquiry.

Reification
In previous chapters we explained why anti-naturalists believe that social reality
is expressive of the webs of meaning of creative human agents. But not everyone
conceives of language and social reality in this way. Indeed, the reification of
social science concepts is the result of neglecting the holistic nature of beliefs
and meanings and instead rendering social reality as if it were composed of

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mere things. Reified concepts are attractive to some researchers because they
allow for a vision of social reality as free of interpretive controversy. Meanings
always involve hermeneutic conflicts over how to relate constituent beliefs and
actions to wider narrative wholes. By contrast, the allure of treating social
reality as consisting of mere things is that ostensibly these can be verified with
little interpretive debate, and then perhaps plugged into the mechanistic and
law-like models of explanation inspired by the natural sciences. For example,
political scientists studying American voter behavior might reify demographic
concepts like “age,” “race,” or “social class” by not taking into account how
members of those demographic groups actually construe the significance of
their social situation or the variant cultural meanings informing these terms.
Once this has been accomplished, age, race, class, and other such demographic
facts can then be correlated and eventually formed into supposedly law-like
causal explanations.2 In this way, reification is one of the building blocks of a
certain widespread approach to the naturalist project in the social sciences.

We will illustrate this series of points using the case of American voter behavior
in greater detail below. But first we must engage the methodological writings of
Sartori and Collier in order to clarify how the reification of concepts can take
one of two forms. The first form we will call brute fact reification. This type of
reification occurs whenever social scientists strip their concepts of meanings
and instead present them as brute facts—demographic, biological, social, or
otherwise. This approach is found in the methodological writings of Sartori.

(p.67) Sartori’s 1991 essay, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” champions a

naturalist vision of social science, whose goal is “law-like generalizations
endowed with explanatory power.”3 Yet, according to Sartori, comparative
political science has not yet achieved this goal due to an approach to concept
formation that does not allow for proper classifications. In particular, Sartori
claims that comparative politics has created “cat-dogs,” or
misconceptualizations that have led political scientists astray by referring to
phenomena that do not exist.4

Sartori’s response to this problem appears in his influential edited volume,

Social Science Concepts. Despite this volume’s approving reference to anti-
naturalist philosophy (specifically the work of Charles Taylor), it in fact carries
out a naturalist approach to concept formation.5 In particular, Sartori commits
the error of reification when he defines a concept’s referent as “whatever is out
there before or beyond mental and linguistic apprehension.”6 The problem is
that Sartori’s definition of a referent draws a sharp distinction between the
meanings and language of our mental states and the social phenomena of the
world. In doing so, he excludes the constitutive role of meanings in the actions
and practices that comprise social life. Instead, he treats actions and social
phenomena as if they were something different from individuals’ meanings and
beliefs. In this way, Sartori’s approach to concepts displays a brute fact form of

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reification, in which social objects are not properly distinguished from mere
physical things. Indeed, his theory of concept formation does not adequately
discriminate between the referents of concepts in the social sciences and
physical objects.

However, a number of the contributors to Sartori’s Social Science Concepts also

discuss concepts that explicitly refer to meanings and beliefs. But unfortunately
even these concepts are naturalistic, exhibiting a second type of atomistic
reification. This kind of reification occurs when meanings are given a role in the
conceptualization of social life but there is a neglect of their holistic nature.
Such reified concepts neglect the holistic nature of meanings and create
concepts that fit within naturalist explanations as independent variables. For
example, Glenda Patrick’s chapter defines political culture in a way that clearly
includes meanings as a “set of fundamental beliefs, values and attitudes that
characterize the nature of the political system and regulate the political
interactions among its members.”7 However, at the same time she molds her
concept of “political culture” to fit with naturalist explanations, even going so far
as to explicitly endorse Carl Hempel’s naturalist analysis of concepts as
designed to “permit the establishment of general laws” and allow events to be
“explained and predicted and thus scientifically understood.”8

This naturalist reification of concepts is also present in the work of a leading

qualitative methodologist, David Collier. At first glance, Collier appears less
wedded to naturalism than Sartori. For example, Collier identifies interpretive
inquiry as one of three sub-categories of small-N comparative analysis, and also
calls for sensitivity to contextual diversity in comparative analysis.9 (p.68)
However, Collier’s underlying naturalism is plainly evident in his coedited book
with Henry Brady. For instance, in the glossary written by Collier and Jason
Seawright, “interpretation” and “explanation” are given contrasting definitions,
as if they were different activities entirely. Here interpretation is defined as “a
description…of the meaning of human behavior from the standpoint of
individuals whose behavior is being observed,” while explanation is defined in
familiar naturalist terms, as an activity making use of dependent and
independent variables.10

Collier thus occupies a position within the methodological literature in which he

embraces naturalism in spite of the fact that he recognizes the constitutive role
of meanings in social reality, the historical contingency of social science
concepts, and even warns against the dangers of reification.11 Indeed, Collier
and his coauthor, Robert Adcock, define the danger of reification as “the mistake
of overstating the degree to which the attributes one seeks to conceptualize
cohere as if they were like an object.”12 This definition of reification sees it as a
neglect of contingency, or the danger of understanding social phenomena as
unchanging objects rather than within an historical flux. But although the
neglect of contingency is certainly a related problem, anti-naturalists believe

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that the key feature of reification consists of stripping the objects denoted by
social science concepts of holistic meanings and beliefs. What Collier’s
discussion of reification misses is the way that social science concepts must
refer to objects constituted in part by meanings or beliefs.

This slide into naturalist reification is evident in Collier’s coauthored work with
Steven Levitsky on concepts of democracy in comparative research. This essay
tries to determine how appropriate various definitions of democracy are when
applied to differing historical and geopolitical contexts. Notably, Collier and
Levitsky argue that a “procedural minimum” definition of democracy is
insufficient in several Latin American countries where civilian government, even
when freely elected, is without the effective power to rule. In such cases, they
believe that political scientists would need to add effective power to rule to the
procedural minimum definition of democracy.13 But although Collier and
Levitsky display sensitivity to context, they ignore the meanings of the specific
actors involved in the democracies in question. Their conceptualization of
democracy is thus devoid of agents’ meanings as constitutive of actions and as
crucial to the contextual diversity. Nor is this concept of democracy sufficiently
embedded in a particular tradition and recognized as in conflict with other
traditions of democracy. Rather, they treat the problem of properly
conceptualizing democracy as one of adding or subtracting the right reified
attributes in the quasi-ahistorical space of a political science lab. In this regard,
no less than Sartori, they commit themselves to a naturalistic reification of
concepts.

So far we have noted how reification occurs in the methodological literature on

concept formation. But it is also important to see that it surfaces in actual
empirical research. For instance, many American political scientists maintain
there is a strong correlation between a certain (reified) concept of human age
(p.69) and the motivation to vote in presidential elections.14 John Mark Hansen
and Steven Rosenstone, for example, have attempted to identify the “causes”
and “personal determinants” of voter participation.15 Gathering data on voter
turnout for American presidential elections from 1956 to 1988, Rosenstone and
Hansen discovered that participation among the oldest citizens was twenty-nine
percentage points higher than among the youngest. This in part led them to
conclude that “as people grow older, their involvement in American politics
deepens.”16

Undoubtedly there is much that is of empirical value in Rosenstone and

Hansen’s work. They have certainly sketched an important set of relations that
exist within recent American politics. However, the problem is that Rosenstone
and Hansen’s concept of age is reified. How so? Age, in this study, is often
presented as a more or less brute thing (e.g., the mere fact of “being eighteen”)
and not as a phenomenon constituted by holistic meanings and significance for
particular individuals. Moreover, these reified concepts are in service of a

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naturalist agenda. The goal is for political scientists to correlate this brute
biological notion of “age” as a mere thing with other ostensibly brute facts in the
hope that some more fundamental causal inference can be achieved. What starts
with the seeming innocence of descriptive correlations ends with attempts to
frame mechanistic causal laws. In this way, the reified fact of age plays a key
role in the effort to model and predict voter behavior via naturalist explanations.

By contrast, anti-naturalists insist that the political significance of age is

necessarily the result of particular contexts of meaning and belief. Thus,
although the mere biological fact of being a certain age undoubtedly exists, this
does not yet give researchers any sense of the relevance of this fact for political
and social life. Rather, in order to grasp the political significance of biological
age, social scientists must engage the holistic webs of meaning and belief of
particular actors.

In this vein, an anti-naturalist-inspired critique of Rosenstone and Hansen might

point to enclaves of elderly Americans that are either highly apathetic or
antagonistic to voting (for example, the last remnants of the “turn on, tune in,
drop out” generation). Similarly, they might point to segments of American youth
that have become politically energized and enthusiastic voters (perhaps clubs of
young Democrats or young Republicans on college campuses). The point of such
counterexamples would be to show that there is no unmediated fact of “being
sixty-five” or “being eighteen” that determines voter behavior. Instead, what is
relevant to social science is how the biological fact of being a given age is
interpreted by different individuals and groups. This implies that the political
significance of being a certain age (or any other demographic fact) is always
grafted into a wider web of meanings. The interpreted significance or meaning
of what appear to otherwise be brute facts in the social sciences must not be
ignored.

Of course, defenders of Rosenstone and Hansen might respond by arguing that

there is no need to neglect meanings in this way. Such defenders might (p.70)
concede that although treating the political significance of biological age as a
reified fact is a mistake, nevertheless the concept of age can be modified to
make reference to meanings and beliefs. Indeed, something like this is what
Rosenstone and Hansen do when they consider various possible hypotheses for
how aging causally influences voter turnout. After weighing three possible
hypotheses, these authors decide to treat the meaning of age on the “life-
experience hypothesis,” which holds that “as people grow older…they
accumulate information, skills, and attachments that help them to overcome the
costs of political involvement.”17 In other words, the political significance or
meaning of age is that experience gradually comes to outweigh the sacrifices
involved in voting.

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But the problem here (similar to Glenda Patrick’s work above) is that the
concept of age is still being made to serve and fit within a naturalist formation.
Indeed, although meanings are now referenced within the concept of age, this is
still done while excluding the holistic beliefs of the actual agents involved. What
if the meanings of age are defined by being part of a clique of young people
actively involved in politics (e.g., the Hitler Youth)? Or what if instead, a given
milieu of the elderly depoliticize because they believe all is lost in the current
country’s polity? Of course, it might be that the meaning of increased
participation has to do with a certain set of contingent developments within
American history where aging allowed for more civic engagement. But this
would have to be grasped and conceptualized by wrestling with the meanings of
actual agents in the culture—not stipulated free of any connection to the webs of
belief constituting actual social reality. Thus, the concrete meanings and beliefs
constituting political reality cannot be ignored. In this regard, there is a
lingering reification that persists. Rosenstone and Hansen have simply shifted
from a brute fact reification to a slightly more defensible atomistic kind.

Of course, none of this excludes the possibility that anti-naturalists might accept
Rosenstone and Hansen’s finding that older Americans voted in higher numbers
between 1956 and 1988. Indeed, as a starting point, Rosenstone and Hansen’s
work gathering data about American elections is a substantive and valuable
contribution to social science research. But anti-naturalists would insist that the
conceptual grid imposed on social reality is causing neglect of holistic webs and
leading to some disfigurations. Moreover, the actual work of explanation is yet to
be done as no narrative has been constructed that grasps the beliefs and
meanings of these groups that generate their actions.

Essentialism
Reification results when social scientists ignore the constitutive role of holistic
meanings and beliefs from the concepts they use to denote social reality. (p.71)
Essentialism, by contrast, is the result of stripping away the historical
specificity from concepts. Anti-naturalist philosophy implies that meanings and
actions are historically contingent and can only be understood in particular
contexts or life-worlds. By contrast, naturalism promotes the view that essential
attributes occur cross-temporally and cross-culturally, transcending historical
contingency. Freed of specificity, essentialist concepts are designed to capture
historical and cultural constants, which might then form the basis for naturalist
causal explanations.

Generally speaking, essentialism in social science takes either a “strong” or

“weak” form. Strong essentialism typically posits a fixed core of common traits
that must be present for the concept to apply. Concepts in this view are built on
a logic of commonality. Weak essentialism, on the other hand, allows for a
spectrum of variation in core traits. We will look in more detail at both strong
and weak essentialism, first in the context of the methodological literature, and

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then with an example from empirical research. Again this approach reveals the
way that naturalist philosophical assumptions inform and mar even some of the
best work conducted by contemporary social scientists.

We have already seen that Sartori’s concept formation is naturalist insofar as it

reifies the objects of social science. But Sartori is also committed to essentialism
of the strong type. Sartori’s strong essentialism is evident in his “Rule 7,”
according to which “the connotation [or intension] and the denotation [or
extension] of a concept are inversely related.”18 Rule 7 (also called the “ladder
of abstraction”) implies that the greater the number of attributes that comprise
a concept’s intension, the smaller the number of empirical cases that comprise
its extension, and vice versa. In this way, Sartori implies that when a concept is
applied to new cases, if those cases do not share the core features shared by
previous cases, the validity of the concept diminishes.

Sartori’s Rule 7 thus expresses a logic of commonality that makes it strongly

essentialist. It subtracts from social science concepts any contextual and
historical specificity. Of course, Sartori might reply that he allows for diversity of
context by forming varied concepts at a “low level of abstraction.”19 But even
forming concepts at such low levels still assumes that they are defined by
essential properties or at least core commonalities. And any diversity of context
would appear only in the spaces between such concepts. Sartori’s
conceptualization of social reality thus remains a strong form of naturalist
essentialism.

By contrast, Collier’s treatment of contextual specificity is subtler, and thus

requires greater attention. In an essay coauthored with James Mahon, Collier
tackles the problem of how to adapt social science concepts to fit a variety of
contexts without weakening their explanatory or classificatory power. Collier
and Mahon conceive of this as the problem of allowing for “conceptual traveling
(the application of concepts to new cases)” without suffering “conceptual
stretching (the impairment that occurs when a concept does not fit the new
cases).”20

(p.72) Collier and Mahon begin by adopting Sartori’s strategy of avoiding

conceptual stretching by allowing for an essentialist core concept that is
preserved in new contexts by what they rename as an ascending “ladder of
generality.”21 Tellingly, Collier and Mahon adopt Sartori’s strategy specifically in
response to the concerns of “scholars committed to an ‘interpretive’
perspective.”22 But even when trying to address interpretive concerns, they are
in fact aligning themselves with the essentialism we already saw in Sartori’s
approach.

But Collier and Mahon also attempt to go beyond Sartori’s treatment of

concepts, as they claim the latter will only avoid conceptual stretching in certain

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“classical categories.” Two other types of concepts they consider are “radial
categories” and “family resemblance categories.” Radial categories echo the
strong essentialism of classical categories, as they are defined in terms of
certain core attributes (or a “central subcategory”) that comprise a prototype.
This prototype is then said to apply in actual cases only in combination with
other “noncentral subcategories” such that relevant cases may share core
attributes with the prototype but not with each other.23

However, “family resemblance categories” mark the deepest attempt by Collier

and Mahon to break from naturalistic, essentialist concepts. Particularly
promising is their attempt to recover “Wittgenstein’s idea of family
resemblance” as a “category of membership different from that of classical
categories, in that there may be no single attribute that category members all
share.”24 The authors try to apply the notion of family resemblances as
commonalities shared in varying degrees by a genetic group, in contrast with
nonfamily members who may share few of these traits: “the commonalities are
quite evident, even though there may be no trait that all family members, as
family members, have in common.”25 Collier and Mahon’s use of family
resemblance concepts presents a significant improvement over Sartori insofar as
it shows they recognize that a principle of mutual fit between a given concept
and various cases is too rigid for the social sciences. However, their analysis of
family resemblance concepts is ultimately flawed, as it pulls them away from
Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialism and toward the essentialism of a naturalistic
social science.

Collier and Mahon’s break from Wittgenstein becomes clear once we draw a
distinction between two senses of the concept of “family resemblance.” On the
one side, a family denotes a clearly demarcated group that contrasts with
nonfamily members; but, on the other, a family might instead be considered a
dynamic set of relations with adoptive, honorary, and step members. Collier and
Mahon use the “family” metaphor in the former, essentialist sense, while
Wittgenstein used the metaphor in the second, anti-essentialist sense. Indeed,
Wittgenstein was skeptical about the ability to draw a sharp boundary around all
family members.26

For Wittgenstein, family resemblances lack any single, fixed set of attributes to
begin with, and therefore the problem of conceptual stretching doesn’t even (p.
73) arise as there is nothing to stretch. Instead, Wittgenstein’s notion of a
family resemblance allows for potentially limitless empirical diversity, in which
concepts must always be considered within specific contexts. By contrast, Collier
and Mahon commit themselves to a weak essentialism insofar as they insist on
clearly identifiable commonalities. This is also why Collier and Mahon must
consider conceptual stretching as a central problem even in family resemblance
concepts.

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But Collier and Mahon’s essentialism also appears in their proposed solutions to
the problem of conceptual stretching. They attempt to allow for concepts that
can capture greater empirical diversity by “emphasiz[ing] that the category is an
analytic construct which the researcher should not expect to be a perfect
description of each case,” and also by “identifying attributes that are present to
varying degrees in particular cases, rather than being simply present or
absent.”27 But this effort at diversity is undermined by their insistence that
social scientists not violate the requirement of evident commonalities. Indeed,
this insistence is precisely what keeps Collier and Mahon’s analysis trapped
within a weak form of essentialism.

Underlying this refusal to follow Wittgenstein’s more radically thoroughgoing

anti-essentialism is once again a commitment to naturalism, which demands
concepts that will function within general, causal explanations. For if the cases a
concept covers do not share a common attribute, social scientists will not be
able to posit a common cause. Instead, they would have to use family
resemblance concepts to reference the particular origins of overlapping cases.
The latter, anti-essentialist strategy is characteristic of a more hermeneutic
approach to concept formation, which we will return to shortly.

At present, however, the key point is to see how naturalism generates an

essentialist distortion of social science concept formation. Once again, this
distortion is not limited to the methodological literature, but can be found in
high-profile empirical research. Strong essentialism is apparent, for example, in
the influential study of “contentious politics” advanced by Charles Tilly, Doug
McAdam, and Sidney Tarrow. This research is worthy of singling out not only
because of its prominence but also because the very field of “contentious
politics” is framed in such a way that it presupposes a strong form of
essentialism.

The concept of contentious politics is strongly essentialist insofar as it

presupposes the ability to capture the core features of what are otherwise
disparate and heterogeneous political phenomena. Specifically, contentious
politics is said to include phenomena as different as social movements, strikes,
revolutions, nationalism, and democratization, to name only a few. According to
Tilly, McAdam, and Tarrow, what the items on this list share is a nucleus of fixed
features rendering them all cases of contentious politics. These core features
include that all phenomena in this class are “episodic,” “public,” and involve
collective interaction between two claimants, at least one of (p.74) which is a
government.28 Contentious politics is thus defined by a logic of commonality that
allows social scientists to include or exclude particular cases on the basis of
whether they exhibit these core features.29

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For example, consider the criteria that all forms of political contention must be
episodic. True to the logic of strong essentialism, this feature is used to exclude
all political phenomena that exhibit regularity. Thus, regularly recurring actions
like elections, parliamentary debates, and associational meetings are all placed
by Tilly and company outside the boundary lines of the concept of contentious
politics. Indeed, because of their regularity, not even the most embattled
elections are instances of contentious politics. Likewise, an essentialist logic
informs Tilly, McAdam, and Tarrow’s criterion that politically contentious
phenomena be public. In this case, the aim is to exclude from the concept any
actions that occur inside “well-bounded organizations, including churches and
firms.”30

Some readers may have already guessed the reasons why an anti-naturalist
approach rejects the strong essentialism upon which the concept of contentious
politics is based. Because anti-naturalists believe that actions are expressive of
historically specific webs of meaning, they are skeptical of claims to the
existence of a universal class of action, which transcends historical and cultural
context. Indeed, they would argue that the attempt to posit this universal class
runs the risk of hiding the very beliefs and actions social scientists wish to bring
to light. Because human beliefs and actions are expressive of contingent
contexts of meaning, the imposition of a nucleus of essential features eclipses
the true object of study. Rather than helping describe the social world, this
search for a logic of commonality instead leads to problems such as
anachronism, ethnocentrism, and other such forms of misunderstanding. The
strongly essentialist formation of concepts like contentious politics thus clashes
with and occludes empirical reality. The process by which the essentialist core is
articulated by political scientists is itself part of the stream of history. So, the
historically contingent beliefs of political scientists run the risk of being
mistaken for universal meanings. One limited set of meanings (those of the
political scientist) are imposed. In the case of the study of radically alien
cultures, this means that the social scientist’s own beliefs disfigure that of the
actual life-world being investigated. Strong essentialism almost inevitably sets
up social scientists for misinterpretations in which their own views are being
studied and imposed upon others.

Of course, social scientists of a naturalist persuasion might follow Collier and

respond to the above problems by adopting a weak rather than a strong form of
essentialism. So, where strong essentialism struggles to account for the sheer
diversity and complexity of political reality, weak essentialism tries to fashion
concepts that allow for stretching across a spectrum. Such a weak essentialism
plays a key role in democratic peace theory, which is often touted as one of
modern political science’s most solidly scientific findings. This (p.75) theory
argues that two democratic regimes are far less likely to engage in warfare with
one another than other pairs of regimes. Bruce Russett and Zeev Maoz advanced

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a seminal defense of this thesis by employing weak essentialist concepts in order

to differentiate democratic from authoritarian regimes.

Adopting a numeric grading scale, Russett and Maoz allowed for a spectrum of
how democratic versus authoritarian actual regimes might be. The regimes in
question were then to be graded on the basis of certain essential core criteria,
like competitiveness of political participation and constraints on the chief
executive. On one extreme, a score of minus 100 represented the most
authoritarian regime, while on another a plus 100 represented the most
democratic. The lower threshold for classing regimes as democratic was plus 30
and the upper threshold for judging them authoritarian was minus 25. As
Russett and Maoz observed, such a grading scale allowed that in empirical
reality “a state can have mixed characteristics” where “some features may be
democratic at the same time that others are highly autocratic.”31 Nevertheless,
these conceptualizations of democratic versus authoritarian regimes were also
essentialist insofar as they remained defined by core features considered to
migrate from context to context.32 In this way, democratic peace theorists
attempted to stretch their concepts across the sheer complexity and nuance of
the actual empirical world, without giving up on the basic essentialist logic of
commonality.

Yet it is precisely the retention of a logic of commonality that renders weak

essentialism vulnerable to the same objections that face strong essentialism.
Namely, what drops out of weak essentialism is the particularity of historical
context. Essentialist concepts hide the actual historical contexts that are
constitutive of the social world. Concepts that are meant to make social and
political reality more readily visible actually end up doing the opposite, creating
blind spots.

By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy reveals that democracy, authoritarianism,

and other features of social reality are never natural or essential types, with
recurring nuclei of features. Rather, both democracy and authoritarianism are
the result of historically contingent meanings expressed in the beliefs, actions,
and practices of particular individuals and their societies. Whether a given
regime of populist, ultranationalist rhetoric and racial hatred is authoritarian
cannot be established by identifying ahistorical core features. Rather, it requires
engagement with the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. Social scientists must
consider particular beliefs within a wider web that forms a historical context.
Ultimately, the answer to the question: “Was this or that ultranationalist
movement authoritarian/fascist or not?” cannot be removed from the domain of
interpretive disputes. This does not mean that objectively better or worse
answers are unavailable (to the contrary, we already argued that objectivity is
still very much possible in comparative terms). But it does mean that social
scientists cannot attain the sort of descriptive core of (p.76) uncontroversial
features that is sometimes fancied to exist in the natural sciences. Rather than

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pretending to a sphere of absolute scientific vocabulary, political scientists need

to locate themselves in the same medium of meanings, contested traditions, and
concepts employed by ordinary political actors who make no claims to an expert
science.

Linguistic instrumentalism
This last line of thought brings us to a final form of naturalist concept formation:
linguistic instrumentalism. Linguistic instrumentalism occurs whenever social
scientists divorce their concepts from their own language and from the language
of those they study. Rather than letting the concepts of social science arise in
dialogue (through a process of textual, archival, or empirical research),
linguistic instrumentalism attempts to impose a formal language that has been
constructed beforehand.33 This formal language is meant to be shielded from the
life-worlds of both researcher and subject, serving as a neutral instrument or
tool.

The tendency to instrumentalize language once again follows clearly from the
basic ambitions of naturalist philosophy. Naturalism suggests that theory
building in the social sciences is detached and descriptive. Scientific language is
transparent and yields a universal picture of the world. In this view, the task of
the scientist is to carefully build this neutral conceptual language. The more the
language of science can disburden itself of particular viewpoints, the better.

There are two major kinds of linguistic instrumentalism. The first is subject-side
instrumentalism, which results from social scientists blocking out their own
historical situatedness from the construction of concepts. Subject-side
instrumentalism encourages social scientists to purge their concepts of personal
traces of their home culture or life-world, rendering the speech anonymous and
supposedly universal. This kind of instrumentalism is evident in the writings of
Sartori. Specifically, Sartori’s essays focus on the internal dynamics of social
science concepts as an analytic tool. He thus explores the relationship between
term, meaning, and referent; between intension and extension; between
declarative, denotative, precising, operational, and ostensive definitions;
between “accompanying properties” and “defining properties”; and between
homonymy and synonymy.34 But in all of this, Sartori’s analysis of social science
concepts remains completely internalist. That is, he leaves no room for his
readers to consider how the place of the scholar within a particular historical
and cultural world might affect the internal aspects of social science concepts.
In this way, Sartori seems to imply that social scientists occupy a space outside
of any particular historical and cultural context.

(p.77) But Sartori’s subject-side instrumentalism also appears more explicitly

in the way he treats concepts as tools over which social scientists should
exercise not only control, but also separation from their home culture. So,
Sartori seeks to overcome the two “defects” he associates with “natural

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language”: the defect of “ambiguity” in the relationship of a concept’s meaning

to the word that expresses it, and the defect of “vagueness” in the relationship
of a concept’s meaning to its referents.35 These are clear attempts by Sartori to
keep social scientists away from their situatedness within the social world.

By contrast, some methodologists accept that social scientists’ language is

historically situated. For instance, Collier and Adcock affirm that social scientists
are situated in at least two ways: first, they recognize that the meanings of
social science concepts can change from one research agenda or tradition to
another, and, second, they note that normative factors often inform choices of
method.36 In this regard, Collier and Adcock once again present a substantial
advance over Sartori.

Unfortunately, however, Collier and Adcock slip into a second kind of linguistic
instrumentalism, which we will refer to as object-side. Object-side
instrumentalism occurs when social scientists treat the social world as a more or
less mute object, on which the conceptual language of social science can be
superimposed. Object-side instrumentalism neglects the fact that human beings
always have their own language and concepts for explaining beliefs, actions, and
practices. Rather than a dialogue, object-side instrumentalism encourages social
scientists to exclude or at least neglect the self-interpretations of those studied
from an active role within concept formation.

Such object-side instrumentalism is apparent in the following example from

Collier and Adcock’s article. According to Collier and Adcock, social scientists
choosing between dichotomous and graded conceptualizations of democracy can
sometimes justify their choice on the basis of normative concerns.37 In order to
demonstrate how such normative justification works, Collier and Adcock explore
the case of O’Donnell and Schmitter who adopted a dichotomous concept of
democracy in order to capture “what they saw as appropriate targets (neither
too low nor too high) at which political actors should aim in pursuing
democratization.”38 While this example displays Collier and Adcock’s
acknowledgment of the situatedness of the researcher, it also reveals the way in
which they neglect a dialogical form of social science. Collier and Adcock do not
even consider whether O’Donnell and Schmitter adopted their concept of
democracy as a result of taking any account of the beliefs of political actors.
Instead, this normative process of concept formation is presented as self-
referential, with the language of those studied not given a major role or
extended engagement and analysis. In this regard, Collier and Adcock avoid
subject-side instrumentalism but slide into object-side instrumentalism.

These instrumental tendencies within social science concept formation are far
from limited to the methodological writings of Collier and Sartori. Rather, (p.
78) they are found in prominent examples of empirical research. Consider, in
this light, the concepts of so-called “selectorate theory.” Selectorate theory

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Concept formation

adopts rational choice theory’s view of humans as self-interested, preference-

maximizers, in order to explain the organization of political life. The major
advocates of this theory are Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph
Siverson, and James Morrow.39

These theorists begin from the assumption that “the self-interested calculations
and actions of rulers are the driving force of all politics.”40 Politics is then
analyzed in terms of three constituent groups said to face all leaders. The first
group is what these theorists call the “nominal selectorate,” or
“interchangeables,” who have the legal right to select the leader but are not
essential to his or her maintaining power. The second group consists of the “real
selectorate,” or “influentials,” whose support is important to the attainment of
power. The final group is what these authors dub the “winning coalition” or
“essentials,” and is composed of those individuals without whose support it
would be impossible to remain leader. Out of these three constituencies,
selectorate theory then endeavors to explain how politics is chiefly organized
around the rational calculations of self-interested leaders.

Of course, readers might well wish to raise a number of objections to this

selectorate theory of politics (and anti-naturalism implies a number of criticisms,
including the slide into an ahistorical, transcendental subject that is the fiction
of a particular intellectual and ideological tradition). But our purpose at present
is to limit ourselves to seeing how selectorate theory is an example of linguistic
instrumentalism. First, consider the way in which selectorate theory’s concepts
are a form of subject-side instrumentalism, which bars the language and life-
world of the researcher from shaping key concepts. Bueno de Mesquita and
Smith are particularly explicit in this regard, insisting that researchers avoid the
entire “modern vernacular of politics” including all dependence on concepts
arising from ideology, nationality, and culture, in favor of supposedly scientific
concepts like nominal selectorate, interchangeables, influentials, and so on.41
The authors acknowledge that such a self-purging of language is not easy,
requiring thinkers to “step outside of well-entrenched habits of mind, out of
conventional labels” and “into a more precise world of self-interested
thinking.”42 But such a stripping of language is also, they believe, necessary to
the attainment of science. Indeed, selectorate theory insists upon the adoption of
this purportedly neutral language as a clean tool with which to study the social
world.

We have already noted how anti-naturalist philosophy maintains that all human
belief formation occurs against the background of inherited traditions, which
bear particular linguistic, historical, and normative content.43 Social scientists
are no exception to this. Therefore, the attempt to devise an ahistorical
language, free of all tradition, is ultimately self-defeating. Instead, researchers
are better served by reflecting thoughtfully on the sources of (p.79) their own
thought, identifying the traditions they have inherited, and considering the ways

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Concept formation

in which this might be reflected in the construction of their concepts. The point
is not to avoid all jargon or neologisms, but to be consciously self-aware of one’s
own linguistic, philosophical, ideological, and other inheritances. The
construction of an ideal scientific language outside all of history is simply not
possible. Social scientists need to become more comfortable embracing and
reflecting critically on the natural languages of their own communities and how
these will inevitably color their concept formation. This once again implies that
interpretive disputes cannot be eliminated from the social sciences. The
language of the social scientist can be contested by relating it hermeneutically
to other beliefs and meanings. The apparent neutral, universal prestige of
scientific language is not available. As with ordinary citizens, the language of
politics is itself subject to political criticisms.

Yet at this point the objection might be raised that Bueno de Mesquita and Smith
do in fact allow the language of their own home culture to shape at least some
key concepts. After all, their work makes heavy use of concepts like democracy,
dictatorship, and other such distinctions between regimes. The problem here,
however, is that selectorate theory largely vacates these terms of their
traditional meanings. In a telling passage, these authors emphasize the difficulty
of fully purging language of ordinary meanings, but nonetheless encourage
those who study politics to do so to the greatest extent possible:

it is tough to break the habit of talking about democracies and

dictatorships as if either of these terms is sufficient to convey the
differences across regimes…In fact, it is so hard to break that habit that
we will continue to use these terms…but it is important to emphasize that
the term “dictatorship” really means a government based on a particularly
small number of essentials drawn from a very large group of
interchangeables…On the other hand, if we talk about democracy, we
really mean a government founded on a very large number of essentials
and a very large number of interchangeables.44

In other words, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith concede that a complete subject-
side instrumentalism may not actually be attainable. But they do so only on the
strict understanding that they have done their best to completely redefine the
meaning of these terms, granting their normal understanding of this language
only the thinnest “heuristic” value.45

Perhaps readers will not be surprised to find that selectorate theory is also
engaged in object-side instrumentalism insofar as it discounts the specific beliefs
and viewpoints of the very leaders that are the focal point of its inquiries. For
example, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith admit they do not care very much what
particular leaders think because this is “not terribly important.”46 Instead of

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Concept formation

giving the language of those studied an active role within concept formation, the
concepts of selectorate theory exclude these self-understandings.

(p.80) By contrast, anti-naturalism makes clear that social scientists ought to

seek a “fusion of horizons” when constructing their concepts.47 Such a fusion
requires confronting the beliefs and meanings of the individuals being studied,
and has the power to modify or even deeply change a researcher’s own
concepts. This implies that social science researchers should build their
concepts through a process of active dialogue—whether this dialogue is the live
discussion of interviews or the careful checking of interpretations in relation to
texts, archives, or surveys. Far from fixing their formal conceptual language
beforehand, they should not be afraid to see their concepts continually change
and grow throughout the research process. And this is because concept
formation in the social sciences does not begin from a blank slate, but always
builds and elaborates upon the interpretations and understandings already tacit
to human social life. Concept formation is part of the process of research, and
persistently iterative, not something completely settled before research has even
begun.

Anti-naturalist concept formation

We have seen the various ways in which reification, essentialism, and linguistic
instrumentalism appear not only in the writings of key methodologists but also
in the concepts employed by renowned social scientists. We have also noted how
these erroneous types of concept formation are tied to the naturalist quest for
ahistorical, causal explanations. But what is the anti-naturalist alternative to
concept formation? And what philosophical considerations should social
scientists keep in mind while molding their concepts? After all, if objectivity is
comparative (as we argued before), then criticism, no matter how valid, is never
enough. A better alternative must always be offered as well.

Anti-naturalist philosophy draws a distinction between two main kinds of social

science concepts: the first descriptive and the second explanatory. Descriptive
concepts can be understood in light of Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist notion of a
“family resemblance,” already touched upon above. Properly understood, a
family resemblance is a feature of the world that is not defined by some
commonality or essential attribute. Instead, a family resemblance is a play of
similarities and mutable relations that crisscross a group. Therefore, although a
pattern can be found, no core of essential properties can be said to exist across
the entire subset. As Wittgenstein puts it:

I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which

makes us use the same word for all—but that they are related to one
another in many different ways…we see a complicated network of
similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,

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Concept formation

sometimes similarities of detail. I can think of no better expression to

characterize these similarities than “family resemblances.”48

(p.81) In the same passage, Wittgenstein famously shifts to the metaphor of a

rope, made of many different fibers, and with no one strand spanning its entire
length. As we already noted above, political scientists like Collier have not
entirely retained the radicalism of Wittgenstein’s insight in this regard. But anti-
naturalism can draw off of Wittgenstein to help social scientists build concepts
that are not marred by naturalism.

An approach to building social science concepts that seeks family resemblances

has much to recommend it. First of all, family resemblances are better at
capturing a world of meanings, which themselves have no fixed core. We have
already seen that the social world is constructed out of contingent, historical
meanings of self-interpreting actors, and is not an assemblage of natural kinds,
reified things, or eternal essences. The meanings that compose social reality are
not amenable to reification and essentialism. To the contrary, they exist in the
world like the very family resemblances Wittgenstein was trying to evoke with
his various metaphors. Social scientists must therefore think of their descriptive
concepts as constructed to capture such anti-essentialist resemblances and not
naturalist types.

Second, and related, concepts built on family resemblances encourage social

scientists to be in continual dialogue with the social world. Empirical diversity
and variation are not enemies to an anti-naturalist social science in the same
way they threaten naturalist projects. Because anti-naturalists are not tied to a
model of explanation that seeks a common cause, they also are free of the
pressure to discover some uniform or common attribute across phenomena. To
the contrary, anti-naturalist social scientists expect to see continual variation
and flux. They expect to continually recalibrate and remold their concepts as a
response to the self-interpreting language of the actors who build that social
reality. Anti-naturalist concepts are therefore oriented toward the astonishing
empirical diversity that is the result of self-interpretation. Instead of fleeing from
this reality, anti-naturalists enter into a continual dialogue with the social world,
in which concepts arise out of a fusion of horizons between researcher and
world.

Finally, because concepts fashioned in terms of family resemblances are not

bound to some reified or essential core of properties, social scientists are free to
build their concepts according to the pragmatic purposes of their research. They
can isolate one particular theme rather than another. They are free to
concentrate on one dimension of meaning in one study and another dimension of
meaning in another. Description, from the anti-naturalist viewpoint, can serve
any number of wider purposes including classification, criticism, drawing out
similarities or differences, alerting a readership to a little-known fact, and so on.

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Concept formation

Different purposes will often lead to different descriptive foci. The hermeneutic
circle allows any one part in a web of meaning to be related in new and creative
ways to other aspects of the whole. This dynamic of playful insight is deeply
familiar to literary scholars and other sensitive readers in the (p.82)
humanities; it also represents one of many places social scientists could learn a
great deal from others in humanities disciplines like art history, literature, film,
drama, classics, and so on. In social reality, as in a work of art, there is no single,
officially scientifically sanctioned description. The only rule from an anti-
naturalist perspective is that family resemblance concepts must remain
answerable to the particular contexts of meaning they purport to capture. In this
way, social scientists remain free to tackle whatever aspect of social life fits their
wider aims and curiosities.

By contrast, we have seen that philosophical naturalism often creates the

impression that social science is the search for the one absolute level of analysis.
So, while phenomena like ideologies or cultures might appear important,
selectorate theorists claim that the true bedrock of scientific description consists
in concepts like nominal selectorate, real selectorate, influentials, and
essentials. In this way, social scientists influenced by naturalism assume that
some basic stratum of social reality must be privileged over others. Other
dimensions of social reality might be of interest in our ordinary lives, but they
have no active or essential role in science.

Built on the notion of family resemblances, anti-naturalist descriptive concepts

liberate social scientists from this arid and reductive approach. Far from
consisting of a single level of supposedly privileged or absolute analysis, there
are potentially innumerable ways of describing and thinking about the meanings
that comprise the social world. Indeed, anti-naturalism maintains that new and
different conceptualizations of social reality may open up neglected or unnoticed
aspects of phenomena.

This contrast between naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches also arises in

the case of explanatory concepts. Where descriptive concepts can be justified in
terms of any number of aims and purposes, explanatory concepts must
ultimately be justified in terms of their ability to explain. We have seen that
naturalist explanations seek general causal laws, or at the very least correlations
between variables that one day might yield a mechanistic causal inference. In
stark contrast to this, we have argued that an anti-naturalist social science
should adopt a historicist form of explanation. Anti-naturalist social scientists
should explain the world in terms of narratives that capture the contingency and
creativity of human actions, practices, and beliefs. In other words, an anti-
naturalist social science should replace naturalist explanatory concepts (laws,
necessary causes, variables) with historicist concepts (traditions, contingent
beliefs, dilemmas).

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Concept formation

At the same time, in contrast to naturalism, narrative explanation also retains a

certain playfulness. For there are multiple true stories that can be told about
social reality as opposed to simply one privileged and exhaustive set of laws.
Although explanatory concepts are necessarily limited by the goal of
explanation, one narrative need not be considered exhaustive of the subject
matter of, say, political organization or voter behavior. Rather, social reality (p.
83) might be treated as a composite of many (perhaps infinite) stories to be
told. This is once again due to the holistic nature of beliefs. One set of meanings
can be related to the wider web or whole in different ways that are fruitful for
different reasons.

This anti-naturalist approach to concepts will become more concrete by looking

to an example from the interpretive social science literature. Consider, in this
vein, the sociologist Robert Bellah’s widely cited concept of an American “civil
religion.” Based on extensive research of the history of American political
rhetoric, Bellah came to believe that there “exists alongside of and rather clearly
differentiated from the churches an elaborate and well-institutionalized civil
religion in America.”49 This civil religion was differentiated from the Christian
churches not only by its systematic omission of such orthodoxies as the person
of Jesus, the trinity, and the resurrection, but also by the fact that it was
centrally concerned with legitimizing American political power. As Bellah
described American civil religion: “though much is selectively derived from
Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity…the God of [American]
civil religion is not only rather ‘unitarian,’ he is also on the austere side, much
more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love.”50 Indeed, Bellah
argued that one central tenet of American civil religion that contrasted with
orthodox Christian faith was the conviction that the United States was under
“obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.”51

The point, of course, is not whether Bellah’s ideas about American civil religion
are justified. Rather, the point is the way that Bellah’s concept gives us a
prominent example of how anti-naturalist social scientists might construct their
own concepts—and this in at least four ways.

First, Bellah’s notion of an American civil religion is self-consciously constructed

to capture contingent, historical meanings (using our earlier language, one
might say family resemblances) rather than ahistorical, essential, reified, or
natural types.52 Thus, Bellah reconstructs what he variously calls a “tradition” or
“theme” of American civil religion, which he claims is evidenced in various forms
of meaning, including the rhetoric that accompanies American inauguration
addresses, state funerals, and other official acts of government.53 But Bellah’s
social theory is not presented as capturing some essential nucleus, or
commonality, that requires stretching across cases. Rather, his descriptive
concept is simply meant to reflect a play of meanings within context.

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Second, civil religion emerges for Bellah out of a dialogic rather than linguistic
instrumentalist approach to language. Specifically, Bellah goes to some lengths
to argue that the very idea of a civil religion is part of “the self-conception” of
Americans, and can be traced back to the nation’s founding and the “cultural
climate of the late eighteenth century.”54 Bellah’s use of the concept of a civil
religion therefore emerges out of his own fieldwork, and is (p.84) the result of
a kind of collaborative dialogue with the language of those he studies, and not
simply imposed from the outside. This means that unlike many of the social
scientists we criticized above, Bellah’s concepts are not built beforehand and
then kept as clean of contamination from other meanings as possible (as if they
were tools kept clean for surgery). Rather, Bellah understands that the
explanations of the social scientist must always begin from the language and
self-interpretations of those studied. In this respect, Bellah avoids an object-side
linguistic instrumentalism, which mutes or ignores people’s language and self-
understanding.

Third, Bellah’s analysis is self-consciously situated within particular linguistic,

historical, and normative traditions. Rather than blocking out his own viewpoint
in the name of science, Bellah instead carefully reflects upon, locates, and
articulates his own perspective. So Bellah recognizes that, as an American, he
speaks from within these traditions and practices. Specifically, he argues that
American civil religion presents citizens such as himself with both dangers and
opportunities. This is because American civil religion has been both prone to
certain abuses (such as jingoism, imperialism, and bellicosity), as well as serving
some salutary political functions (such as the advancement of democratic social
reforms and providing a shared standard of political criticism).55 Here we see
that Bellah does not conceive of the role of the social scientist as either
ahistorical or free of normative evaluation. To the contrary, part of Bellah’s
formulation of the concept of American civil religion involves an evaluation of its
potential uses and abuses, and thus extends an explicitly normative line of
thought.56 In this way, Bellah avoids the error of subject-side linguistic
instrumentalism, which attempts to ignore the fact that social scientists are
always situated within particular traditions of thought. Social science is no less
within history than its subjects of study are.

Finally, Bellah’s analysis embodies the pragmatic playfulness of an anti-

naturalist approach. He presents fellow social scientists with one possible
narrative or theme within American political life. But he does not claim that this
is an absolute level of analysis upon which all further inquiries into politics must
be based (as advocates of selectorate theory and other naturalists sometimes
intone). Instead, the implication is quite clear that different stories might be told
about different individuals and new insights might be won by focusing not on
civil religion, but on some other set of concepts. Bellah recognizes that social
science is a field for creative insights, and continually new ways of looking into
social reality, and not the quest for a final scientific vocabulary that will liberate
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Concept formation

us from the need for further thought, innovation, and open-ended dialogue. The
goal of social science is not a final set of explanatory laws, but always better and
better explanatory stories and descriptive insights.

In sum, social scientists must form concepts in order to study the social world.
This is an inescapable need for anyone conducting empirical research. Yet what
kinds of concepts they will craft depends largely on the philosophical (p.85)
assumptions and intuitions they bring to the task. The foregoing philosophical
analysis is offered in the hope that an anti-naturalist framework helps to sharpen
and hone social scientific approaches to concept formation. Rather than
uncritically slipping into forms of naturalism, social scientists should remain
alert to the philosophical aspects inherent in their choice of concepts.
Otherwise, they run the risk of detracting from what are often highly valuable
contributions to our knowledge of the social world. That such distortions might
be taken on board by social scientists “as if” they were true for heuristic
purposes is an argument we will consider at greater length in our treatment of
rational choice theory and even more so in Chapter 9 on public policy.57 For now
it is important to see that practicing social scientists ignore certain philosophical
controversies at their own peril. Part of what this chapter has established are
the high amounts of distortion that come along with any shift toward naturalist
concepts. But concepts are only one small area where this is apparent. The
effects on the debates over methods and the approaches to empirical topics are
no less dramatic. The time has ended when social scientists could afford to be
oblivious to philosophy—itself another vestige of naturalism, which looked upon
the natural sciences and imagined a domain finally free of philosophical
controversy.

Notes:
(1.) This chapter draws significantly on: Mark Bevir and Asaf Kedar, “Concept
Formation in Political Science: An Anti-Naturalist Critique of Qualitative
Methodology,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2008): 503–17. Although substantially
altered from the original article, we heartily thank Asaf for his permission to
build on that earlier work.

(2.) For an example of such an attempt see: Steven Rosenstone and John Mark
Hansen, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (New York:
Macmillan, 1993).

(3.) Giovanni Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” Journal of Theoretical

Politics 3:3 (1991): 250.

(4.) Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing,” 247.

(5.) Giovanni Sartori, ed., Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis

(Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1984) 17.

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Concept formation

(6.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 24.

(7.) Glenda Patrick, “Political Culture,” in Social Science Concepts, 297.

(8.) Patrick, “Political Culture,” 265.

(9.) David Collier, “The Comparative Method: Two Decades of Change,” in

Comparative Political Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives, ed. D. A. Rustow
and K. P. Erickson (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) 15.

(10.) David Collier and Jason Seawright, “Glossary,” in Rethinking Social

Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, ed. Henry Brady and Collier (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004) 292; see also: 288.

(11.) David Collier and Robert Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies: A

Pragmatic Approach to Choices About Concepts,” Annual Review of Political
Science 2 (1999): 544–5.

(12.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 544.

(13.) David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual
Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49:3 (1997): 434, 443.

(14.) S. Kernell, G. Jacobson, and T. Kousser, eds., The Logic of American Politics,
5th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011) 496–7.

(15.) Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, 128.

(16.) Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, 136–7.

(17.) Rosenstone and Hansen, Mobilization, 137.

(18.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 44.

(19.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 45.

(20.) David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited:
Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science
Review 87:4 (1993): 845.

(21.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 846.

(22.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 846.

(23.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 848.

(24.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 847.

(25.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 847.

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Concept formation

(26.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Malden, MA: Blackwell,

2001) §§68–9.

(27.) Collier and Mahon, “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited,” 847, 848.

(28.) Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and Doug McAdam, Dynamics of Contention
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 5.

(29.) McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly express skepticism at the possibility of general
laws but preserve the naturalist hope that identifying the essential properties of
political contention will help them discover the recurring causal sequences
behind political phenomena. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of
Contention, 345–6.

(30.) McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 5.

(31.) Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, “Normative and Structural Causes of
Democratic Peace, 1946–1986,” American Political Science Review 87:3 (1993):
624–38, 628.

(32.) This weak essentialist approach is repeated by Russett in his influential

book with John Oneal, Triangulating Peace (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
2001) 45.

(33.) Many interpretivists have criticized this tendency to cut off dialogue by
creating concepts beforehand. See: Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow,
Interpretive Research Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge,
2012) 17–18.

(34.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts.

(35.) Sartori, Social Science Concepts, 26–8.

(36.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 539, 562.

(37.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 554, 556.

(38.) Collier and Adcock, “Democracy and Dichotomies,” 557.

(39.) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James
Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

(40.) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook:
Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics(New York: Public Affairs,
2011) xxiii, xxiv.

(41.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, xxii; see also: ix, xix,
113, 135, 137, 253.

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Concept formation

(42.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, xxv.

(43.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition, trans.
Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004) 265–307.

(44.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, 8.

(45.) Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival, 72, 55.

(46.) Bueno de Mesquita and Smith, Dictator’s Handbook, 135; see also: 253.

(47.) Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302–7.

(48.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 65–7.

(49.) Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on

Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1991) 168.

(50.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 175.

(51.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 172.

(52.) Indeed, Bellah even worries that if his research fails to be sensitive enough
to history, it risks distortion precisely by “reifying” the meaning of civil religion.
This serves to emphasize the way in which interpretive social scientists must
always be wary of the ongoing risk of slipping into distorted concept formation.
Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 179.

(53.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 172.

(54.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 172–4.

(55.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 179–86.

(56.) Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 168.

(57.) For an insightful example of such an argument, which we will engage later,
see: Colin Hay, “Neither Real Nor Fictitious but ‘As If Real’? A Political Ontology
of the State,” The British Journal of Sociology 65:3 (2014): 459–80.

Page 25 of 25
Methods

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Methods
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter draws on the latest methodological literature in order to show how
an anti-naturalist framework justifies multi-methods in social science research.
Contrary to the widespread debate that pits “quantitative” versus “qualitative”
methods, researchers are free to use methods from across the social sciences
provided they remain aware of anti-naturalist concepts and concerns. Leading
methods are analyzed in light of the latest social science, including: mass
surveys, random sampling, regression analysis, statistics, rational choice
modeling, ethnography, archival research, and long-form interviewing. A full-
blown interpretive approach to the social sciences can make use of all the major
methods and techniques for studying human behavior, while also avoiding the
scientism that too often plagues their current deployment.

Keywords:   multi-methods, random sampling, regression analysis, rational choice, ethnography,

qualitative versus quantitative

Social science today has largely reduced the interpretive turn to a commitment
to “qualitative” methods. Unfortunately, this narrow and mistaken view of the
interpretive turn is widespread among many of the most influential practitioners
of social science. For example, three of the most eminent methodologists
working in political science today equate interpretivism with deep immersion in
the customs, practices, and institutions of a particular group of people.1 In this
way, interpretive research becomes synonymous with ethnography and
immersive, onsite fieldwork.2 Viewed from this perspective, the opposite of
“interpretive” is quantitative methods like mass surveys, statistics, and various

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forms of modeling. The interpretive turn is then thought of as little more than an
attempt to have qualitative methodologies reign supreme. The entire
methodological debate becomes limited to a highly polarized discussion about
“quantitative” versus “qualitative” research. So widespread is this confusion
today that even those who defend the interpretive turn in social science often do
so in the name of qualitative methods.3

Here our anti-naturalist framework can dispel confusions, pointing to a more

viable way forward past the gridlock of a method dispute between “qualies” and
“quants.” Anti-naturalist premises help show how the interpretive turn does not
bind social scientists by logical chains to either qualitative or quantitative
methods. To the contrary, social scientists are free to employ the full range of
methods from the “soft” qualitative to the “hard” quantitative so long as they
keep clear of certain naturalist malformations. This is because the primary
methods used by social scientists today are philosophically compatible.4
Ethnography may be combined with statistical analysis, rational choice mixed
and matched with long-form interviews, mass surveys carried out side by side
with immersive field research. Methodology, properly conceived, is nothing more
than forms of data collection, data analysis, and heuristics. Methods are
instrumental, much like a hammer or nail, and whether they are put in the
service of building a naturalist or an anti-naturalist edifice depends on how they
are employed. This means social scientists can stop worrying about whether two
methods are incompatible and leave the debate between “qualitative” versus
“quantitative” behind. As instruments, methods are always subordinate to the
wider purposes of the researcher and do not dictate the philosophical
commitments of the work. Instead, the primary form of incompatibility social
scientists do need to worry about is philosophical—especially the naturalist
versus anti-naturalist divide. Our hope is to turn attention away from supposed
methodological divisions, to the deeper and (p.89) more important strata of
philosophical dispute. Clearly, then, our use of the term “methodology” emerges
out of philosophical concerns, and although it is used this way by a wide number
of social scientists, it is also at odds with other uses of the term that consider
methodology and philosophy to be more synonymous.5

Methods can be distinguished philosophically into three general, not entirely

mutually exclusive categories. First, methods can be used for data collection or
to generate information about the world (as in the case of ethnography, long-
form and semi-structured interviews, and mass surveys). Second, they may be
used to find patterns in data or what we call data analysis (as in the case of
random sampling, statistical inference, case studies, grounded theory, and Q
methodology). Finally, they can serve as heuristics that, although not chiefly
concerned with either data collection or analysis, help inspire insights about
social reality (as is the case with certain kinds of formal modeling, especially
rational choice theory). While anti-naturalist philosophy prescribes clear
parameters about how social scientists should treat data generation, data
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analysis, and heuristics, it does nothing to prohibit the use of any one particular
technique. Social scientists determine what method is best for their research
goals by exercising their experienced judgment within context. Provided social
scientists steer clear of naturalism, they are free to creatively make use of
whatever method best serves their research goals and purposes. Anti-naturalism
makes clear the way in which multi-methods is fully compatible with the
interpretive turn.

Data collection: ethnography, interviews, and mass surveys

Social science research is impossible to conduct without some way of grasping
what social reality actually looks like on the ground. This means social scientists
need tools for generating information about the world—what we will refer to as
“data collection.” Data collection involves collecting information about a
particular group’s beliefs, actions, practices, and way of life. Such data
collection can take a number of forms—from the techniques of ethnography to
mass surveys and census data. We will look at each of various techniques in turn
to clarify how social scientists should use these methods while also remaining
cautious of the possibility of naturalist vitiation. However, first a brief
clarification in our use of the word “data” may be necessary. By “data” we do not
mean to reintroduce some naturalist notion of empiricism or brute verification.
In prior chapters we have already argued that no such immediate sense data is
available in the social sciences. This is because the (p.90) social sciences are
engaged in trying to interpret webs of meanings and beliefs. Social reality is
expressive of these holistic webs and so must be studied through a hermeneutic
circle of relating part to whole. In other words, our use of the word “data” here
has nothing to do with a naturalist claim to foundationalism or brute empiricism
in the social sciences (a connotation it too often takes in naturalist-dominated
disciplines). We mean something very different by data here—simply information
about the meanings, beliefs, actions, practices, and so on that comprise social
reality. In other words, data is information about the social world that respects
the holistic and interpretive nature of human agency.

Because of the dominance of the qualitative versus quantitative debate,

ethnography has become the method most commonly associated with the
interpretive turn. Indeed, many people believe that interpretive research is little
more than a movement advocating the spread of ethnography and other such
qualitative research methods. But anti-naturalism makes clear how this view is
mistaken. Like any other form of data collection, ethnography can be put to
either anti-naturalist or naturalist uses.

Largely developed by anthropologists and sociologists, ethnography is a method

defined by immersion in the way of life of a particular group or culture. This is
normally accomplished by onsite research and observation. The goal of
ethnography is the construction of “thick descriptions.”6 Thick descriptions are
detailed accounts of human belief and action within their surrounding webs of

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meaning. The most common way to conduct ethnography is through observer-

participation, in which a social scientist scrutinizes a given group in its daily life,
developing a sense for its patterns and rhythms. Observer-participation can take
the form of “researcher alone,” in which the social scientist never departs from
his or her role as a detached observer, or “situational participant,” in which the
social scientist directly partakes in the customs, rituals, and other aspects of
social life.7

Ethnographers often combine observer-participation with in-depth interviews.

In-depth interviewing allows researchers to pursue the complexities and
nuances of an individual’s or group’s beliefs through conversation. Unlike mass
surveying, in-depth interviewing gives the researcher the chance to
extemporize: following unexpected leads and other unforeseen elements of
dialogue and exchange. This approach contrasts with “fixed-format” interviews
that follow a single, preordained track and “forbid researchers from digging in
areas that emerge as promising during the course of an interview.”8 Like the
immersive practices of observer-participation, long-form interviews allow social
scientists to arrive at thick descriptions—or highly nuanced, complex accounts of
the meanings constituting social reality.

Ethnography is clearly an extremely powerful tool for the study of social science.
The vast and diverse body of successful research that currently employs
ethnographic techniques confirms the strength and fruitfulness of (p.91) this
method. To choose only a few of many examples, the sociologist Kenneth
MacLeish has used ethnographic techniques to track the effects of the Iraq war
on military communities far beyond the frontlines of the battlefield. He
accomplished this through the use of both observer-participation and long-form
interviewing at Fort Hood, Texas. What MacLeish found is that the violence of
war extends into the life of the communities far beyond the battlefield and mixes
into the ordinary lives of military families. The otherwise invisible tolls of war
are therefore made concrete.9

In a different vein, Alice Goffman made a much-discussed contribution to urban

ethnography by immersing herself in the world of young African American men
living in the ghettos of Philadelphia.10 Goffman used thick descriptions to
challenge the standard narrative which holds that racial equality was achieved
with the civil rights movement, instead arguing that poor black men are
“enveloped in intensive penal supervision” that is “the latest chapter in a long
history of black exclusion and civic diminishment.”11 Yet another example are
the deep insights into the political and economic despair of white working-class
conservative voters in rural Louisiana offered by Arlie Russell Hochschild; or
Matthew Desmond’s masterful ethnographic work on the pressures of urban
poverty and eviction.12

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Regardless of the final assessment of these respective studies, they stand as

examples of the effective use of ethnographic methods in an anti-naturalist study
of society. Indeed, ethnography is a highly attractive and powerful tool for anti-
naturalist research in particular for at least three related reasons. First,
ethnography is especially helpful for crafting concepts that emerge out of
dialogue with the social actors studied. Rather than concepts crafted “a priori by
the researcher,” the ethnographer can form concepts from “the bottom up” in a
way that is “context-situated.”13 Done correctly, this helps social scientists steer
clear of the naturalist error of instrumental concept formation and instead form
concepts that are dialogical. This averts the instrumentalist errors we discussed
in Chapter 4 on concept formation.

A second reason ethnography is attractive for anti-naturalist inquiry is because

thick descriptions are particularly useful for making the unnoticed meanings and
beliefs structuring social reality come to light. Ellen Pader emphasizes the power
of ethnography in this regard by recounting the case of a single, working-class
mother in New York City who, although she struggled to pay for food and rent,
spent some of her meager salary on two luxury goods—an air-conditioning unit
and a videogame for her children. Pader notes that many social science students,
when presented with this poor mother’s purchases, polarize into two groups: one
decrying the fiscal irresponsibility of the lower classes, the other defending the
purchases as another case of a poor woman succumbing to the nefarious
pressures of commercial society. Neither group comes close to seeing what
ethnography revealed about this tragic case of human poverty. Namely, this
single mother purchased (p.92) the videogame and air-conditioning unit in a
desperate attempt at childcare. Unable to afford a babysitter or daycare during
the hot summer months when her children were out of school, the mother
purchased these two items to try to keep her children off the rough streets of
their New York City neighborhood.14 In this way, ethnographies of New York
City’s public housing projects have made the motives driving particular
residents more intelligible in a way that otherwise would have remained
undetected. Ethnography offers the opportunity for thick descriptions that grasp
the meanings and beliefs informing agents’ particular actions. In this case the
hard plights and no-win situations facing the poorest families would remain
unintelligible without the help of ethnography.

A final way ethnography helps advance anti-naturalist research is that it can be

used to attack oversimplifications of social reality by generating greater
sensitivity to the contextual nature of meaning and language. Frederic Schaffer,
for example, has used ethnography to great effect in this way—correcting
contemporary political science’s tendency to assume that the word “democracy”
means the same thing everywhere. As discussed in Chapter 4 on concept
formation, this essentialist error occurs frequently within the study of
democratic theory. Schaffer’s extended study of the word “demokaraasi” in
Senegal shows how deeply this term differs from the “English-language concept
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of democracy used by American social scientists.”15 In this need to grasp

language, all social science depends (if only inchoately and implicitly) on an
ethnographic background of knowledge.

Yet ethnography need not exclusively be used in support of anti-naturalist

research in the social sciences. Nothing about ethnography magically
guarantees the right philosophical position. On the contrary, during the
twentieth century ethnographic techniques were also often used to bolster
naturalist research programs. For example, during the 1920s and 30s
anthropologists like Margaret Mead used ethnography as a way to travel the
globe in an effort to ascertain the “essential institutions and structures” of a
culture.16 Mead and her students believed anthropologists could use short forms
of observer-participation in order to identify the essential, abstract types that
define all human social life. This effort at essentialist, synchronic, and ahistorical
structures clearly shares in the philosophical attributes of naturalism and later
came to be derisively referred to as “airplane ethnography.”17 But it also makes
clear that there is nothing philosophical or logical barring the use of
ethnographic tools for naturalist ends.

Indeed, longer stays and intensive language training would not necessarily have
freed this kind of ethnography from naturalist distortion. Many ethnographers
spend their entire lives specializing in a few cultural subgroups and carry out
forms of immersive observer-participation that last years and even decades.
Such practices often make for good workmanship and generate important
insights about social reality, but they do not guarantee an escape (p.93) from
naturalist distortions. After all, a researcher could spend years mastering the
appropriate language, and decades in the field engaged in observer-
participation, and still adopt essentialist, ahistorical structures of explanation.
Arguably, many naturalist social scientists working across modern societies
today live out de facto just such an immersive experience in their own home
cultures. But while long-term exposure to a cultural group may enrich
ethnographic data, it does not guarantee its freedom from naturalist
conclusions.

Naturalism is also evident in some of the earliest ethnographies ever conducted.

Historically speaking, ethnography began in part as a colonial endeavor. The
pioneers of ethnographic technique often sought to make far-flung and
purportedly primitive cultures intelligible to European colonialists. What arose
from this colonial approach to social science was too often essentialist and
“orientalist” fictionalizations of the “natives.” Too often the native was stripped
of the dignity of human agency by social scientists and treated as simply another
representative of a monolithic cultural type.18 Where Mead sought ahistorical,
universal structures shared by all global cultures, colonial anthropologists
instead ethnocentrically assumed there was a particular, essential “spirit”
defining a culture, which the ethnographer tapped.19 Once again, then,

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ethnography can clearly be put to naturalist uses—for the construction of

monolithic natural types: essentialist and sometimes even racist conceptions of
the core nuclei of cultural features that invariantly characterize a people.
Ethnography need not take such misbegotten features, but there is nothing
philosophically that necessitates it as a method pure of naturalist taint. The
qualitative–quantitative debate and its insistence on methods as guaranteeing
interpretive outcomes is therefore potentially misleading in this regard.

Fortunately, ethnographers in our own time have developed a number of post-

colonial strategies for avoiding naturalist pitfalls like that of essentialism. These
strategies are important to keep in mind for anyone wishing to make use of
ethnography. The first is making sure to disaggregate meanings and to guard
against the creation of false monoliths. In its colonial phase, anthropologists
sometimes favored the study of small, bounded locales like villages or a
particular political institution and from this they would extrapolate the supposed
overarching spirit of an entire people. However, today ethnographers are more
apt to study all varieties of social organization, from the army to large multi-
national corporations, while also pursuing “multi-sited” studies, following
communities across borders and into the different branches of an increasingly
globalized society.20 Where ethnographers once spent much time trying to make
the far-flung and strange familiar (e.g., Balinese cockfights), now they are as
likely to focus on features of the nearby in an effort to make the familiar appear
strange (e.g., American shopping habits). Ethnographers can avoid the error of
essentialism by always searching for the heterogeneity and variances within
cultures and not rushing to convert local meanings into (p.94) civilizational
monoliths. As we already discussed at length, meanings are a series of family
resemblances and not a fixed nucleus or core. One of the important anti-
naturalist lessons of post-colonial ethnography is to be alive to the sheer
heterogeneity and variance in meaning.

Similarly, the post-colonial turn in ethnography has inspired researchers to

develop innovative dialogical approaches to their research. Rather than the
monologue of the ethnocentric colonialist, ethnographers today have developed
strategies of deeper dialogue, including lengthy quotation, various forms of co-
authorship, and other such attempts to let the subject of the study speak in his
or her own voice.21 Naturalist conceptual problems like essentialism and object-
side instrumentalism can potentially be corrected by these more radically
dialogical strategies.

Ultimately, ethnography is not any more immune to naturalism than other forms
of data collection. The fact that it can be classified as a “qualitative” method
does not resolve the deeper philosophical issues of which social scientists must
remain aware. Because naturalism and anti-naturalism are philosophies and not
mere techniques, they can subordinate any number of methods into their
service. Furthermore, because all methods are compatible with one another,

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ethnography is easily paired with other kinds of data generation that are less
immersive. For example, ethnography and long-form interviewing are often used
by social scientists in conjunction with mass surveys and questionnaires.22 So
researchers conducting a mass census survey might supplement their work with
in-depth interviews of particular subgroups within that population in order to
gain a more nuanced sense of their beliefs. Similarly, a mass survey registering
widespread dissatisfaction with a given public figure can be combined with in-
depth interviewing to uncover the specific and myriad reasons for this
dissatisfaction. Thus, ethnography can be joined with other more “quantitative”
methods in the social sciences by providing contextual, local knowledge that
might otherwise remain inaccessible. How this mixing and matching can be
realized will become clearer by briefly scrutinizing a second form of data
collection—mass surveys.

If ethnography is frequently mistaken as an exclusively interpretive method,

mass surveys are too often thought of as inescapably naturalist. Again, this is
due to the spell cast by the quantitative–qualitative debate, which assumes that
social scientists must choose a side when it comes to methods. Yet mass surveys
remain one of the most effective tools for collecting information about the social
world. Such surveys can be used to describe individual beliefs and behaviors as
well as to capture the attributes of particular social groupings—for instance,
how many households own a firearm or how many cities run a public
transportation system. In this way, surveys can describe both individuals and
larger group organizations (churches, clubs, companies, cities, and nations).
Mass surveys allow social scientists to sketch the social (p.95) world in broad
strokes. Such sketches of social reality can either take the form of a single
snapshot (“cross-sectional”) or else depict a population over an extended period
of time (“longitudinal”).23 Any social science that could not make use of such a
powerful tool would be greatly impoverished. One can hardly be surprised when
well-meaning social scientists, taught that they must decide between qualitative
and quantitative methods (and who therefore believe the interpretive turn is
incompatible with the use of mass surveys), opt for quantitative methods and
forgo anything they could learn from hermeneutic philosophy.

Fortunately, anti-naturalism makes clear that no such exclusive choice between

quantitative methods and the interpretive turn is necessary. Rather, the main
naturalist threat that must be avoided in the use of surveys is atomization. In
Chapter 4 on concept formation we argued at length that under the influence of
naturalist philosophy, social scientists often try to atomize political reality in
order to correlate one bit of reality with another. This is done in the hope of
discovering general causal mechanisms or laws. For instance, naturalist social
scientists might try to establish a link between one isolated feature discovered
by a mass survey like a respondent’s race, age, class, or gender and another, like
their voter preferences. In doing so they might try to explain voter behavior by
appealing to some atomistic fact as in a necessary causal bond with another
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such fact. When one atomistic bit of social reality occurs, another bit is said to
necessarily follow (or at least be correlated in some way). Indeed, often survey
research is erroneously presented by naturalist methodologists as tied to just
such “multivariate analysis.”24 When framed by such concepts and ambitions,
mass surveys are thought to simply generate data for mechanistic, naturalist
explanations.

But there is no logical link binding mass surveys to such atomism and
mechanism. Instead, social scientists may affirm the descriptive validity of
particular mass survey research (for example, X percent of white female
Christians voted for the rightwing candidate) while recognizing that any attempt
at explaining these beliefs will require further exploration of the reasons and
beliefs held by these agents. In other words, explanation requires placing beliefs
in a wider web of meanings. In order to move from description to explanation,
mass survey research might benefit from supplementing its findings with
ethnographic research or panel studies that take a sample of respondents in
order to delve into their reasons for holding the beliefs that they do.25

A similar point can be made about structured and semi-structured interview

methodologies. Structuring an interview refers to “the degree to which the
questions and other interventions made by the interviewer are in fact pre-
prepared by the researcher”; thus, interviewing can vary in approach from
“lightly structured to heavily structured…from the completely unstructured to
the fully structured.”26 Heavily structured interviews can sometimes veer (p.
96) into naturalism by ignoring the contingent beliefs and meanings of those
being interviewed. In these cases, interviewers can fall into the trap of having
reified or brute, reductive notions of the answers given by interviewees (as if
they were merely extracting readymade, interpretation-free data). When
language and beliefs are treated this way, social reality is seriously disfigured.
But there is nothing about the degree of structuring of an interview that forces
researchers to treat reality in a naturalist way. To the contrary, staying aware of
the interpretive features of the meanings gathered allows researchers to decide
how much or how little to structure their interviews on a purely pragmatic basis.

Thus, there is no need to make a hard choice between “quantitative” mass

surveys or structured interviews and the insights of anti-naturalist philosophy. To
the contrary, anti-naturalist philosophy shows that the descriptions of mass
survey research and structured interviews can be accepted as valid while also
insisting that explanation requires embedding these beliefs within some
narrative. Both concept formation and explanatory forms must remain anti-
naturalist, but the method for generating information need not necessarily be
rejected even if some caution of use is in order.

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In short, data collection (be it in the form of immersive ethnography, long-form

interviews, or mass surveys and questionnaires) may be mixed and matched by
social scientists to best serve their research goals. But what about the use of
statistics that are often paired with mass surveys? Surely such randomization
and statistical inference are the mark of quantitative methods that are
necessarily tied to the naturalist project? In order to grapple with this problem,
we must consider methods that are not forms of information collection but of
data analysis.

Data analysis: random sampling, statistical inference, case studies,

grounded theory, and Q methodology
Ethnography, interviewing, and mass surveys are all forms of data collection—
that is, of gathering information about a given population’s beliefs, actions, and
way of life. This is distinct from data analysis, in which such information is
treated to a certain kind of organization in search of patterns. Yet similar to data
collection, data analysis is also frequently subject to the widespread assumption
that certain forms of it are either inescapably naturalist or inescapably
interpretivist. For example, random sampling and statistical inference are often
thought to be inherently naturalistic, while case studies are too often conceived
as necessarily sensitive to meanings. Other methods like (p.97) grounded
theory and Q methodology are often subject to considerable confusion and
claimed as both scientistic and sensitive to meanings.27 Yet as was the case with
data collection, these tools of analyses are largely instrumental and can take
either naturalist or anti-naturalist forms. Social scientists are thus free to make
use of whichever data analysis tools they choose so long as they guard
themselves carefully against naturalist tendencies. Looking at each of these
forms of data analysis will clarify how this is the case.

Random sampling makes use of statistical theory in order to generalize about a

large population while studying only a much smaller, more manageable subset.
Without a technique like random sampling, social scientists would be unable to
describe larger populations because such a project might be impractical, cost
prohibitive, or in some other way unmanageable. Random sampling resolves this
problem by allowing social scientists to conduct a rational form of guesswork
when trying to infer the characteristics of a larger population by examining only
a thin slice. This form of data analysis requires that every single member of a
population has an equal chance of selection. Such randomization is an effort to
eliminate bias in selecting the subset. The subset then gives a picture of how
beliefs are distributed.

This is not the place for an extended exposition on the statistical theory that
supports the inference from the small subset to the total population—but in
general terms, this inference is possible because a distribution of samples takes
on a fixed, normal shape. For example, support for the Green Party in a given
population may be 7 percent. A sample of the wider population might instead

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place the percentage of Green Party support at 4 percent, a second sample at 9

percent, a third at 6 percent. So long as the survey respondents are truly
randomly selected, the more samples that are taken by researchers from a given
larger population, the more there will be convergence around a mean. This then
creates a standard distribution around a given number. In the use of random
sampling, this number or mean always remains a guess or approximation.
Because the population has not been exhaustively interviewed, the mean may be
wrong. But the more samples that are taken, the more reliable this guesswork
becomes. Indeed, statistical theory allows researchers to quantify the degree of
their uncertainty. The sample mean allows researchers to build a “bridge” from
what they know about the sample population to what they “believe,
probabilistically to be true about the broader population.”28 This inference, from
a small subset of a population to what is likely about a large population, is the
very heart of what is called statistical inference.

Thus, there is an ineliminable uncertainty in the method of random sampling and

statistical inference. Randomization and statistical inference are a form of data
analysis that allows for highly sophisticated guesswork. No researcher should
ever forget this. Indeed, the guesswork can itself be subject to statistical
description and analysis in terms of standard deviations that can be treated as
“confidence” levels.29 As with mass surveys more generally, there (p.98) are
many who mistakenly associate random sampling and statistical inference with
an exclusively “scientific” and naturalist approach.30 But there is nothing
inherent to this method that is philosophically incompatible with an interpretive
approach. Guesswork, even of a highly sophisticated statistical form, is in no
way out of bounds for anti-naturalists. Rather, as with mass surveys more
generally, the real naturalist threat occurs in how social scientists use this
information. If they tie this information to multivariate analysis that atomizes
political reality in order to seek out general causal laws, then something has
gone badly wrong. If, however, they use this descriptive guesswork to embed
their findings in further webs of meaning and belief (perhaps with the aid of
ethnography or other more immersive techniques), then they are on firm
philosophical footing.

Both the promise and the peril of random sampling statistical methods can be
clarified with an example from the social science literature. In 2005, sociologists
Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton conducted a deep analysis of the
National Survey of Youth and Religion—a random-digital-dial sample of teens
across the United States ages thirteen to seventeen.31 The fruit of this research
was the single largest trove of statistical data on U.S. teen attitudes toward
religion and spirituality at that time. Such a massive random sample survey can
be embraced by anti-naturalists as providing an important descriptive map of
certain features of social reality. For example, anti-naturalists can affirm Smith
and Denton’s finding that contrary to widespread belief at that time, U.S. teens
were not trending away from traditional churches and congregations; indeed,
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the “vast majority of U.S. teenagers profess to be theists.”32 This could be taken
as a descriptively valid finding at the time of the survey research.

However, anti-naturalists should also take note of an important caveat to this

finding that was furnished by Smith and Denton’s own supplementary, more
ethnographic research on this topic. Specifically, Smith and Denton used a
randomized subsample of the survey respondents in order to conduct 267 in-
depth face-to-face interviews. Among other things, this in-depth investigation
uncovered that “the de facto religion” among U.S. teens at that time was what
the authors termed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” or the belief that traditional
religion is primarily a tool for making people nice and generating good
individual self-esteem (as opposed to, say, the more mystical, metaphysical, and
political aims of various traditional forms of religious belief).33 In this respect,
the in-depth interviewing revealed a deeper underlying complexity to the
statistical survey research. While the majority of American teens continued to
identify with the traditional churches, what they meant by “God” had changed
significantly. God was an impersonal designer, a lawmaker whose primary
concern was fostering self-esteem and kindness. He was not so much a real
person, a teacher of sin and grace, or a redeemer of human history. In this way,
mass surveys combined with in-depth interviews established that U.S.
adolescents were both more and less religious than their contemporaries
suspected.

(p.99) The lesson for an anti-naturalist social science is clear: mass surveys,
random sampling, and statistical inference are valuable for large-scale sketches
of social reality but they do not replace an analysis of the deeper beliefs and
traditions that create a given status quo. As Smith and Denton observe, mass
statistical surveys provide an “overarching sense of our social world,” but they
are also “oversimplifying” and must be supplemented with deeper engagement
of cultural meanings and textures.34 In this respect Smith and Denton’s work
serves as a model to anti-naturalist researchers—expertly employing both mass
survey statistics and ethnographic inquiry. In doing so, they also make clear our
point that all methods are compatible and can be effectively mixed and matched.
The move from so-called “quantitative” to “qualitative” methods presents no
impassable boundaries to the working social scientist.

However, Smith and Denton’s research also serves as a cautionary tale insofar
as it occasionally creeps toward naturalism. To pick just one example, Smith and
Denton propose possible “empirical correlations and causal relations” between
the intensity of religious belief and adolescent wellbeing or good life
“outcomes.”35 Of course, the idea that there would be a mechanistic causal
relationship between teenage belief in religion and wellbeing commits a number
of the errors we have already discussed in prior chapters. Not only can such an
explanation not cope with anomalies, but it also neglects the contingency of
meanings and the basic narrative structure of human agency. Yet the point at

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present is not to rehash these arguments. Rather, the point is to make clear the
way that statistical data can be both used and abused. Random sampling and
statistical inference are powerful tools for anti-naturalist social science provided
researchers keep clear of the temptation to impose mechanistic explanations
between atomized, essentialized, or reified variables (here “religiosity” and
“wellbeing”). Instead, social scientists should explore the inherited traditions
and contingent reasons and beliefs that have helped create a particular
distribution of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. They should connect a given set
of findings to wider webs of belief and meaning. This means engaging in the
hermeneutic circle, and explaining a particular pattern through the construction
of a holistic narrative of meanings, not formulating mechanistic laws. Agents
should be situated within traditions, and stories told about how they inherited or
modified their beliefs, actions, and practices.

For example, if religious U.S. adolescents are outperforming their peers in terms
of “wellbeing,” the anti-naturalist social scientist should consider a whole
battery of questions that remain obscured by the tacit naturalist assumptions of
Smith and Denton. This means looking at questions like: Are certain religious
traditions more likely to create certain kinds of wellbeing (for example, Max
Weber’s famous link between Calvinist theology and capitalist prosperity)? Such
cultural links might then reveal that the term “wellbeing” is not simply neutrally
descriptive. Whose definition of “wellbeing” is being granted priority in such (p.
100) research? After all, varying traditions have starkly opposed conceptions of
“wellbeing.” The term is not essentially or atomistically self-evident, but must be
related to wider webs of meaning in ways that produce rival and contestable
conceptions of wellbeing and not just one. In this vein, a reader of Smith and
Denton’s study whose philosophical intuitions have been honed by anti-
naturalism might ask: Is the study neglecting rival definitions of “wellbeing”
held by other religious traditions or teens who do not necessarily have religious
beliefs? Perhaps atheistic and agnostic teens simply do not share the same
conception of wellbeing (this would mean Smith and Denton might be
committing conceptual errors like essentialism and object-side instrumentalism).

Yet even if the concept of wellbeing is widely shared, the link is not mechanistic,
but involves contingent belief formation and self-interpretation. An anti-
naturalist social science must be prepared to explore the complex matrices of
meaning, belief, tradition, and practice that have created certain descriptive
relationships and not move to the oversimplifying, distortive mechanistic
explanatory forms of naturalism. As with mass surveys more generally, data
analysis like random sampling and statistical inference can be accepted as a
powerful tool provided social scientists do not mistakenly begin to atomize and
correlate such findings into mechanistic forms of explanation.

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A parallel set of problems arises with tools of analysis like case studies, which
are often conversely thought to be a guarantee of more historically and
interpretively sensitive inquiry than statistical inference and random sampling.
Case studies are employed across the social sciences, but in political science are
most often identified with the more “qualitative” subfields, especially
comparative politics. One of the most widely cited methodologists of case studies
is the political scientist, John Gerring. Briefly scrutinizing his influential claims
will help clarify the naturalist dangers and anti-naturalist potential of this tool of
analysis.

Gerring defines a “case” as a single instance of a phenomenon (e.g., a nation-

state, a city, a prison, a voter) within a wider class of that phenomenon (e.g.,
nation-states, cities, prisons, voters). Studying particular cases is thus a strategy
for analyzing political reality by intensively drilling down on a single historical
instance of it (or perhaps a cross-case study of a handful of cases) with the goal
of better understanding something about the larger series or class.36 In
comparative politics the case study is often presented as imminently historical,
sensitive to context, and anti-scientistic. Yet as with the other two forms of data
analysis, there is nothing logically binding this method of inquiry to either
naturalism or anti-naturalism. What is crucial from a philosophical perspective is
that researchers retain a strong sense of the holistic, historical, contingent, and
narrative nature of social and political reality. So cases can be fruitfully analyzed
by interpretive social scientists to search for analogies or wider patterns of
meaning and belief. But these must always be (p.101) conceptualized in terms
of narratives about contingent features of reality and not ahistorical, formal,
atomistic, or mechanistic applications.

Unfortunately, Gerring’s own treatment of case studies slides into a naturalist

direction, not only through his atomizing of ahistorical units (as if a nation-state
or prison were a reified chunk of reality that could be moved from context to
context) but also through his extended analysis of case studies as tools for
finding causal pathways and relationships between formal variables. For
example, Gerring argues that one of the primary virtues of case-study analyses is
that they can be used to test either strong or weak causal bonds between
ahistorical variables. In the case of strong causal bonds, “X is assumed to be
necessary and/or sufficient for Y’s occurrence,” whereas in weak causal bonds,
the “mechanisms” are “more tenuous,” “highly irregular,” and “probabilistic.”37
When the former is the case a single case study can be used to disprove a claim
to a strong causal bond, but when a claim is being made to probabilistic causal
bonds, Gerring recommends social scientists use a cluster of cases (or “cross-
case” studies) to test the hypothesis. In both scenarios, the problem is that
Gerring is fitting case-study forms of analysis to a naturalist schema of
mechanistic explanation between ahistorical, atomized variables.

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For instance, in the case of weak, probabilistic causal bonds between variables
Gerring writes of “democracy” and “the economy” as if they were formal,
ahistorical variables: “democracy, if it has any effect on economic growth at all,
probably has only a slight effect over the near-to-medium term, and this effect is
probably characterized by many exceptions.”38 What this passage reveals is
Gerring’s naturalist tendency to treat political reality as reified, essentialized,
and atomistic units. Gerring’s defense and articulation of case-study analysis is
certainly not without merit but needs to be disentangled from these naturalist
tendencies. By contrast, interpretive social scientists analyze cases not for the
sake of setting up mechanistic and ahistorical causal bonds, but for the
construction of contingent narratives, family resemblances, and patterns of
meaning. So the case study, far from being inherently interpretive or historical,
is (like the other methods of data analysis) subsumable under either one of the
competing philosophical paradigms.

That methods can be bent to either naturalist or anti-naturalist ends is

something that more methodologists have begun to recognize. For instance, the
latest methodological work on “grounded theory” or coding notes that this tool
can be put to either more interpretively sensitive or more scientistic uses.39
Grounded theory is a method of data analysis that draws on in-depth
interviewing in order to formulate abstract categories. The building of these
abstract categories is called “coding” and “involves constructing short labels
that describe, dissect, and distill” meanings from the interviewing process with
the goal of sorting and synthesizing large troves of beliefs and actions.40
Researchers can use the coding system they have devised to think more (p.102)
broadly about the tacit meanings and beliefs of a group of people; coding also
allows researchers to creatively conceptualize and draw comparisons.

Of course, all this can be taken in a very naturalist direction if meanings are
treated as self-evident, brute bits of empirical reality in little need of context or
interpretation. Indeed, under the philosophical sway of naturalism there is a
serious danger that the coding categories or labels will become completely
exogenous to the social world supposedly being studied. When this happens
researchers will be more likely to ignore the holistic, contingent, and historical
dimensions of meanings. Instead, under the spell of naturalism, researchers
might start treating coded terms like reified, essentialist, or atomistic objects
ready to be plugged into mechanistic explanations. Researchers can correct this
mistake by always remaining aware of the way their coded categories should be
derived from the contingent beliefs and meanings of the interview subjects. Anti-
naturalism implies that coded concepts should be the fruit of a dialogue between
the interviewer and interviewee—as such, the concepts should have a bottom-up
sensitivity to agent language and self-understandings. Coded concepts that fail
to capture the contingent meanings and beliefs of the subjects in question are
philosophically defective. For this reason, the most recent handbooks on
grounded theory have rightly stressed the need for an “iterative” process in
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which the coded concepts are continually refined, modified, scrapped,

reformulated, and changed in light of ongoing discussions with the subjects of
study.41 Provided this is the case, there is nothing philosophically barring
interpretive social scientists from making careful use of the abstraction,
labeling, and conceptualization involved in coding meanings.

A final method that combines both elements of data collection and data analysis
is Q methodology. Q methodology has mostly been developed and employed by
psychologists in order to study configurations of opinions and beliefs within a
group. Carrying out this method involves several steps, beginning with selecting
a sample collection of items (these can be pictures, objects, or statements) for
participants in the study to then rank along a continuum. The continuum can be
devised along any number of scales like “most agree to most disagree, most
characteristic to most uncharacteristic, most attractive to most unattractive.”42
The participants then assign the series of items selected by the researchers a
number along the scale (for example, +5 or “I strongly agree” with this
statement). The significance of statements on a given theme (like love or crime
or moods) can in this way be organized and studied by researchers across a
group of participants. A key feature of Q methods is the exit interview in which
“open-ended comments” are requested to discover “how the participant has
interpreted the items.”43 The results of the various rankings can then be
mathematically sorted, ordered, and analyzed into various patterns that are
subject by researchers to interpretation.

In light of the discussion of other methods, it should be clear that Q methodology

can either be pulled in interpretive or naturalist directions. (p.103) The risk
with Q methodology is that it be fitted to naturalist aims that neglect meanings,
intentions, and historical contingency. In current discussions of Q methodology
this often happens when researchers begin to treat aggregate configurations or
rankings among a group like a reified “gestalt” viewpoint floating above any one
participant. For instance, two prominent methodologists slide in this naturalist
direction when they write that the findings of Q methodology are “designed to
communicate a ‘shared’ viewpoint, and hence…they need not provide a veridical
representation of a participant’s own opinion.”44

By contrast, interpretive philosophy shows that meanings are always the product
of the contingent reasons and intentions of particular agents. Reification
happens when features of social reality are stripped and disconnected from
agent intentions, purposes, reasons, and beliefs. Researchers should never be
mystified into treating meanings as objects ascribable to a group “gestalt” that
hovers above any one participant. For this involves a basic naturalist
philosophical confusion over the nature of meanings. Fortunately, the same
methodological writers provide the antidote to bring Q methods in a more
interpretively sound direction. This can be done by keeping the rankings and
configurations of Q methods embedded within the reasons and beliefs that

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participants gave in their interviews. This can be used to “fill out” the various
competing meanings and reasons that have led to certain rankings of items.45
The formal configurations must not be allowed to turn into formal, ahistorical
features of social reality that have no connection to the thought-world, beliefs,
meanings, and practices of the participants in the study.

In sum, the various methods of data analysis offer highly valuable research tools
for working social scientists. A social science without the tools of random
sampling, statistical inference, and case studies would be deeply impaired.
Moreover, there is no reason why interpretive social scientists cannot make
careful and selective use of Q methodology if it helps them answer a particular
research question or explore the meanings and beliefs of those they are
studying. However, when using these tools social scientists must also be
philosophically cautious and resist the temptation to atomize, reify, or mechanize
political reality. The task of the social scientist is not to hunt down correlations
that might yield the holy grail of ahistorical causal bonds, but rather to
historicize findings by placing them within the scope of a particular narrative
and world of meaning.

Heuristics: formal modeling and the case of rational choice theory

So far we have argued that social scientists wishing to follow the interpretive
turn may make use of methods of data collection that generate information (p.
104) about a way of life (ethnography, interviews, mass surveys) and data
analysis that finds patterns in that information (random sampling and statistical
inference). Yet a third and final category of methods that deserve careful
attention are “heuristics.” A heuristic is a potentially fruitful way to reach a valid
conclusion about social reality. This is distinct from an explanation or description
of social reality itself. Explanations, as we saw in prior chapters, must consider
the actual reasons and beliefs that led particular individuals or groups to
specific actions or meanings. Explanations, therefore, have a narrative form and
engage the social world. Data analysis and collection meanwhile are foremost
concerned with describing some feature of that social reality. By contrast,
heuristics often deal in formal or ideal models that initially put aside the
question of how well they actually describe or explain social reality. A heuristic is
a way to think about or consider social reality that may potentially lead to
further insights. Anti-naturalist philosophy makes clear that, like the other
methods we have studied so far, heuristics can be used by social scientists
provided they remain cautious and vigilant when it comes to concept formation
and explanation.

In the social sciences, heuristics most often take the shape of formal modeling
and rational choice theory. Of all the heuristics used by social scientists today,
perhaps none is more often thought to be the antithesis to an interpretive
approach than rational choice theory. After all, what could be more contrary to
interpretive philosophy than creating a model of rationality completely divorced

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from the actual beliefs of individuals in their life-worlds? And we already saw
that scholars like Colin Hay have insightfully linked this kind of project to a
deterministic view of social reality as fixed by certain option or incentive
environments. Yet, like the other methods we have examined in this chapter,
rational choice theory can be put to either naturalist or anti-naturalist uses. Anti-
naturalist social scientists will be able to appreciate this once they view rational
choice theory as a heuristic and not foremost an attempt to conduct data
collection or analysis. Once social scientists realize that rational choice theory is
a heuristic, they are free to playfully make use of this method within certain
limited contexts and as suits their purposes—again, they must steer clear of
naturalist snags. This series of points will become clearer by taking a closer look
at the specifics of rational choice.

Rational choice theory does not begin by looking at the actual social world but
instead by building an ideal conception of human rationality. Like randomization
and statistical inference, rational choice is a way of organizing and reasoning
about certain features of social reality. But unlike data analysis, rational choice
does not begin by paying very much attention to the actual features of social
reality. Instead, rational choice proposes an ideal theory of decision-making and
strategic game scenarios. In the case of rational choice, this is achieved by
formulating axioms about how a certain kind of rational agent makes decisions—
a process known as “axiomatization.”46 Two key (p.105) axioms of rational
choice modeling are the assumptions that individual preferences are complete
and transitive. Completeness assumes that a rational actor will always be able to
compare and rank preferences (though ties and indifference are both allowed).
What is not allowed by the completeness axiom is that a rational actor will be
unable to compare and rank two preferences. In addition, the transitivity axiom
assumes that a rational actor can transfer the preference of one object over
another to other objects. So, a rational actor who prefers x to y and y to z must
also prefer x to z.

Completeness and transitivity are two of the most important (though by no

means the only) axioms of rational choice theory. The idealized picture of
decision-making that rational choice generates is the basis for game theory and
social choice theory, and has also been central to the development of
neoclassical economics.47 Rational choice constructs a thin or minimalist view of
human rationality—as is widely acknowledged today, this ideal of rationality is at
wide variance with the actual empirical workings of human psychology (actual
human beings do not uniformly arrive at their beliefs in compliance with this
idealized pattern).48 However, in building an ideal model, rational choice has
nonetheless proven a powerful tool for modeling how idealized strategic and
rational decision-making scenarios might play out, casting light on scenarios as
diverse as economic exchange, geopolitical strategy, voter behavior, and other
game-like scenarios. Indeed, as Hay (who has been particularly helpful on the
uses and abuses of this method) has noted, rational choice theorists have made
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significant contributions to social science and public policy debates. For

instance, using these theories to model social reality, they have drawn “attention
to the often perverse and collectively irrational effects of individually rational
action” in cases like the so-called free-rider problem or the “tragedy of the
commons” in which the devastation of some shared good is motivated by short-
term individual gains.49 If enough people really follow a “self-serving, utility
maximizing behavior,” then rational choice models can show how this “translates
into collectively irrational outcomes.”50

What does anti-naturalist philosophy make of such formal models built before
researchers have even had a chance to consider the actual self-understandings
and webs of meaning of particular individuals out in the social world? First, anti-
naturalism stresses the way in which rational choice theory’s axiomatization and
idealization of social reality is effective only within a very limited domain.51 The
biggest naturalist pitfall for rational choice theory is to mistakenly assume that it
offers a universal, historically transcendent account of the human subject.
Indeed, many rational choice theorists have themselves begun to affirm that this
kind of formal model can in no way be taken as a universal theory of human
agency. The best way to see this, and avoid naturalist pitfalls, is by
understanding some of the limits of axiomatization—many of which have been
mapped out by rational choice theorists and their (p.106) critics. We will focus
on only a couple of examples of such limits in order to impress upon readers the
importance of treating rational choice as a heuristic and not as a universal
theory explaining human action. We will then turn to possible anti-naturalist
uses of rational choice as a heuristic.

The completeness axiom assumes that any two objects can be compared or else
are simply objects of indifference. Pairs of objects, in other words, no matter
how different, are comparable and susceptible to ranking. But this excludes from
the outset all goods that are incommensurable or unable to be compared to one
another. Critics of rational choice have attempted to establish the existence of
incommensurable goods in various ways. One influential way is the “small
improvements” argument.52 The small improvements argument asks us to
imagine a person who is unable to decide between two preferences—say,
seriously endangering the life of a loved one versus saving his small bankrupt
country one trillion dollars. The completeness axiom holds that all goods are
comparable, granted there may be ties. This means that if one million dollars
were added to the one trillion then the individual, so long as he or she is a
rational decision-maker under this definition, should at that point prefer the
money to keeping the loved one safe. Yet because such incremental changes
might not break the stalemate, this shows that the goods in question are not in
fact comparable. And yet neither can it be said that the individual was
indifferent to the economic fate of his country or the wellbeing of this person.53
The completeness axiom is therefore not a psychologically valid description of
human attachment to certain goods, which individuals can resist subordinating
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to a calculative rationality. Indeed, for many individuals, subordinating such

goods to calculation is itself potentially corruptive or demeaning of those
goods.54

This is a larger problem than it may at first appear because human life abounds
in incommensurable goods. For example, can we compare one person we love
dearly to another? What of competing political and ethical goods like security
and freedom, justice and mercy? Utilitarian philosophers often argue that all
goods are subject to completeness and ordering. What is certain is that society is
not made up exclusively of utilitarian philosophers. Individuals daily deal with
what they perceive as incommensurable goods that comprise their distinctive
ethical outlooks. Moreover, what counts as an incommensurable good will
depend on the self-understandings of the individual or group. Social scientists
cannot legislate this beforehand. In one culture newborns, totems, and the land
will be incomparable goods; in another a particular species of animal, a
tabernacle, a piece of bread. From a sociological perspective, completeness of
preference is simply not always an accurate or even useful way to look at human
decision-making.55 Thus, the basic axioms of rational choice should not be taken
as universal descriptions or explanations of human action. The idealization of
one kind of formal rational structure is not a successful or universal human
anthropology. In fact, in a (p.107) very different way, it veers back into the
problematic universal, ahistorical, and autonomous subject critically examined
earlier in the debates between old-school phenomenologists and Foucault.
Foucault’s radically historicist critique applies here as well.

This dilemma with completeness and an ahistorical subject is closely related to

another naturalist problem with rational choice. Namely, by its very nature,
rational choice begins by bracketing the actually psychological beliefs and
motives that explain why individuals act the way they do. Instead, rational
choice simply posits an order of preferences. The assumption is that an
individual is involved in some form of preference maximizing. However, research
has shown that in many scenarios individuals do not respond rationally to risk,
but tend to inflate small probabilities “as if they were larger than they are
known to be.”56 This failure of individuals to actually carry out the ideal of a
rational assessment of probable risks is called “prospect theory.” Once again,
there is a gap between the formal model of rational choice and the thick
psychological reality of human belief formation. The idea that rational choice is a
universal or imperial theory of human behavior is untenable because actual
human beliefs and actions are frequently incompatible with its basic
assumptions. The bracketing of human beliefs and self-interpretations thus
comes at a significant cost to rational choice theory. It cannot be adopted as
explanatory or descriptive of the human social and political world.

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Because rational choice theory begins by intentionally bracketing the beliefs of

individuals in order to construct an ideal of rationality, it is highly limited in its
legitimate application.57 Rational choice is a heuristic that can within some
contexts help shed light on the analysis of social dynamics. But social scientists
must always consider whether rational choice is the proper tool based on an
assessment of the social actors in question. Are the goods involved complete and
transitive? Is the actor through repeated practice, education, or other forms of
socialization adept at strategic reasoning and calculation? As with mass surveys,
proper use of rational choice requires a grasp of the ethnographic background of
the actors involved. This is necessary in order to determine whether the
individuals involved are in fact interpreting themselves as the sorts of strategic
actors posited by rational choice axioms. In cases where individuals are dealing
with incommensurable goods (for instance, as is often the case in politics and
many domains of psychology), then rational choice will most likely not be as
helpful a heuristic. Indeed, in such cases rational choice might be downright
harmful, generating a completely ahistorical subjectivity that actually occludes
what is happening in the social world that social scientists wish to understand
and explain.

The above line of reasoning makes clear why the domain in which rational
choice has met with the greatest success is contemporary economics. This is
because economic actors often aspire to approximate the type of decision-maker
offered by neoclassicism and rational choice. The practices of modern (p.108)
consumer capitalism have habituated individuals to the treatment of goods as
complete and transitive. Likewise, the discourses of rational choice have seeped
into the self-understandings of many in market societies who learned these
discourses in economics and business schools. By contrast, rational choice and
modern economics have been much less successful in domains that deal with
incommensurable goods and non-strategic, non-calculative self-understandings
and practices. But economics is only an autonomous domain in academia. The
actual economic world is always embedded in values, practices, and institutions
that extend beyond the market and its calculative practices.58 Human social,
economic, and political reality are permeated by incommensurable goods as well
as non-strategic forms of reasoning that can make the assumed axioms a
stumbling block to effective social research. This perhaps goes a long way
toward explaining the intense combination of successes and disappointments
that is the modern discipline of economics.

The anti-naturalist upshot of all of this is clear: rational choice is an effective but
also highly limited tool. Social scientists should employ rational choice when
there is some approximate fit between the actual self-understandings of the
agents involved and the idealized model. They must never mistake what is a
heuristic for actual explanation or description. The thin or minimalist sociology
generated by rational choice must be evaluated in light of thick understandings
and descriptions. And even in those limited cases where rational choice is found
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to be useful, the model remains an abstraction and idealization that needs

serious re-embedding in the fabric of agent self-understandings. This process
can once again be aided by multi-methods and the compatibility of the entire
scope of techniques. Rational choice should thus be used in tandem with other
methods like ethnography and interviewing. Far from being rivals, these
qualitative and quantitative methods might often come to complement one
another.

In addition to this domain-limited use of rational choice theory, Hay has drawn
attention to the ways in which rational choice can be employed to illuminate
hypothetical, what-if scenarios. The purpose of the rational choice method in this
case would be “hypothetical thought experiments” that ask the question “what if
the world were like this?”59 If social scientists are careful to not mistake rational
choice theories as naturalistic and explanatory, then these models might
“provide timely and powerful warnings about the likely consequences of existing
political trajectories.”60 Vicious cycles and perverse incentives that encourage
the squandering of shared goods in the environment (like water and climate)
might be clarified using rational choice models. Similarly, the consequences of
neoliberalizing or marketizing goods like public education or welfare might be
explored in this way—not as “predictive hypotheses” but as “precautionary
political warnings.”61 These are what Hay dubs “as-if” uses of naturalist
assumptions and theories, and we will return to them at length in our treatment
of public policy. For now the point is that Hay adds (p.109) another important
sense in which rational choice may be employed as a heuristic method, divorced
from naturalist philosophical assumptions.

Unfortunately, at present very few practitioners of rational choice heed anti-

naturalist and interpretive insights. Recent studies show that the bulk of rational
choice research today woefully neglects interpretive evidence and instead treats
its models as quasi-universal explanations of social reality.62 Interpretive social
scientists using rational choice and game theory must correct this tendency by
always asking themselves questions like: Are the real-life participants playing
this game and strategizing in a way that approximates the structure of the
idealized axioms or not? Will simplifying through formal modeling produce
useful insight into a given social reality or rather occlude the actual social
dynamics? What actual reasons do the people involved have for specific beliefs
and actions? What are the limits of modeling a strategic or market scenario in
this way? What forms of ethical reasoning, irrationality, or non-calculative
thinking become invisible when this particular piece of social reality is modeled
in this way? Does employing rational choice in this way provide a useful thought
experiment or political warning? What dangerous biases might the as-if uses of
rational choice and the focus on strategic rationality and game scenarios create?
Failure to weigh such considerations will perpetuate what several critics of
rational choice have diagnosed as a “flight from reality”—or the neglect of social
and political reality in favor of complex models of high precision and little
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relationship to political life.63 Such uses of rational choice are more explicable in
terms of the insularity of much of modern scholarship than a genuine effort to
respond to social reality.64

But advocates of the interpretive turn and qualitative methods should also take
note. Social scientists should not squeamishly cut themselves off from the uses
of rational choice analysis. Such models can and have generated insights into
the ramifications of strategic and calculative reasoning within human practices,
particularly in market scenarios where individuals are highly habituated to
thinking in this way. The successes of modern economics as a discipline are
often tied to the strength of rational choice as a heuristic. Once again, anti-
naturalism is uniquely placed to identify both the strengths and the weaknesses
of this tool. Anti-naturalism rejects the overblown antagonism between rational
choice scholars and their opponents. Instead, anti-naturalism is able to absorb
and integrate rational choice into a vast array of social science methods. This is
accomplished, moreover, without ever giving way to the naturalist myth that
rational choice is anything like an adequate philosophical anthropology. Indeed,
rational choice must never be mistaken for an actual anthropology or even a
very good account of how humans across history form their beliefs (a mistake
made all too frequently by neoclassical economists).65 But even economists need
anti-naturalists concepts like traditions, beliefs, practices, and the social
background. This will tune them into whether a (p.110) particular actor or set
of actors within a context might be more given to rational choice strategic
thinking because they themselves were instructed in this heuristic or learned
approximations of it through long iterative decisions in the marketplace.

In sum, anti-naturalism gives back to social scientists the freedom to consider

and judge within context which method is best for their particular research
goals. Social scientists need not sit behind artificial methodological walls
defensively committing to either quantitative or qualitative methods. Instead,
they can make use of the full range of social science tools. They must only learn
to use these toward anti-naturalist and not naturalist ends. In other words, social
scientists must stop neglecting philosophy.

We have seen that data collection, data analysis, and heuristics can all be
reconciled. This means tools as diverse as observer-participation, in-depth
interviews, mass surveys, random sampling, statistical inference, case studies, Q
methodology, grounded theory, and rational choice modeling can all be either
used or abused. Anti-naturalism is uniquely placed to create a vast synthesis of
the data collection, data analysis, and heuristics that have been developed by
social scientists in the last two centuries.

Of course, within the limits of a single research project, mixing methods (like
advanced econometric analysis and ethnography) could be difficult because of
the practical unlikelihood of finding this kind of knowledge in a single

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researcher. Indeed, the disciplinary demands of graduate school and modern

scholarship make it difficult for any one person to master and apply highly
diverse methods. Moreover, the intense specialized training often serves to limit
and not broaden the kind of research that is conducted by contemporary
scholars. One way to resolve this is to begin to enact a far more cooperative
form of social science—one in which anti-naturalist scholars do not expect to
find all the requisite methodological expertise embodied in a single researcher
or discipline.66

The anti-naturalist case for multi-methods does in this regard seem to imply a
shift toward much greater levels of cooperation across research communities
than has thus far been the case. Unfortunately, scholarly communities clustered
tribalistically around method-expertise and technical wizardry currently serve as
the norm. Each tribe claims for itself the one true path to social science via a
particular method or methods. By contrast, future anti-naturalist ethnographers
and statisticians might collaborate in the construction of a narrative social
science. But even in lieu of this more cooperative future, current anti-naturalists
working under intellectual isolation are free to learn from the research of both
hard-nosed quants and linguistically adept qualies. Anti-naturalist social
scientists can employ philosophy to help them sift through the mountains of
empirical findings generated by current researchers. What is distorted by
naturalism can be carefully separated out from what is valid and admirable but
still in need of interpretive and historical (p.111) contextualization. The
repurposing of existing findings into interpretive and narrative forms of
explanation is arguably an enormous area of untapped research potential. An
entire generation of social scientists could devote itself to taking the many
bricks and isolated pieces of information generated by the naturalist focus on
data and build them into narrative, sociological edifices.

Notes:
(1.) The authors call this “soaking and poking.” Gary King, Robert O. Keohane,
and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative
Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) 38–9. For another
widely used textbook that makes a similar assumption, see: John W. Creswell,
Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 3rd
ed. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009) 8.

(2.) This is not necessarily an error made among ethnographers themselves:

Edward Schatz, ed., Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the
Study of Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

(3.) For example: Henry Brady and David Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry:
Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,

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2010) 86; Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow, Interpretive Research

Design: Concepts and Processes (New York: Routledge, 2012).

(4.) A similar point about a pluralist approach to methods has been echoed in the
action research literature. For example: Davydd James Greenwood and Morten
Levin, Introduction to Action Research, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, 2007).

(5.) For a usage similar to our own see: David Marsh and Gerry Stoker, eds.,
Theory and Methods in Political Science, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010) 3.

(6.) The famous phrase is from Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an
Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1973) 6. See also: John Van Maanen, “Ethnography as Work,”
Journal of Management Studies 48:1 (2011): 219–20.

(7.) Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design, 63–5.

(8.) Joe Soss, “Talking Our Way to Meaningful Explanations: A Practice-Centered

View of Interviewing for Interpretive Research,” in Interpretation and Method:
Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, eds. Dvora Yanow and
Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006) 135.

(9.) Kenneth MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a
Military Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

(10.) Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2014). For a recent overview of urban ethnography
see: Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kasinitz, and Alexandra Murphy, eds., The Urban
Ethnography Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

(11.) Goffman, On the Run, 203.

(12.) Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and
Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016); Matthew
Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Penguin
Random House, 2016).

(13.) Schwarz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design, 38.

(14.) Ellen Pader, “Seeing With an Ethnographic Sensibility,” in Interpretation

and Method, eds. Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 167.

(15.) Frederic C. Schaffer, Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in

an Unfamiliar Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) xi.

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(16.) James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2 (1983):

124.

(17.) Dvora Yanow, Sierk Ybema, and Merlijn van Hulst, “Practicing
Organizational Ethnography,” in The Practice of Qualitative Organizational
Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges, eds. Catherine Cassel and
Gillian Symon (London: Sage, 2012) 331–50. See also: James Clifford, “On
Ethnographic Authority,” 125.

(18.) Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 119.

(19.) Van Maanen, “Ethnography as Work,” 225.

(20.) Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, Interpretive Research Design, 65–6.

(21.) Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 139–40.

(22.) See, for example, our extended discussion below of: Christian Smith and
Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of
American Teenagers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 67.

(23.) For further discussion see: Earl Babbie, Survey Research Methods, 2nd ed.
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998) 56–9; John W. Cresswell,
Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 3rd
ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009) 146.

(24.) Babbie, Survey Research Methods, 52. Another example of this naturalist
error can be seen in: Arlene Fink, The Survey Handbook, 2nd ed. (Thousand
Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2003) 55–60.

(25.) Even survey researchers who promote naturalist modes of explanation

admit the efficacy of such supplementary study: Babbie, Survey Research
Methods, 58.

(26.) Tom Wengraf, Qualitative Research Interviewing: Biographic Narrative and

Semi-Structured Methods (London: SAGE, 2001) 60.

(27.) See: Simon Watts and Paul Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology: Theory,
Method, and Interpretation,” Qualitative Research in Psychology 2 (2005): 67–
91.

(28.) Paul M. Kellstedt and Guy D. Whitten, The Fundamentals of Political

Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 121.

(29.) For a more detailed discussion, see: Kellstedt and Whitten, The
Fundamentals of Political Science Research, 126–7.

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(30.) Lesley Andres, Designing and Doing Survey Research (Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE Publications, 2012) 9.

(31.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 292–3.

(32.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 68.

(33.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 163.

(34.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 67.

(35.) Smith and Denton, Soul Searching, 263.

(36.) John Gerring, “The Case Study: What It Is and What It Does,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Political Science, ed. Robert E. Goodin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011) 1137–8.

(37.) Gerring, “The Case Study,” 1152–3.

(38.) Gerring, “The Case Study,” 1153.

(39.) Kathy Charmaz and Linda Liska Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and
Grounded Theory Analysis,” in The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The
Complexity of the Craft, 2nd ed., eds. Jaber Gubrium, James Holstein, Amir
Marvasti, and Karyn McKinney (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012) 349.

(40.) Charmaz and Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and Grounded Theory

Analysis,” 356.

(41.) Charmaz and Belgrave, “Qualitative Interviewing and Grounded Theory

Analysis,” 348.

(42.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 77.

(43.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 78.

(44.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 85.

(45.) Watts and Stenner, “Doing Q-Methodology,” 76.

(46.) Itzhak Gilboa, Rational Choice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010) 39–40.

(47.) See: Julian Reiss, Philosophy of Economics (New York: Routledge, 2013) 6;
Daniel M. Hausman, “Philosophy of Economics,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998) 211–22.

(48.) This has been a key finding of behavioral economics. For famous early
pieces disputing the transitivity of human preferences on psychological grounds,
see: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the

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Psychology of Choice,” Science 211 (1981): 453–8; Kenneth O. May,

“Intransitivity, Utility, and the Aggregation of Preference Patterns,”
Econometrica 22:1 (1954): 1–13; Amos Tversky, “Intransitivity of Preferences,”
Psychological Review 76:1 (1969): 31–48.

(49.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002) 9.

(50.) Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? The

Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public
Administration 82:1 (2004): 42.

(51.) See Donald Green and Ian Shapiro’s important critique of rational choice’s
pretensions toward “universalism.” Green and Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational
Choice Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) 54.

(52.) Martin Peterson, An Introduction to Decision Theory (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2009) 170.

(53.) Some rational choice theorists have responded to the problem of

incommensurable goods with the theory of revealed preferences, which simply
holds that whatever decision individuals in fact make reveals their comparison.
Yet the theory of revealed preference, which is by no means held by all rational
choice theorists, runs completely afoul of an interpretive conception of actions
as expressive of beliefs. Social scientists must be sensitive to the meaning of
actions by interpreting them in light of the beliefs of the actors involved. To
unilaterally impose a meaning on actions from the outside is a clear form of
naturalist distortion. Decision theorists have also argued that the “revealed
preference dogma” is negated by the existence of “probabilistic preferences” or
preferences that are only held a percentage of the time without vacillating back
and forth. In the case of probabilistic preferences, one does not always prefer A
to B or B to A. Peterson, An Introduction to Decision Theory, 292.

(54.) For one extended account of goods not susceptible to rational calculation,
see: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Part I.

(55.) Rational choice theorists have similarly found that individuals do not
always hold transitive preferences but in some contexts hold cyclical
preferences. Peterson, An Introduction to Decision Theory, 290.

(56.) Gilboa, Rational Choice, 43.

(57.) Gilboa, Rational Choice, 22–3.

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(58.) For an extended historical account of markets and market rationality as

culturally embedded, see: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political
and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001).

(59.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 55.

(60.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 56.

(61.) Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, 57.

(62.) Iain Hampsher-Monk and Andrew Hindmoor, “Rational Choice and Inter-
pretive Evidence: Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place?”, Political Studies
58 (2010): 49.

(63.) Ian Shapiro, The Flight From Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005).

(64.) Because of our concern with rational choice as a social science method, we
have intentionally avoided the related debate over whether rational choice ought
to be normative for decision-making.

(65.) For a famous articulation of this erroneous view see Nobel laureate, Gary
S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1976).

(66.) These issues have been extensively and provocatively discussed in action
research literature: Morten Levin and Davydd Greenwood, “Revitalizing
Universities by Reinventing the Social Sciences: Bildung and Action Research,”
in The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, eds. Norman Denzin and
Yvonna Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011) 27–42.

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Synchronic empirical research

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Synchronic empirical research

Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords

Interpretive philosophy opens a novel range of empirical topics for researchers.
This chapter focuses on synchronic research topics (or those pertaining to a
single snapshot of time) and argues that anti-naturalism generates distinctive
ways of studying beliefs, identities, cultural practices, traditions, and political
resistance. Examples are drawn from cutting-edge interpretive research into
subjects like the politics of Islam, race, globalization, and democratic civic
engagement. In addition, some of the more controversial findings of mainstream
social science are engaged, including Samuel Huntington’s thesis that global
politics consists of a “clash of civilizations”; Michelle Alexander’s argument that
the United States is experiencing a new Jim Crow; and Robert Putnam’s view
that American democracy is suffering a decline in civic engagement.

Keywords:   interpretive empirical research, culture, identity, political resistance, Islam, Race,
globalization

Ignoring philosophy does not spare social science from philosophy. It only means
that choices are made without proper critical reflection. In the case of tacit
naturalist philosophical assumptions, this can cause problems with explanation
and concept formation that distort otherwise highly valuable research efforts.
Anti-naturalist critique of much of the mainstream in social science today makes
clear that in the future social scientists need to become more conversant in
certain philosophical issues. Graduate schools in social science should
emphasize philosophical education as much as methodological skills like
numeracy, fluency in native languages, and the ability to take random samples or

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model strategic rationality. The latter remain important, but they are never
substitutes for philosophical training. To the contrary, whether social scientists
know it or not, philosophy is what allows for a coherent treatment and execution
of those very methodologies.

Earlier we argued that an anti-naturalist form of objectivity should not be

conceived in foundationalist terms as an appeal to theory-neutral facts, but
rather as a comparative practice. Competing theories are evaluated by their
ability to resolve dilemmas or open new areas of research that are more fruitful
and less self-defeating than their rivals. This adoption of a notion of objectivity
that is anti-foundationalist and comparative also applies to our own overarching
argument in this book and the dispute with naturalism. This means that our
defense of anti-naturalism, if it is to be considered superior to naturalism, must
not only best it philosophically but also offer a viable, fruitful, and less self-
defeating option for empirical research in the social sciences. It must open up
new and promising vistas for inquiry into social and political reality.

But then what does a specifically anti-naturalist empirical research agenda look
like? The next two chapters seek to give a philosophically informed answer to
this question. Anti-naturalism is a completely alternative paradigm of research in
the social sciences. It conceptualizes empirical reality in a way that breaks away
from naturalism’s essentialism, atomism, and instrumentalism. In what follows
we will argue that the topics that have been taken up by researchers who are
hostile to naturalism are not purely accidental or random, but actually flow out
of basic philosophical commitments. Anti-naturalist philosophy does not merely
serve as an approach to topics, but helps shape the topics themselves. While
undoubtedly the entire world of phenomena is open to anti-naturalist social
science research, the way this research is conducted is expressive of particular
philosophical assumptions and commitments.

(p.116) The present chapter explores the relationship between philosophical

concepts and actual research by looking into synchronic empirical topic areas,
while Chapter 7 delves into the diachronic, historical sociologies and genealogies
developed by interpretive and anti-naturalist theorists. Synchronic research
limits itself to a single period in time while diachronic research considers the
evolution, development, and change of social and political life. Synchronic anti-
naturalist research employs such concepts as beliefs, identities, cultural
practices, traditions, and resistance. As we shall see, each of these topic areas is
shaped by anti-naturalist assumptions in such a way that it dramatically
distinguishes empirical discovery from research conducted by naturalists. In
some of the age’s most controversial areas of social scientific debate—politics
and Islam, race and crime, globalization and democratic civic engagement—anti-
naturalist and interpretive philosophical commitments are generating critiques
of the naturalist mainstream while also offering radically new theories. The

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following topics thus represent some of the most promising research areas in the
social sciences, whose potential remains largely untapped.

Beliefs and identities

Anti-naturalist philosophy assumes that humans are self-interpreting animals,
whose beliefs structure everything about their social and political worlds, from
their actions to their practices, from their identities to their institutions. As we
have already noted at length, the actions that comprise social and political
reality are every bit as expressive of meaning as texts or poems are—only in the
case of actions, the meanings are often embodied within flesh and bone,
concrete and institutions, practices and rituals, as opposed to ink and paper. In
this way, human agency is capable of signifying meaning by conveying certain
beliefs and identities. Such beliefs, as we have already discussed, always occur
in contingent webs or networks of belief, which serve to fill in meaning—that is,
they are holistic and not atomized. Grasping these realities therefore involves
considering single beliefs and clusters of beliefs in light of larger streams of
meaning.

Thus, one way in which anti-naturalist philosophy generates empirical topics is

by conceptualizing social reality as composed of holistic webs of contingent
beliefs and identities. Anti-naturalist concepts promote sensitivity to the
expressive diversity, contingency, and holistic nature of human belief and
identity. This sensitivity has given much of the research of interpretive and anti-
naturalist social scientists the power to radically alter particular debates within
both social science and the public discourse more generally.

Some examples will help clarify this point. Consider, for instance, the current
debates raging in both academia and American society over the role (p.117) of
Islam in politics. This has become one of the most intense areas of argument
since the attack in New York City on the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Yet
what is rarely appreciated is the way these debates can be seriously
compromised and distorted by naturalist philosophical assumptions, which lead
to particular conceptualizations of empirical reality.

In this vein, consider the influential work of Samuel Huntington, the late
Harvard political scientist, whose work on Islam and global conflict was taken up
by many after the September 11 attacks. Writing well before 2001, Huntington
argued that the major source of global conflict post-Cold War would be what he
referred to as “civilizations.” In particular, Huntington argued that the twenty-
first century would be characterized by a violent “clash” between nine essential
civilizational types—including very prominently the “West” versus “Islam.”1 No
more would the competing secular ideologies of Marxism and liberal democracy
fuel global wars. Instead, civilizational identity rifts would determine the
frontiers of human warfare, and fighting would be particularly intense between
Islamic civilization and secular Western civilization.

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Clearly Huntington’s theory resonates within certain developments in politics in

the post-9/11 world—which have undoubtedly contributed to its popularity. But
what makes Huntington’s theory so problematic is that his concept of a
“civilization” very clearly follows a naturalist logic of essentialism (a logic
discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 on concept formation). Specifically,
Huntington argues that the nine civilizations comprising the world today are
defined by a common core of “objective elements such as language, history,
religion, customs, [and] institutions.”2 He also claims that although people have
different “levels of identity,” civilizations are “the broadest level of identification
with which [an individual] intensely identifies.”3 In this way, essentialism
generates the extremely tendentious and influential picture of global politics
propounded by Huntington: one in which nine completely discrete civilizational
identities are pitted against one another in a violent struggle for power.

From an anti-naturalist perspective there are many problems with the

essentialism that Huntington uses to carve up global politics. For one thing, it is
not at all clear that the world has any (let alone nine) “civilizations” in
Huntington’s essentialist usage of the word. The problem is that Huntington’s
essentialist conception seriously neglects the historical contingency of individual
belief formation. No complex, heterogeneous cross-pollinations are politically
significant within Huntington’s picture. Instead, human beliefs about political
identity automatically fall into one of nine buckets. For example, the possibility
of a large-scale variant of Islam that is at once both piously faithful and
politically committed to the institutions of, say, the United States or Great
Britain is treated as either impossible or irrelevant to global dynamics.
Huntington’s civilizations are instead mutually exclusive monoliths of meaning,
with the viewpoints of actual individuals in the world supposedly (p.118)
reducible to certain core elements, and absolutely binding on their moral
identities. This presents deep problems given that humans can creatively reason
through their beliefs in any number of ways. For instance, a Muslim might
strongly identify as, say, an American liberal. Likewise, someone from Athens,
Greece might find no common cause whatsoever with someone from Athens,
Georgia, U.S.A. Indeed, this Greek might find more solidarity with his Muslim
neighbor from Morocco. There is simply nothing that compels or shapes
individual human belief into conformity with the preset civilizational types set
out by Huntington—let alone anything that makes them fit the pattern and
become objects of intense psychological connection as Huntington implies. In
this regard, Huntington’s concept formation shows a clear tendency toward
object-side instrumentalism, in which dialogues with actual individuals within
the myriad communities that comprise the globe are neglected in favor of
concepts formed a priori by the social scientist and without serious empirical
engagement with actual beliefs and meanings in the world.

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Indeed, the more prominent anti-naturalist critiques of Huntington have also

taken issue with his essentialism by drawing on an alternative view of beliefs
that insists on the complex, contingent, and empirically diverse nature of the
meanings informing human identity. These interpretive social researchers have
insisted that social scientists need to attend much more closely to the
constitutive role between beliefs and identities if they are to really understand
what is happening with Islam and geopolitics. The work of Edward Said was a
leading early voice in the effort to overcome these naturalist distortions of Islam
and replace them with interpretive sensitivity. Said argued that Huntington’s
views of the “West” versus “Islam” were not only false but also politically
dangerous. Ironically, Islamophobes and anti-Americanists alike shared
Huntington’s vision of massive, monolithic, homogeneous identities battling each
other on the world stage. As Said put it: “Huntington is an ideologist, someone
who wants to make ‘civilizations’ and ‘identities’ into what they are not: shut-
down, sealed-off entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and
counter-currents.”4

What was needed, according to Said, was an interpretive disaggregation of

monolithic identities like “Islam” and the “West” to see the many underlying
versions. Paying attention to the particular beliefs of Muslims and liberal-
democratic societies means carefully disaggregating them in all their empirical
diversity. What Huntington failed to see is that identities are in fact the product
of intentional states of particular individuals who can creatively modify and
generate new variations and hybrids. Such interpretive analysis reveals that all
of Huntington’s so-called civilizations are in fact multicultural composites.
Empirical reality is far more complex than Huntington’s naturalist concepts
allow. Islam in particular is made up of a diverse set of rival sub-groupings. Said
thus called for a rejection of “Orientalist” ideological fictions (p.119) that
turned Islam into a unitary, essential other.5 Said’s sensitivity to anti-naturalist
notions of belief and identity made this critique possible.

Anti-naturalist philosophy emphasizes the creative contingency of human belief

and identity formation. Recently more interpretive assumptions about beliefs
and identities have helped inspire empirically detailed and rich accounts of the
post-9/11 world. For example, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane Smith, and
Kathleen Moore have done extensive work to unearth the beliefs of particular
Muslim women in America and disaggregate the many possible identities hiding
under the label “Islam.” As they put it, an “Orientalizing gaze” envisions Islamic
women as “passive victims of masculine dominance” and “fully shrouded.”6 Thus
“saving the women of Islam became part of the post 9/11 Western agenda” and
has been “used by more than one American administration to engender
emotional support overseas.”7 The problem is that such conceptions of Islamic
women are too clunky and one-dimensional—they are not sensitive enough to the
rival meanings informing identity practices like wearing the hijab (headscarf) or
reading the Qur’an. An object-side instrumentalism silences the actual meanings
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constituting various identities and actions. A monolithic essentialism reduces the

meaning of being a Muslim woman to a single (and often tacitly Islamophobic)
core.

In reality, scholars like Haddad, Smith, and Moore show that there are an
enormous number of ways of being a Muslim woman today—including not only
all the rival varieties of Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi theology but also creative new
self-interpretations in terms of feminism, Qur’anic interpretation, Islamic
women’s roles in public life, dress, education, and gender. There is no single way
of being a Muslim woman. For this reason “Muslim women in the West should
not be subsumed under any such stereotypes” but instead recognized as
“members of American society who act in conformity neither with Western
assumptions nor, necessarily, with the dictates of Islamic traditionalism.”8

In this way, interpretive sensitivity to the constitutive role of particular webs of

belief has generated a much different picture of our current geopolitical
situation than the image offered by Huntington’s naturalistic research paradigm.
This more anti-naturalist picture is one in which there are family resemblances
between certain groups of Muslims and other citizens in liberal democracies that
they may not share with Muslims in other parts of the world. In other words,
there are Muslims who are every bit as American or British in their political
commitments as the stereotype of the traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Yet
Huntington’s analysis makes this reality of complex family resemblances—of
differences and similarities across groups—invisible and irrelevant. Anti-
naturalism’s philosophical commitment to conceptualizing beliefs and identities
as contingent products of self-interpretive behavior thus allows researchers to
understand social reality in its empirical diversity. By contrast, the
conceptualization of social reality in terms of a naturalist essentialism bewitches
researchers into seeing reality through a highly (p.120) distorted lens.
Suddenly the geopolitical stage consists of colossi in a world-civilizational battle
for existence. This social scientific conceptualization of empirical reality has
serious ideological and ethical implications.

An interpretive sensibility concerning political beliefs and identities has also led
scholars like Mary Habeck to wrestle with the specific ideologies and beliefs
behind politically radicalized variants of Islam like al-Qaida. According to
Habeck, Americans after September 11 did not adequately consider the identity
of the attackers: “Not all Muslims chose to carry out the attacks,” but rather the
advocates of a very specific minority and militant tradition within Islam, with its
own particular concepts, political theology, and lineage.9 Habeck refers to this
minority view as “jihadi” and argues that it has conducted a hostile takeover of
key Muslim theological concepts like jihad and tawhid in order to pursue the
overthrow of the current international system in the hope of establishing an
Islamic state.10 One of the key motives animating Habeck’s research is her belief
that knowing the identity of those who conducted the September 11 attacks is

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vital to forming an adequate response. There is a strong political need to

“differentiate the extremists from other Muslims” and “work with moderate and
liberal Muslims to prevent extremists from taking over mosques.”11 Thus, an
anti-naturalist sensitivity to the contingent way in which beliefs and identities
form is superior even when trying to understand the politically hostile branches
of Islam that preoccupy Huntington.

In short, there is good reason to believe that research into the threat posed by
certain heterodox offshoots of Islam is far better served by anti-naturalist
assumptions than by Huntington’s naturalism. In comparative terms, an anti-
naturalist research agenda is able to steer clear of dilemmas besetting naturalist
rivals. Of course, such social scientific research is also of urgent political
importance because failure to properly ascertain this reality will leave
governments, policy makers, and citizens shadowboxing with cartoon versions of
reality (enemies will be created unnecessarily and opportunities for vital
alliances missed). Anti-naturalism is thus able to overcome dilemmas facing
Huntington’s naturalism both at the theoretical level and as concepts for guiding
public policy.

The anti-naturalist philosophical conception of beliefs and identities thus helps

both academics and elite political actors move past Huntington’s shortcomings.
Yet anti-naturalist research into these topic areas corrects not merely “high”
academic theory but also distorted forms of naturalism that circulate popularly
among laypeople and within civil society. Indeed, the naturalist worldview has
been so pervasive in the last century that even people far outside of academia
today often hold naturalist intuitions about what counts as a good explanation of
political and social life and how concepts should be formed. These popularly held
intuitions are what might be termed “folk naturalisms.” Folk naturalisms have an
enormous scope in all kinds of areas of political life and so anti-naturalist
research can have a political effect in such instances.

(p.121) For example, although racism has certainly been around for centuries,
more recently various forms of folk naturalism are used to prop up racist
worldviews, which attempt to essentialize a kind of inferiority into the biology of
non-whites. Such folk naturalisms view races analogously to the way Huntington
views civilizations—self-contained entities or natural types that do not allow for
politically significant mixtures or variations. To be black, white, Hispanic, or
Asian is said to necessarily entail certain essentialized features of belief and
identity. A biological feature of skin tone supposedly signals a necessary pattern
of beliefs and certain kind of identity when it comes to areas like criminality,
politics, intellectuality, sexual drive, aggression, and so on.

By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy insists on the contingency of human belief

and identity formation. There is no preset, necessary pattern of beliefs that
essentially identifies a particular individual or group. Instead, anti-naturalism’s

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notion of contingency makes clear the ways in which race is a socially, culturally,
and politically interpreted category. Far from reducing human identity to
biological features of skin tone, anti-naturalism asks those who wish to
understand race in the modern world to wrestle with the effects of contingently
formed beliefs and identities about what it means to be black, white, Hispanic,
etc. Racial identities are in fact traditions of inherited beliefs and practice. As
such they are continually being creatively modified by those who inherent them.
This means that, for example, assumptions that Hispanic identity must
necessarily be characterized by an essential core set of features like sensuality,
passion, and musicality prove to be the results of particular histories and not
biological necessity. This focus on racial identity as a product of historically
contingent formed beliefs is clearly employed in the burgeoning branch of anti-
naturalist social science research that critically investigates the political role of
race in America.

Consider, for example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Alexander notes
that while the sale and use of drugs occur at remarkably similar rates across
racial groups in America, blacks have been subject to far more punishment
(including incarceration rates twenty to fifty times higher than whites).12 This
massive discrepancy between crime and punishment, violation and enforcement,
leads Alexander to delve into the types of identity formation that have made this
possible. Here Alexander offers an extensive historical account and
interpretation of the role of beliefs and racial biases that shape the perception of
black identity among police officers, prosecutors, the courts, and the wider
public. In the public imagination, young African American males from the ghetto
have been envisioned as the main culprits in the War on Drugs. Indeed, black
youth have been so identified with illicit drug use that their dress,
communication, music, and even hairstyles have come to be falsely identified as
necessarily related to criminality and illegal drug activity. This false
essentialization of young African American identity as necessarily delinquent or
disordered is one of the most destructive ideological fictions within (p.122)
contemporary American life. Yet, as Alexander helps us see, this essentialist way
of looking at race also has concrete consequences for political reality: “from the
outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelming white
suburbs or on college campuses” (since usage rates among these groups are
comparable) but this would have been seen as misdirected because drug use
among whites is often, paradoxically, not viewed as really criminal.13 In fact, the
War on Drugs—while officially colorblind—is largely driven by a particular set of
beliefs about who the “real” criminals within society are.

Alexander goes on to show how beliefs that criminalize black identity in turn
shape Supreme Court jurisprudence, congressional legislation, and police and
incarceration tactics.14 The overall effect of this racially biased notion of identity
has been the historically unprecedented round-up of racial minorities into
America’s prisons—a phenomenon known as mass incarceration. What look to be
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colorblind policies upon closer interpretive inspection turn out to be part of a

larger historical narrative of American racial exclusion. This argument has in
turn been elaborated by recent urban ethnographies conducted in America’s
ghettos by Victor Rios and Alice Goffman. These ethnographers have found that
mass imprisonment and surveillance have led to a “hypercriminalization” of the
poor and blocked out thousands of black and Latino youth from normal civic life
—including from jobs, hospital care, schooling, and even stable residency.15 Rios
discusses at length how members of civil society and the police conceptualized
certain “everyday styles and behaviors” as essentially “deviant, threatening,
risky, and criminal.”16 In this way, wearing your hat in a particular style,
listening to rap music, or talking in a given dialect are essentialized as part of a
criminal or deviant identity.

The point once again is not whether the reader agrees or disagrees with this line
of research into race per se, but to see that an anti-naturalist philosophical
conception of identities and beliefs generates a critique of naturalist concept
formation and explanation. At the same time, anti-naturalist conceptions of belief
and identity as contingently formed entities open up what would otherwise have
gone unnoticed by both other social scientists and the wider public. A new kind
of research program into identities and beliefs becomes possible. Suddenly
sociologists and political scientists have historical and cultural histories as part
of the depth of meanings they engage when investigating beliefs and identities.
By comparison, ahistorical, essentialized notions of identity appear both
intellectually and politically inadequate.

Cultural practices
Another empirical topic made possible by anti-naturalist philosophical
commitments is a focus on cultural practices. Practices are defined as any stable
patterns of action—from particular forms of marriage and worship to (p.123)
education and political procedures. Studying practices is one way that anti-
naturalist social science can move from the micro-level examination of human
beliefs to mid- and macro-level analysis of institutions, structures, and systems.
As was the case with identities, interpretive social scientists treat practices as
historically contingent and expressive of a holistic web of meanings. Because
these meanings are the fruit of creative human intentionality, practices are in a
continual state of change and modification. Although practices are relatively
stable, a history of a given practice oftentimes reveals various iterations and
even ruptures in meaning.

As we discussed in Chapter 4 on concept formation, naturalists often strip

human actions of any intentional meanings, thereby reifying them. Where anti-
naturalists see practices as constituted by historically contingent and complex
networks of meaning, naturalists instead often conceptualize the world through
what they call “institutions.” When naturalists talk of “institutions” they often
mean something very similar to practices, only they have stripped them of the

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intentional meanings of those participating in them. In doing so, they grant

institutions an exaggerated power in determining individual human action. The
meanings of institutions are then too often conceived as ahistorical and fixed, as
if existing outside and beyond any one of the individuals participating in them.

Take, for example, the big social scientific debate over civic participation in the
United States and other liberal democracies. There is now widespread
agreement among social scientists that Western electoral democracies are
experiencing a steep decline in voting.17 The question is what this means for
democracy more generally. Robert Putnam has argued for a thesis of complex
but general civic decline in America. He has added to the findings on voter
turnout a sophisticated empirical analysis of the decline in engagement in
informal civic institutions (like bowling leagues, neighborhood associations, and
charitable groups).18

Now there is undoubtedly much that is of tremendous value in Putnam’s findings

about growing disengagement in America. But for the sake of this discussion it is
important to see how Putnam’s treatment of civic institutions drifts toward
naturalism. The main problem is his concept of “social capital” which he defines
as a kind of reciprocal networking power that is resident in virtually all types of
formal and informal institutional participation.19 When people engage in civic
institutions, a kind of cooperative, networking power is conferred upon them.
Thus, for Putnam, the sociological meaning of participating in groups as diverse
as charity organizations, meeting informally at bars for drinks, joining unions,
and playing in softball leagues is largely reducible to forms of social capital. The
meaning of the institutions has been fixed as if it were an object separate from a
consideration of their significance for the various participants who engage them.
For this reason Putnam interprets people dropping out of these organizations in
large numbers as a clear sign of decline in American civic engagement.20

(p.124) The problem is that this concept of “social capital” reifies the meaning
of America’s informal civic institutions, creating a kind of naturalist neglect of
the beliefs and intentions of actual individuals. Specifically, Putnam is reifying
social capital as a form of networking power as the meaning of institutions and
informal practices. What individuals actually believe becomes less important.
The meaning of social capital floats above all their actions like a cloud they
almost never touch (this cloud is what naturalists call “institutions”).

To avoid this mistake, social scientists need to keep in mind the way practices
are the result of human self-interpretive activity and therefore capable of
constant changes and gradations of meaning. Practices are generated by human
actions and not the other way around. A question thus arises: What happens if
social scientists actually focus on the self-interpretations, beliefs, and practices
of individual agents when investigating all these recent dropouts from voting
and bowling leagues? Does an anti-naturalist sensitivity to practices at all

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change or complicate Putnam’s picture of modern democracies and the decline

of civic associations?

Here the interpretive work of Pierre Rosanvallon on democratic practices shows

how an anti-naturalist conception of the social world can make an enormous
difference in our understanding. Rosanvallon begins by noting that the focus on
certain institutions as absolute signifiers of civic engagement has led to a
neglect of the meanings of actions by citizens who adopt new, more disperse
practices. Indeed, citing the empirical investigations of Pippa Norris and others,
Rosanvallon observes that far from civic decline, there has been a proliferation
of alternative political practices in the wake of the demise of the traditional civic
institutions. So, for example, since the 1980s newer forms of political expression
such as protests, petitions, consumer boycotts, and demonstrations have been on
the rise. As Norris puts this: “Indicators point more strongly toward the
evolution, transformation, and reinvention of civic engagement than to its
premature death.”21 Drawing on these findings, Rosanvallon argues that
although “electoral democracy has undoubtedly eroded,” signaling an age of
increasing political distrust, nonetheless, “democratic expression, involvement,
and intervention have developed and gained strength.”22 This means that the
widespread idea of the “‘passive citizen’ is a myth” and this is not an age of
“political apathy” but one in which “citizenship has changed in nature.”23

Rosanvallon’s sensitivity to the contingent beliefs of particular people as they

create new patterns of action is what makes this line of argumentative inquiry
possible. The drop-out rates from civic associations observed by Putnam mark
the rise of a new set of informal practices of engagement that Rosanvallon dubs
“counter-democracy.” Counter-democracy is a set of informal practices—existing
alongside the well-known formal, institutionalized channels—that hold political
elites accountable to the populace in times of increasing distrust. For example,
democratic populations today avidly carry (p.125) out the practices of what
Rosanvallon calls “surveillance” and “judgment” which are informal types of
oversight exercised through the formation of public opinion and discourse. Such
surveillance turns citizens into an active, watchful presence within democratic
societies, able to “inspect, monitor, investigate, and evaluate the actions of
government.”24 And although informal, these practices have the potential to
sanction and censure elites by doling out reputation and legitimacy. This does
not mean the old participatory model of civic, direct democracy is healthy or
even intact. To the contrary, Putnam is right to see the decline of one set of
participatory forms—and he may be right to rue them as well. But, if
Rosanvallon is correct, his mistake in terms of empirical inquiry is to not be
sensitive enough to the practices of civic engagement that have emerged in its
place. Putnam’s reified notion of dropping rates of civic association blinds him to
the more complex picture. This is a classic case of naturalist forms of empirical

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inquiry inadvertently creating limits on coming to terms with the actual

empirical reality of the world.

Rosanvallon also argues that citizens today frequently carry out the counter-
democratic practice of “prevention” or a form of “negative sovereignty” that is
capable of blocking or thwarting elite representative action.25 Naturalist social
science with its reified notion of civic institutions thus misses the rise in informal
ways that a “democracy of rejection” emerges in which “increasingly…popular
sovereignty manifests itself as a power to refuse.”26 In this way, surveillance,
judgment, and prevention together encompass a plethora of counter-democratic
practices that comprise the “invisible institutions” of democracy that have been
neglected by other social science researchers because of insensitivity to
meanings.27

Much more could be said about Rosanvallon’s work on counter-democratic

practices. But for our purposes, enough has been outlined to suggest how
empirical breakthroughs are made possible by having a more anti-naturalist
sense of patterned action within social reality. By remaining alive to the
intentionality and contingency of the agents participating in practices, social
scientists and theorists are able to make empirical breakthroughs that the
reified notion of institutions blocks. This important point about the empirical
advantages of anti-naturalist philosophy applies to at least one other conceptual
feature of practices.

We saw in Chapter 4 that naturalism tends to create the impression of a single,

absolute level of analysis and description of political life. The study of politics
becomes all about, say, voting behavior or elite strategy or some other political
institution that is deemed absolutely central to comprehending political life. A
major reduction of political reality at the hands of social science occurs when
only certain institutions are deemed worthy of truly extensive study. Yet anti-
naturalism’s concept of a practice opens the possibility of empirical inquiry into
the strange and often neglected minutiae of political and social life. Where
generation after generation of naturalists focuses on one (p.126) supposedly
privileged set of institutions (e.g., voter behavior or Congress), the anti-
naturalist conception of practice allows for the discovery of whole new worlds of
relevant political meanings.

Consider, for example, the surprising findings of interpretive social scientists

focusing on the subtle political meanings that inform today’s practices of
standardization and quantification. Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star have
noted the way standardization modeled on the natural sciences has penetrated
all kinds of everyday practices. Indeed, the practice of standardization is now
reshaping a wide assortment of human patterns of action including: schooling,
policing, dieting, shopping, insurance markets, journalism, and bureaucratic
management, to name only a few. The nearly ubiquitous spread of this practice

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of standardization has unexpected political significance. Lampland and Star note

that standardization is almost always introduced unevenly, meaning that some
individuals and institutions have the power to opt out of standardization while
others must conform. So, for instance, elite private boarding schools can avoid
much of the trend toward standardization in testing while life in public schools is
increasingly governed by the imposition of standardized norms (that are in turn
tied to the funding outcomes and the enforcement of government fiscal austerity
among especially poorer communities).28 In such cases standardization can
create the false impression of fairness and uniformity in public discourse when
in fact at the level of practice the imposition of the standard is ensuring that the
exact opposite is true—namely, the weaker and more disadvantaged are subject
to standards that the rich and powerful are free to bypass, while existing
inequality is enforced and even increased.

Too often mainstream political science deems this kind of minute phenomenon to
be primarily of sociological interest and bear no real political significance.
Practices like the spread of standardization are ignored in favor of studying
certain institutions almost exclusively: interest groups, lobbying, the presidency,
Congress, the courts, and so on. Anti-naturalist philosophical concepts, by
contrast, help social scientists see that politics is a far more complex, sprawling,
and even confusing phenomenon than something merely limited to a few
canonized institutions. Indeed, inquiry into neglected micro-practices of this
kind can in turn shed fresh light on the practices of traditional public and private
sector institutions (for example, why certain congressional actors who otherwise
disfavor federal regulation might favor the imposition of standardized norms on
public schools). Anti-naturalism thus makes possible an interpretively enriched
perspective on institutions that otherwise gain the appearance of overly
straightforward entities that are easy to grasp and describe.

Another example of the interpretive alternative is the work of Theodore Porter

who has explored the spread of the practice of quantification inspired by the
natural sciences into non-expert and political domains. Porter’s work takes off
from the observation that practices of quantification have become (p.127)
nearly ubiquitous. Institutions both public and private continually ask for precise
quantification or numbers in order to resolve controversies in decision-making.
Such precision is distinct from accuracy in that the former is the “quality of
being definite and unambiguous” but “need not signify correctness.”29 And yet
modern societies have developed elaborate practices around precision even
though we know they have nothing to do with accuracy. For example, in the
tabulation of national census polls we know that “the last four or five digits of a
population figure are probably meaningless”; yet while “scientifically those
numbers may be meaningless…politically they play a role in the allocation of
electoral power and of public funds.”30 Similar practices of precise (but not

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necessarily accurate) quantification drive the cost-benefit analyses of private

firms and insurance companies.

In this context, Porter notes that quantification is being used as a political

practice in modern democratic societies in order to help individuals cope with
disagreement through a form of quasi-objectivity. Thus he studies practices like
the use of “numbers, graphs, and formulas” as “strategies of communication”
that “minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust.”31 Indeed,
Porter notes that oftentimes the insistent use of quantitative metrics in social life
loosens and even disappears in more intimate group settings where social trust
is still high. Yet in public domains (including the institutions that are of such
intense interest to naturalist social scientists) practices of quantification have
become ways of generating agreed-upon criteria for decision-making. In other
words, practices of quantification are often political and not what they appear to
be on the surface—namely, straightforward scientific description.

In this way, Porter’s study of minute practices and meanings opens up surprising
insights into central economic and political patterns of action in government and
private sector corporations. These patterns of action are not reducible to
ahistorical, reified institutions, but rather are continually being modified by the
introduction and development of new meanings. Porter’s investigation into the
politics of standardization and quantification can help social scientists come to
grips with much broader phenomena like the spread of public policies of
neoliberalism and networks in the modern state and corporations (a topic we
return to at length in our discussion of democratic governance and public
policy). Quantification, auditing, benchmarks, and standardization are all part of
a deeper politics that has transformed the major political institutions of
modernity.

The point again is to see how anti-naturalist philosophical concepts (in this case
practices) make this empirical discovery possible. By contrast, naturalism has
devoted too many talented researchers to a narrowed study of institutions. No
doubt much of this work is valuable. But the de facto treatment of these
institutions as the totality of the study of modern politics betrays a naturalist
reduction. In reality, there is an entire subterranean world of human political (p.
128) activity in need of illumination. The work of anti-naturalist social scientists
has already yielded surprising insights about seemingly mundane and
uncontroversial patterns of action like standardization and measurement by
numbers. These in turn might come to radically reshape how we think of
quantification and standardization in major political institutions like state
legislatures or international federations. Yet without an anti-naturalist
philosophical sensibility, such insights go unseen.

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Traditions and resistance

A final area of synchronic empirical inquiry opened up by anti-naturalist
philosophical concepts is the study of traditions. We saw in prior chapters that
anti-naturalist philosophy assumes that humans are always historically situated
against a background of inherited beliefs or traditions. Traditions are how
meanings, beliefs, and practices are extended and transmitted through time,
often across many centuries. Traditions thus explain continuities in belief,
identities, and practices. But traditions are also a major topic of empirical study
in their own right. Generally speaking, because of an emphasis on the historical
contingency of belief formation, anti-naturalist social scientists tend to focus on
both the multiple and contested nature of traditions. This means they often
disaggregate what appear to be single, monolithic traditions into rival strains. As
part of this, anti-naturalist social scientists are able to focus their research on
the way individuals creatively subvert, resist, or modify hegemonic traditions.
This means resistance to traditions opens as a further and related area for
empirical investigation.

In stark contrast to this, naturalists often inadvertently de-historicize inherited

human beliefs and conceptualize them as homogenous or else monolithic
starting points for human action. That is to say, naturalists often neglect the
actual empirical diversity of traditions—sometimes overextending one tradition
or other times mistaking the background and inherited beliefs of a given time
and place for the background and inherited beliefs of all times and places. When
this happens, beliefs are treated as somehow causally necessary to a given social
milieu as opposed to historically contingent. This illusion of the naturalness and
necessity of certain beliefs can lead to enormous confusions when trying to
empirically decipher the political and social world.

In this vein, consider the famous work of American political scientist Louis Hartz
who argued that the liberal tradition in the United States has been completely
dominant since the country’s inception. Hartz drew inspiration for this thesis
from reading Alexis de Tocqueville, who implied that Americans shared a kind of
uniform ideological consensus or what is commonly referred to as an American
“creed.” This creed consisted of the affirmation of certain (p.129) basic tenets
of liberal ideology like the primacy of the individual to pursue his or her
preferences, the contractual nature of society, and the canonization of certain
basic rights. As Hartz put it, liberalism is so dominant in the United States that
“there has never been a ‘liberal movement’ or a real ‘liberal party’” but only “the
American Way of Life, a nationalist articulation of Locke.”32 Indeed, in this view,
even when anti-liberal ideologies form in the United States like Edmund Burke’s
conservatism, Karl Marx’s socialism, or various populist kinds of racist or
authoritarian ideology, they have in fact been liberalized in terms of their
fundamental assumptions about individual rights and the source of the
government’s legitimacy. Thus, in Hartz’s view the liberal tradition is the
uniform, homogenous starting point for American political ideology—a kind of
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inescapable, necessary meta-tradition. Hartz thus treats liberalism as an

essentialist concept. Liberalism is a set of beliefs that are found at the core of all
of the U.S.A.’s major ideological movements. A kind of tacit naturalist
conceptualization of social reality informs Hartz’s empirical research.

By contrast, researchers with more anti-naturalistic and interpretive intuitions

have conceptualized the American ideological landscape in a very different way.
Chief among those who have challenged Hartz’s essentialized view of American
political thought is Rogers M. Smith. Smith employs the notion of “multiple
traditions” to disaggregate American ideology into various rival and competing
strains.33 What drops out of Hartz’s notion of an American Way of Life is not
merely the importance of rival traditions like republicanism, but also a
persistent history of inegalitarian racial and gender hierarchies—which Smith
dubs the “ascriptive” traditions of American political thought. Through extensive
interpretive studies of federal statutes from 1798 to 1912, Smith is able to show
that racist and other hierarchical, ascriptive traditions have played a consistent
role in American political life and thought. Hartz’s mistake is to reduce all of
American political thought to a kind of benign liberal innocence. But this erases
the more complex political reality.34 What Smith’s research shows is that
inherited beliefs are not necessary and invariant across a given political
community. Rather, the contingency of beliefs means that researchers inspired
by anti-naturalist approaches are able to discern the contours of the historical
contestability of rival traditions. The United States itself appears a far more
empirically complex and diverse landscape for inquiry when employing an anti-
naturalist sense of the contingency of traditions as opposed to Hartz’s
essentialist notion of the American Way of Life.

The anti-naturalist philosophical conception of a tradition thus allows social

scientists to disaggregate social reality and do justice to the actual empirical
diversity. For example, the political theorist John Gray has made a similar move
in the debates over globalization. There the most famous naturalist thesis is
Francis Fukuyama’s well-known claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union,
American-style capitalism would create a uniform global (p.130) economy.
Indeed, Fukuyama went so far as to proclaim that with the end of the Cold War
the world might be reaching the “end of history as such…the endpoint of
mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal
democracy as the final form of human government.”35 Not unlike Hartz,
Fukuyama assumes that political beliefs will necessarily have a certain
structure. In this case, modern societies will be characterized by a necessary
progression or development toward a final set of ideas or goals.

In response to this extremely influential thesis, Gray notes that Fukuyama’s

views in this regard are an example of the wider naturalist, Enlightenment
assumption that “a diversity of cultures” is “not a permanent condition of human
life” but “a stage on the way to a universal civilization.”36 Like Smith’s critique

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of Hartz, the force of Gray’s rebuke of Fukuyama comes from being able to
philosophically grasp the contingency of human-inherited beliefs and traditions.
Where Fukuyama sees a necessary growing convergence, Gray is able to
observe empirical countercurrents. Specifically, Gray saw very early on that
globalization involved not convergence but the formation of conflicting
indigenous capitalisms—to varying degrees illiberal—in Russia, Japan, China,
and Singapore, to name only a few. For example, Japan developed an indigenous
capitalism and path to modernization that confounded the widespread Western
assumption that individualism and capitalism must necessarily go hand in hand.
Japan accomplished this through a culture of firms that “grafts on institutions
inherited from its medieval age” such that “Japanese market institutions rely on
networks of trust rather than upon a culture of contract.”37 Gray argues that
Japanese stances toward employment, career security, and the role of firms
within civic life are capitalist without being individualist. Similarly, in Russia,
Gray analyzes the emergence after communism of an “anarcho-capitalism” with
an “enfeebled, corrupt and, in some regions and contexts, virtually non-existent
state” together with “the pervasive presence throughout economic life of
organized crime.”38 This has itself developed into a “state-led Russian
capitalism” that draws on the tradition of economics from the “last decades of
the Tsarist regime.”39 In this way, an anti-naturalist sensitivity to multiple
traditions reveals the error in Fukuyama’s view of modernization as necessarily
developing toward a single set of beliefs that match North Atlantic liberal
democracies.

Anti-naturalist philosophy makes clear that the reason such multiplication and
diversification of traditions is possible is because humans can modify and resist
their inherited traditions.40 This notion of “resistance”—or the ability to change
and subvert even the most long-held inherited beliefs—is a further anti-
naturalist concept that is able to aid empirical inquiry. A few examples will help
illustrate how this philosophical concept proves empirically fruitful in ways that
elude naturalism.

(p.131) Consider, for instance, the work of social theorists like E. P. Thompson,
Raymond Williams, and other members of the First British New Left who
insisted on a humanistic brand of socialism against the naturalist, structural
determinism of mainstream Marxism. Thompson focused on history from below,
and studied the lived experiences of various subordinate groups including
peasants, women, racial minorities, and especially the English working class. In
his famous study, The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson argued
that nineteenth-century Luddites, croppers, handloom weavers, and utopian
artisans all played a part in the emergence of a modern English working-class
tradition of popular resistance to the dominant political ideologies of the age.41
In this way Thompson brought attention to neglected streams of meaning and
practice that helped shape English political life.

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Williams meanwhile developed a theory of culture that criticized its reduction to

high culture. There was nothing that made the movements of culture essentially
elitist or top down. To the contrary, Williams conceived of mass culture as a site
for rebellion. For example, in The Long Revolution, he argued that political
conflict was carried out within the popular sphere of ideas. In this way, popular
culture was a possible arena for subordinate groups to rebel against hegemonic
political traditions.42 As with Thompson, a view of political society was made
empirically possible by giving attention to the human capacity for resistance.
Traditions need not be monolithic or imposed from above. What determined
Englishness was not only for elites to determine.

What Williams and Thompson shared was a view of human agency as able to
modify and resist inherited and even hegemonic beliefs. This empirical study of
resistance fueled by certain philosophical commitments has gone on to inspire a
number of very fruitful research programs in the social sciences. Two in
particular are worth mentioning.

First, Stuart Hall formed a school of cultural studies, which focuses on questions
of race and gender and also made significant contributions to the debates over
Thatcherism and New Labor in England. Hall drew on Antonio Gramsci’s
concept of hegemony to claim that popular culture can also reinforce dominant
ideas and identities, at the same time that resistance is still possible.
Thatcherism in 1980s England was an example of one such hegemonic tradition
that managed to present neoliberal economic ideas as a kind of populist
movement. This was accompanied, however, by an authoritarian style of
government, which according to Hall was met with popular resistance.43 Hall
was thus able to bring attention to the way that ruling ideologies almost
inevitably meet with some form of resistance in modern societies—whether
planned or ad hoc, conservative or radical. Culture, Hall showed, should not be
mistaken for a uniform entity spreading evenly and unchanging over the whole
of society like a blanket.

(p.132) In addition to inspiring Hall, Thompson’s philosophical notion of agents

capable of resisting structures and inherited systems also helped set in motion
anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott’s influential research
program on peasants in Southeast Asia. According to Scott, the peasants of
lower Burma and Vietnam developed a complex set of subsistence practices to
stave off the continual threat of starvation and scarcity. Practices like common
lands, reciprocity, and various forms of redistribution were central to the lives of
these peasants in pre-capitalist agrarian societies. However, during Burma’s and
Vietnam’s periods of colonization, these grassroots traditions of subsistence ran
into conflict with the dominant and opposed modernizing traditions of
nationalism and colonialism. Both nationalists and colonizers in South East Asia
sought to impose the modern practices of the free market, private property

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enclosure, and state enforcement and taxation on the peasants, thereby

eliminating the feudal arrangements.

The backlash to these dominant modernizing trends is what Scott calls “the
peasantry’s ‘little tradition’ of moral dissent and resistance.”44 Although large-
scale action like peasant revolts is thwarted more often than not, peasants have
developed tenacious “everyday forms of resistance,” including “the ordinary
weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion,
false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so
on.”45 Such tiny techniques of resistance may seem insignificant but have the
potential to “in the end make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by
their would-be superiors in the capital.”46

Although Scott’s work is not entirely free of naturalism (as when he slides into
discussing peasant psychology and identity as if it were a more ahistorical form
of subjectivity), nonetheless his work helps show how an anti-naturalist
philosophical conception of human agency as capable of resistance in turn can
generate a tremendously dynamic field of empirical research.47 Again, where
naturalist social scientists see only an overarching system or structure of beliefs,
anti-naturalist researchers can focus on the actual empirical complexity that
comprises the world.

Synchronic study of the political and social world is therefore best served by
anti-naturalist philosophical concepts like beliefs, identities, practices,
traditions, and resistance. Indeed, in addition to freeing research from errors
like reification, essentialism, instrumentalism, and reductivism, anti-naturalist
concepts actually open new domains for inquiry. Far too often social scientists
led by naturalist intuitions view empirical diversity as an enemy that must be
vanquished on the road to true universal science. Naturalists are thus
continually haunted by the inevitable anomalies and empirical diversity that
spoil their attempts at a uniform and ahistorical treatment of society. By
contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy allows social scientists to embrace the deep
complexity and multidimensional meanings of social and political life. What was
once the bane of scientific theory (empirical diversity) becomes another avenue
into renewed discovery.

Notes:
(1.) Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, Foreign Affairs 72:3
(1993): 22–49.

(2.) Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, 24.

(3.) Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, 24.

(4.) Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance,” The Nation 273:12 (2001): 12.

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(5.) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

(6.) Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane Smith, and Kathleen Moore, Muslim Women
in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 22.

(7.) Haddad, Smith, and Moore, Muslim Women in America, 4.

(8.) Haddad, Smith, and Moore, Muslim Women in America, 40.

(9.) Mary Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) 2.

(10.) Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, 4, 107–9, 161–2, 175.

(11.) Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, 175, 173.

(12.) This figure cannot be accounted for by differences in violent crime:

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2011) 7, 99–101.

(13.) Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 124.

(14.) For example, see: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 108, 112, 115–17, 119–23,
139.

(15.) Victor Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New
York: New York University Press, 2011) xiv; Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive
Life in an American City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

(16.) Rios, Punished, xiv.

(17.) Although much of the literature on voter turnout is awash in naturalist

assumptions, nevertheless the statistical descriptions of rates of practice are
extremely valuable for an anti-naturalist social science. See, for example: Mark
N. Franklin, Diana Evans, and Michael Fotos, Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of
Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).

(18.) Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) 27.

(19.) Robert Putnam, “Social Capital: Measurement and Consequences,” Isuma:

Canadian Journal of Policy Research 2 (Spring 2001): 41–2.

(20.) Again it should be emphasized that in spite of a creeping naturalism,

Putnam’s statistical descriptions of declining participation are extremely
valuable contributions to social science. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 19–24.

(21.) Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 4.
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Synchronic empirical research

(22.) Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 21.

(23.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 21, 19.

(24.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 13.

(25.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 14.

(26.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 15.

(27.) Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 13.

(28.) Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, eds., Standards and Their Stories:
How Quantifying, Classsifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009) 6.

(29.) Theodore Porter, “Speaking Precision to Power: The Modern Role of Social
Science,” Social Research 73:4 (2006): 1282.

(30.) Porter, “Speaking Precision to Power,” 1283.

(31.) Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science

and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) xiii–ix.

(32.) Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955)
11.

(33.) Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S.

History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) 6, 8–9.

(34.) Smith, Civic Ideals, 38, 37. This is not to say that Smith’s social scientific
work is completely free of naturalist influences. It is worth noting that
unfortunately Smith sometimes flirts with naturalistic concepts such as the
deployment of “dependent variables” (p. 8). In addition, critics have noted that
Smith missed an opportunity to complicate the history of liberalism itself. Thus,
in Smith’s book: “it is an idealized and purified, even essentialized, liberalism
that makes an appearance. Whenever racism rears its ugly head, this showing is
taken as confirmation of a nonliberal strand rather than as a commentary on the
liberal tradition itself.” See: Ira Katznelson, “Review: Civic Ideals: Conflicting
Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History,” Political Theory 27:4 (1999): 568. None of
this negates the virtue in Smith’s basic shift toward multiple traditions and away
from an essentialized picture of American ideological belief.

(35.) Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16 (1989):
4.

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Synchronic empirical research

(36.) John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: The
New Press, 1998) 2.

(37.) Gray, False Dawn, 169.

(38.) Gray, False Dawn, 152.

(39.) Gray, False Dawn, 152.

(40.) There are some important affinities here with: Steven Griggs, Aletta J.
Norval, and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds., Practices of Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014).

(41.) E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
Random House, 1964) 12.

(42.) Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus,
1961).

(43.) Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in Stuart Hall and Martin
Jacques, eds., The Politics of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1983).

(44.) James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and
Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976) viii.

(45.) James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant

Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) xvi.

(46.) Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvii.

(47.) For example: Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 4, 7.

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Historical sociologies

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Historical sociologies
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter continues the examination of interpretive empirical research topics
with a focus on large-scale, diachronic studies (or phenomena developing across
time). Contrary to widespread belief, an interpretive approach to social science
is not limited to the small-scale study of single cases. Anti-naturalism makes
possible sweeping forms of historical sociology, meta-narrative, and genealogy
that explore some of the most urgent domains of social scientific research today
(including topics such as violence, religion, secularism, nationalism, economic
history, and the state). As part of this analysis this chapter critically engages the
work of top social scientists and theorists like Steven Pinker, Charles Taylor, E.
O. Wilson, and Steven Levitt.

Keywords:   interpretive sociology, genealogy, secularism, nationalism, the state

Even those who concede the validity of anti-naturalist critiques often question
whether this form of social science really offers a full-blown alternative. After all,
how can a philosophy that emphasizes individual beliefs as central to
understanding social reality ever get beyond fine-grained, micro-level case
studies? Don’t concepts like belief, identity, practice, and tradition require
examining meanings at a very local and limited level? Naturalism may have its
shortcomings, this line of reasoning goes, but at least it is able to make large-
scale generalizations by transcending particular historical contexts. Yet this
objection to hermeneutics, as we now hope to show, is seriously mistaken. The
interpretive turn, understood in anti-naturalist terms, is capable of large-scale

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explanations and historical sociologies that rival naturalism—moreover, these

are achieved free of the unacceptable intellectual costs.

In Chapter 6 we argued that anti-naturalist philosophy substantively shapes

synchronic, small-scale empirical investigations through the use of certain
concepts. We now want to make apparent how anti-naturalist philosophy can
generate large-scale and diachronic historical sociologies that comprise a unique
conceptual and empirical agenda. Specifically, when anti-naturalist social
scientists want to construct general theories, they develop genealogies and
meta-narratives, shunning naturalist attempts to reduce explanation to
mechanistic classifications, formal modeling, or ahistorical causes. As was the
case with synchronic research, social scientists neglect philosophy at the risk of
compromising the enduring value of their own work. We live in an age that
abounds in pseudoscience, such that today’s ultra-prestigious research program
may very well be tomorrow’s phrenology.

What we must first do is consider the conceptual features of anti-naturalist,

diachronic explanations. The diachronic study of empirical reality is concerned
with the evolution, change, and development of social phenomena across time.
Thus, we begin by briefly surveying the basic aspects of genealogy and meta-
narrative as general forms of anti-naturalist historical sociology. The remainder
of the chapter then tries to show how genealogies and meta-narratives contrast
with rival naturalist theories in some of the most urgent domains of social
scientific research—including topics such as violence, religion, secularism,
nationalism, economic history, and the state. In each of these cases, social
scientists with an anti-naturalist bent have employed genealogies and meta-
narratives as large-scale explanations that make evident their conceptual and
empirical superiority to naturalist rivals. Thus, we will show not only how anti-
naturalist historical sociologies work in action (helping put to (p.136) rest the
fear of a hobbled interpretive social science incapable of explanatory
generalizations) but also how naturalist attempts to explain the same
phenomenon are seriously flawed. Once again, the philosophical and the
empirical cannot be entirely dichotomized in the study of social and political
reality. This is because the formation of concepts and the attempt to construct
explanations are in large part philosophical problems that no social scientist can
avoid. This intersection between philosophy and large-scale, diachronic
empirical inquiry proves to be another domain in which an anti-naturalist
framework establishes its usefulness within the wider interpretive turn.

Meta-narratives and genealogies: basic features

Moving beyond the small-scale narratives of single individuals to place them in
larger webs and streams of historical meaning is vital to how anti-naturalists
develop more comprehensive theories about social reality. Naturalist social
scientists often try to cover cases across diverse historical contexts by
excavating a kind of universal underlying mechanics. Naturalism in this way

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subtracts, brackets, or re-conceptualizes individual beliefs to make them fit into

universal causal generalizations. By contrast, anti-naturalists never seek to
subtract or eliminate context, but can gain a sense of the greater whole by
identifying a particular series of historical, cultural, or even civilizational events
within larger or smaller frames of meaning. For this reason Charles Taylor has
argued that one way that anti-naturalist social science pursues objective
knowledge of political reality is by constructing the “most comprehensive”
narrative possible (and not by positing explanatory laws like those found in the
natural sciences).1 In other words, in the social sciences, the most
comprehensive and accurate narrative is part of establishing the superiority of a
particular social theory or research paradigm. Thus, we should not be surprised
to see that Taylor exhorts fellow researchers to not share “the post modern
aversion to grand narratives.”2 To the contrary, such meta-narratives are hugely
important to establishing the superiority of anti-naturalist research to
naturalism’s tendency to subtract away context and contingent meaning. In
addition, other social constructivists and interpretivists have also persuasively
argued that radical post-modernists (like Jean-Francois Lyotard) cannot reject all
meta-narratives without themselves subscribing to a meta-narrative about the
“end [of] all metanarratives.”3

We have already explored at length in prior chapters the philosophical reasons

why anti-naturalists insist that social reality must be explained through
narratives or stories and not by constructing formal, mechanistic, or causal laws
as preferred by naturalists. The key considerations for the current discussion
were as follows. Because humans can creatively modify (p.137) their beliefs, no
set of antecedent conditions is ever enough to lock in a necessary consequent
set of beliefs or actions. Yet this necessary causal link is exactly what naturalism
requires in order to establish causal laws analogous to the natural sciences. This
points to a fundamentally different kind of contingent causality in the case of the
human sciences, not the mechanistic causal bonds found conjoining inanimate
objects. Narratives, moreover, are the form of explanation that captures
contingent causal relations of this sort. Narratives always relay some sequence
of events concerning a person or persons who acted in one way according to
their purposes, beliefs, and aims but could have acted differently if they had
reasoned otherwise. Social scientists are thus in search of the best narrative or
story—not universal or formal causal laws.

This much has been established by the foregoing analysis. What still requires
further exploration, however, is the way that this commitment to narrative
explanations opens up the capacity for anti-naturalist empirical research to
make large-scale generalizations about nations, history, civilizations, and the
seismic shifts in human culture and politics. There is nothing that philosophically
limits anti-naturalist social scientists to telling stories about small groups or
individuals. So long as social scientists’ narratives capture contingent formations
of meaning, then they are free to paint on as large or small a canvas as they like.
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In this way, anti-naturalist social scientists are able to construct what might be
called meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are interpretive stories about the
contingent formation of meanings, practices, traditions, and social worlds that
work at a large scale of generalization.

Perhaps the most prestigious and widely recognized genre of large-scale

historical narrative today is genealogy. Genealogy is driven by certain anti-
naturalist philosophical assumptions that make this unique empirical form of
inquiry possible. The inventor of genealogy was the nineteenth-century German
philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his book On the Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche pioneered a historical form of inquiry that sought the contingent,
discontinuous origins of particular beliefs and values—in this case, what he
called the “unegoistic” values of Judaism, Christianity, and the egalitarian
movements of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche tried to do this by returning to the
conflict between what he called “slave” and “master” morality in ancient Rome.4
For our own purposes Nietzsche’s key discovery was of a new form of historical
sociology—a form of historical narration that explains some aspect of social
reality by showing how it came to be. What very few social scientists realize at
present is how this opens up an entire research program with limitless
possibilities for application. Two points about genealogical explanations as forms
of anti-naturalist theorizing need to be clarified: first, their epistemic dimensions
which derive from anti-naturalist commitments, and second, the way these have
been employed by the principle advocates of genealogy (Nietzsche and Foucault)
in order to generate sociological critique.

(p.138) The first and most important philosophical feature of genealogy is its
radical historicism. Genealogy emerged in the nineteenth century against the
backdrop of the widespread belief that history was developing according to a
natural set of organic stages (an intellectual paradigm discussed in Chapter 1 as
a form of developmental historicism). Figures as diverse as Auguste Comte, Karl
Marx, and John Stuart Mill all assumed history was unfolding according to a
progressive logic with convergence upon a universal set of final world-historical
institutions and societal forms. In other words, the historicism of the nineteenth
century was what we might call developmental, assuming that all human
societies passed through natural developmental phases akin to those of a life
form passing through infancy, maturity, and old age. History on this view was
locked into inescapable epochs or stages leading toward some final form. In this
way, the developmental view of history was a type of naturalism that took
inspiration from the biological sciences in order to try to causally predict the
course of human societies and events.

Nietzsche’s great genius was to reject this naturalist, developmental conception

of history by drawing on the philosophical notion of contingency. Contingency
(as we have developed at considerable length) is the view that human action,
because it is creative, does not have to be bound by necessary causal sequences.

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A belief or action could always have transpired differently based on the human
exercise of this creative faculty. This implies that collective human action is also
contingent and need not follow a necessary, locked-in sequence. Where most of
Nietzsche’s contemporaries saw history as a natural, developmental process, he
saw that beliefs, practices, institutions, and the major features of human social
reality emerged out of the contingent and even accidental reasoning of
particular individuals and groups. His form of explaining historical changes thus
ceased to be naturalist and developmental and instead became genealogical—
seeking out narratives of contingency for the birth of specific features of social
and political life.

Following Nietzsche, today’s practitioners of genealogical narratives also

emphasize the philosophical concept of rupture or discontinuity. Where
naturalists and others conceptualize empirical reality in terms of necessary,
ahistorical causal chains that are spatially and temporally uniform, genealogists
instead organize empirical reality in terms of breaks in the reasons or meanings
that motivate human belief and action. So, for example, Nietzsche notes that a
“good” belief or action did not mean the same thing in Homeric Greece as it did
later during Christianity or the Enlightenment. Whereas in the Homeric world
“good” was understood in terms of a hero ethic of self-assertion, in later
Christianity and the Enlightenment it is understood in terms of mercy and
service of others.5 In this way, the meanings and beliefs driving human actions
and the construction of the social world were radically discontinuous. As Michel
Foucault (the second authoritative genealogist after Nietzsche) famously
expressed this key point: “the development of (p.139) humanity is a series of
interpretations [and] the role of genealogy is to record its history.”6

Genealogy thus investigates how history is characterized by radical breaks and

not by the continuous unfolding of a single logic. But this also implies that the
paths history takes are not destined or fixed but highly contestable. In other
words, meanings and beliefs may have gone one way but they could very well
have gone another. An anti-naturalist notion of contestability contrasts with
naturalism’s tacit sense of scientific inevitability. For naturalists the existence of
certain beliefs and actions often appears structurally built into the causal order
of things (something we will explore in particular examples below), while for
anti-naturalists any belief, value, meaning, action, institution, practice, tradition,
or entire social reality is always fundamentally contestable. This is one way to
interpret the subtitle to Nietzsche’s genealogy as a “A Polemic” or in German
Eine Streitschrift, derived from the German word Streit meaning an argument or
quarrel and Schrift meaning a piece of writing. In other words, genealogy is
centrally concerned with contesting or quarrelling over meanings, beliefs,
actions, values, and so on.

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This emphasis on contingency, discontinuity, and contestability brings us to

Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s insistence that genealogy as a form of narrative
explanation is also capable of generating critique. That is, genealogical
narratives denaturalize what some take as natural, given, universal, or
inevitable. In this way genealogy’s emphasis on contingency reinforces anti-
naturalist insights about social ontology as constructed from meanings and
beliefs. Naturalists often view social reality as populated by natural kinds and
ahistorical mechanisms. But genealogical inquiry can reveal how supposed
natural kinds are actually the result of contingent, self-interpretive activity.
Social reality is constructed and historically variant, not natural and universally
fixed. The latter is a central insight into why humans have the experience of
history at all, and do not simply occupy an unchanging, uniform social space.

Although not all genealogists are as emphatic in their avowals of meta-

narratives, Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s versions of genealogy fit as a sub-species
or variant of what we are calling meta-narratives or grand historical sociologies.
This does not mean that all practitioners of such anti-naturalist forms are
otherwise in agreement. To the contrary, prior discussions have shown that
Foucault’s post-structuralist notion of agency is not the same as ours; nor is
Nietzsche’s conception of human anthropology and the will to power the same
as, say, Charles Taylor’s notions of teleology and moral sources. But genealogies
in the above sense can be thought of as anti-naturalist meta-narratives that
focus on the discontinuous, accidental, and contingent origins of values,
practices, beliefs, and institutions that are presented as natural and timeless.
Historical narratives can be more or less genealogical in this respect. The
emphasis can rest more heavily on some historical trajectory or emergence,
without the critical genealogical aim of unmasking pretensions to (p.140)
universality and naturalness. Genealogies in this sense may, as Bernard Williams
points out, be “vindicatory” or affirmative of the birth of some value or practice
within historical contingency.7

Yet, it is important to see in what follows that all anti-naturalist historical

sociologies (be they genealogical or some other kind of meta-narrative) have at
least an implicit critical potential. This is because they are tacitly critical of
naturalist philosophical assumptions that render social reality mechanistic or
fixed. In what follows we hope to show how these genealogical and meta-
narrative historical sociologies work by turning to some of the most salient
topics of interest in social science research today and showing how anti-
naturalistic narratives have bested naturalist efforts in the same domain. What
will become evident is the way anti-naturalist historical sociologies work in
action—as well as the unacceptable costs of continuing with naturalist
philosophical assumptions in the realm of large-scale diachronic explanations.

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Discontinuity and contestability: studies of violence, religion, and

secularization
What does anti-naturalist philosophy look like when making large-scale
generalizations? And how does it compare with naturalist attempts to explain
change? Anti-naturalist assumptions are manifestly less problematic in major
areas of social scientific research like the relationship between violence,
religion, and secularization. We will begin by briefly considering what historical-
sociological analysis looks like when anti-naturalist philosophy and concepts are
ignored and instead a naturalistic mindset prevails. We will then turn our
attention to how anti-naturalist inquiry avoids these dilemmas.

One pitfall of naturalist concepts is they tend to create a false mechanistic

necessity to the developments of human history. A good example of this is
Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s work on the decline of human
violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature. In this book, Pinker unabashedly
declares: “human history contains an arrow…[an] alignment of so many
historical forces in a beneficial direction.”8 To substantiate this claim, Pinker
offers a sprawling historical sociology of several millennia, arguing that human
violence is on a continual downward slope, culminating in a present age of
unprecedented peace. Pinker explains this alleged “arrow” by arguing that the
human decision-making environment has been modified. Drawing on rational
choice theory (specifically a version of prisoner’s dilemma), Pinker links this
decline in violence to a teleological claim about human history more generally.
The argument is worth looking at in some detail to see how genealogical
approaches challenge and displace Pinker’s account.

(p.141) According to Pinker, for the early centuries of human experience

violent action was simply the rational thing to do given certain strategic pay-offs.
Indeed, the pay-offs of violent action meant it was “irrational to be a pacifist”
and “aggression [was] the rational choice.”9 What made us less violent was that
the calculus of the rational choice game-scenario changed. Although this is not
the place to go into Pinker’s full analysis, a few details will give readers a sense
of the argument. Notably, Pinker argues that the development in European
societies of the nation-state with a monopoly on violence changed “the rational-
actor arithmetic” in favor of pacifistic forms of action instead of aggression.10
Likewise, Pinker argues that the development of modern markets and trade
eliminated “the adversary’s incentive to attack since he benefits from peaceful
exchange…[and] the profitability of mutual cooperation.”11

Pinker’s findings have been strenuously contested at various points, beginning

with his highly tendentious empirical claim that violence has in fact decreased in
the first place.12 Moreover, many of the same critics have rightly noted that
Pinker’s argument grants Western state-capitalism a salvific status within world
history, battling against the many supposedly inescapably violent primitivisms of
the past, and enforcing homogeneous development toward a single political

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form. In the imagined rational choice world of Pinker’s theory it is only when the
modern state and markets come on the scene that violence is finally beaten back
into the caves of the primitive past. There is here a neo-Fukuyaman end-of-
history faith in a certain set of Anglo-European institutions as the end-goal or
telos of rational human development. Once the thesis is in place, the violence of
the modern state and the inevitability of market capitalism is leveraged against
communities and peoples resisting its authority.

But these lines of criticism (though certainly worth pursuing) are not necessarily
where an anti-naturalist critique begins. From an anti-naturalist perspective,
Pinker’s initial error is his misuse of rational choice theory. Rather than treating
it as a hypothetical thought experiment that does no actual explaining, Pinker
seems to be turning rational choice into a descriptive, quasi-universal human
anthropology. His entire analysis seems to tacitly assume that human beliefs
necessarily have a certain calculative and preference-maximizing structure. And
the latter runs afoul of the philosophical contingency of human beliefs and
actions as self-interpreting animals. Yet Pinker’s entire explanatory argument
depends on positing this very ahistorical, transcendental human subjectivity that
more or less makes decisions via the same method of rational-actor arithmetic
(be she a Lakota-Sioux, a Latin American campesino, or a New York
stockbroker).

Pinker tries to prove his claims that this form of strategic, rational choice
reasoning actually motivated the key transition in history to the modern peaceful
period by offering evidence of correlations between the market and declining
violence, as well as the advent of the state and purported declines in
aggression.13 But Pinker seems unaware of the fact that this does not at all (p.
142) establish his explanatory thesis for the alleged decline in violence. Instead,
what Pinker needs to show is that actual historical actors (across many varying
cultural contexts and in huge numbers) did in fact reason in this prisoner’s
dilemma-type way. The structural exposition of a particular ahistorical, rational
choice subjectivity needs to be linked up with the actual contingent reasoning
and concrete psychologies of historical actors. Otherwise Pinker is simply left
with an idealized model floating in the air. There is no reason to believe this
idealized model has anything to do with empirical history and the actual
causality driving it. In other words, Pinker’s theoretical generalizations are not
at all properly linked up to human beliefs, reasons, meanings, and motives,
which anti-naturalism shows are necessary for any true social science
explanation. Pinker seems fundamentally philosophically confused about what
counts as a social science explanation. He also seems confused about the status
of rational choice theory as a method that idealizes certain features of human
rationality and thereby puts considerable distance between itself and actual
empirical reality. Does Pinker realize that his major explanatory thesis for the

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decline of violence is premised on demonstrably false generalizations about

human rationality?

Pinker would have benefited from meditating on Foucault’s famous dictum that
the work of historical sociology must be “gray, meticulous, and patiently
documentary.”14 Instead, Pinker makes no effort to ground the meta-psychology
of rational choice theory within the contingent causes of beliefs and reasons of
key actors—let alone the mass-scale changes he has burdened himself with
explaining. Thus, at a philosophical level, Pinker’s ahistorical, transcendental
subjectivity does not in fact explain the empirical historical particulars that it
claims to. He fails at his own task because he does not understand what is
philosophically at stake in social science explanation. Instead, history becomes
the unfolding of a particular set of institutions that correspond to humanity’s
basic predicament vis-à-vis violence. Naturalism here becomes an engine for
oversimplification, obscurantism, and befuddlement as to what actually does
explanatory work. Once human beliefs are assumed to have a certain necessary
pattern or structure, history itself is treated as having a linear, developmental
arrow. The fact that rational choice is a heuristic with hypothetical insights into
social reality and not descriptive power is lost from view.

By contrast, anti-naturalist philosophy highlights how no less than any other

human action, violence is expressive of contingent beliefs that are contested and
situated within particular traditions of meaning. It follows that what qualifies as
a case of “violence” is highly contestable. Does the use of racially charged
language (“hate speech”) count as violence or only racist action against
someone’s physical person? Is punishment by a judicial system violent? Or can
only those who violate the law be considered perpetrators of violence? What
about spanking a child or the socialization of gender roles or (p.143) the
isolation of an individual or group? Is a woman who is not allowed into certain
professions being done violence or not? Is psychiatric surveillance and heavy
medication an act of violence or purely curative? The point of such questions is
to evoke how what is meant by “violence” is always subject to competing
interpretations. Indeed, violence is no less contestable in its meanings than any
other human action and can never be simply treated as a brute datum without
introducing serious confusion into a study (what we earlier termed “brute fact
reification”). Social scientists must therefore be sensitive to the fact that the
concept of “violence” is neither ethically nor culturally neutral. Any serious
sociology of violence must grapple openly and self-consciously with the
discontinuities and contestability of this concept, situating it within competing
traditions. Underlying Pinker’s use of the term violence, of course, is a clear neo-
Hobbesian liberalism (with an unacknowledged cultural paternalism) parading
around as value-neutral science.

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Foucault’s historical sociologies are an important corrective to Pinker’s de-

contextualized and naturalist view of violence in this respect. Specifically, a
genealogist’s sensitivity to concepts like discontinuity and contestability allows
Foucault to see that the phenomenon of human violence has a long
discontinuous history that has passed through various rival meanings and
iterations. As we saw above, genealogy’s explanatory concerns are normally with
the genesis of a particular human value, belief, or practice with the rupture of
past meanings. In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how the ancient regime
of medieval Europe had a different interpretive grid upon which it understood
violence as a form of spectacle needed to restore the legitimacy of the king. The
spectacles of medieval public torture—the unspeakably horrible violence
inflicted on the accused regicide, Damiens, which famously opens Discipline and
Punish—reflected a particular interpretation of violence. A regicide, Foucault
recounts, was someone who through their violence had put the entirety of
society and the cosmic order itself into jeopardy by attacking the divine and
mystic elements of the king’s physical and political body. The violation of the law
was in this way an assault on the king’s second “body” (the laws).15 The idea
that one could do violence to the transcendent political or cosmic body of the
king is very hard for us to render intelligible within our own conceptual schemes
and paradigms. Thus, the meaning of violence in European societies at this time
was expressed through various beliefs that are not continuously available but
exist on the far side of a ruptured past.

By contrast the modern world, according to Foucault, has a completely different

constellation of meanings that conceptualize and fill in the web of meanings that
classify “violence.” Part of this is a newer, subtler kind of “panoptic” correction
and normalization of those who break the laws or deviate from established
norms of social conduct. Of course, modern societies no longer have the
medieval world’s public spectacles of ritualized torture. Instead they have
developed forms of surveillance and vigilance that create (p.144) constant
objects of observation out of criminality, delinquency, deviancy, and mental
illness. There is a science of restoration and normalization that thinks of
violence as a quasi-scientific and disciplinary problem.16

Is modern panoptic, disciplinary control itself a violent system or not? Whatever

one’s view on this question, it undoubtedly needs to be answered by anyone
trying to give an account of violence on a world-historical scale. Unfortunately,
Pinker neglects the genealogical dimensions of this history. Instead, rational
choice is ontologized into a transcendental subjectivity, leading Pinker to ignore
the contingent beliefs and meanings of the actual historical actors. Foucault’s
genealogical account of differing senses of self and the attendant view of
violence draws attention to just how problematically reductive Pinker’s
conception of “violence” is. For example, during the time Pinker describes as the
most peaceful in human history, there has also been the strange and widely
documented phenomenon of “mass incarceration” of disproportionate numbers
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of African Americans in the United States.17 Why does mass incarceration as a

phenomenon not figure more prominently within Pinker’s picture? Foucault’s
genealogical analysis of the historical emergence of a carceral society can
account for new conceptions of violence that virtually go unseen within Pinker’s
naturalist analysis. This is the message of Foucault’s famous aphorism that
“history becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into
our very being.”18 What leads Pinker down the wrong path in his research is an
inadequate grasp of the philosophical issues at stake surrounding large-scale
historical interpretation. Pinker needs to build a narrative of contestable and
discontinuous beliefs, not ahistorical classifications and correlations that float
above actual human history like clouds. Such cloud-building might make for
effective intellectual gamesmanship today (while also flattering the ideological
vanities of contemporaries), but it does not have enduring value as a serious
empirical treatment of the past.

We have been arguing that genealogical explanations are conceptually superior

to naturalist approaches when it comes to accounting for mass social changes.
Taylor has more recently used genealogical techniques to this end in his
enormously influential sociology of religion, A Secular Age. In this book Taylor
challenges the standard (naturalist) secularization thesis, which holds that
modern societies are gradually converging on secular unbelief and the loss of
religion.19 Taylor’s work draws off other sociologists like José Casanova who
reject the naturalist view that correlations between decreased religious belief
and increased urbanization, industrialization, and modernization point to an
ironclad historical development.20 As with Pinker’s theory of violence, these
theories betray a developmental historical logic, in which human beliefs follow a
certain necessary path or set of phases. The assumption is that human beliefs
about religion are necessarily structured in certain ways by the institutions and
conditions of modernity.

(p.145) Likewise, as with Pinker, the standard secularization thesis with its
ahistorical, formal correlations tends to hide a much more complex reality of
meanings, beliefs, and practices beneath the surface. Taylor recognizes this
problem and turns to meta-narratives as a way to capture some of the contingent
transformations in meanings. He begins his account with the medieval world in
which religion imbued all aspects of life—political, economic, natural, and so
forth—and then tries to make clear what kinds of ruptures in religious belief and
practice have actually occurred between now and then. According to Taylor, the
naturalist correlations between modernity and unbelief miss how the new social
landscape of our time has not resulted in the disappearance of religion but
instead in its multiplication and diversification. Engaging the contingent beliefs
of actual people reveals that a secular age does not necessarily entail the
breakdown of human spiritual life but instead has so far meant the spread of a
vast array of options. New Age spiritualities have mushroomed (what Taylor calls
“novas”) but there have also been returns to traditional sources of faith. The
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modern age is therefore not primarily defined as non-religious but as pluralistic.

Secularization is not a story about implacable, relentless disbelief, but of
exploding numbers of moral and spiritual possibilities such that belief in God is
only “one option among others.”21

Taylor’s genealogy of secularity has revolutionized the debates over sociology of

religion by being able to better grasp the contingencies of human meaning and
belief formation across seismic historical shifts. In the process it has also
unsettled one of the most deeply held naturalist, developmental histories of
modern sociology. Ultimately, complicating simplistic “arrows” of history gives
social scientists an enriched and more complex vision of the social world than
naturalist categories offer. Anti-naturalist concepts therefore generate a more
promising empirical research program in debates over modernity, religion,
violence, and secularism.

Social imaginaries: studies of nationalism and economics

We have seen that naturalists often begin from the mistaken assumption that the
cultural conditions facing human beings are explicable in terms of structurally
formal correlations or necessary causal logics of development. History
disappears from sociology in favor of the search for the eternal structures or
mechanisms behind the ever-changing pageantry. But what also vanishes from
naturalism are what anti-naturalists refer to as “social imaginaries.” Social
imaginaries are the background worlds of beliefs, meanings, and practices that
(p.146) shape the horizon of a given society, civilization, epoch, or social world.
These imaginaries are no less historical, holistic, and contingent in their
meanings than individual practices or beliefs. As expansive as social imaginaries
are, they ultimately derive from individual and group self-interpretation. Once
again, anti-naturalists can deploy meta-narratives and genealogies to help them
understand and explain the formation of such large-scale worlds of meaning.

Anti-naturalist philosophy maintains that all individuals exist nested in a dense

and complex fabric of meanings. These meanings are often inherited and tacitly
present within practices or implied by other beliefs. Anti-naturalism also holds
that this background of inherited beliefs is bounded by a historical horizon—
always changing and being modified and thus creating the diverse worlds of
meaning that distinguish human epochs from one another (e.g., the autarkic,
enchanted world of European medievalism versus the post-industrial
globalization of modern Los Angeles). The Hegelian preoccupation with world-
construction and negation was an important insight. Yet these dense background
imaginaries not only serve to give a philosophical account of human agency as
situated; they are also a concept that helps guide diachronic empirical research.
Social scientists have in social imaginaries a vast, untapped area of empirical
inquiry to explore. Once again this becomes evident by critically comparing
naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches to social science.

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Consider first the way that naturalism often leads to a neglect of the historical
contingency of social imaginaries, instead positing eternal, ahistorical
background structures to human agency. A particularly dramatic example of this
naturalist error is the entire research program known as “sociobiology.”
Sociobiology was launched by the Harvard evolutionary biologist, E. O. Wilson.
Wilson argued that those studying human social behavior ought to seek the
general underlying biological structures that patterned beliefs and actions
according to Darwinian fitness. Wilson referred to these structures as the
“biogram.”22 For example, Wilson believed that modern nationalist passions
were the result of primordial evolutionary forces like the human need for
territory, breeding, shelter, and food. Nationalism, in Wilson’s sociobiological
conception, is essentially a form of tribalism in which fear of “hostile groups” as
well as “increases in real and imagined threats congeal the sense of group
identity and mobilize the tribal members.”23 In this way, the background
condition for modern nationalist ardors becomes biologically universal and
ahistorical. Nationalism is reduced to tribalism and tribalism a perennial feature
of human biology.

Wilson’s views were later developed by other naturalist social scientists into a
number of detailed research programs that hoped to explain modern ethnic
strife and warfare.24 For example, R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong followed Wilson
in rejecting the notion that nationalism is a modern phenomenon and (p.147)
instead claimed it is the product of a universal biological mechanism. The
specific biological and Darwinian structure fueling nationalist identity formation
is what Shaw and Wong call the inclusive fitness logic. Inclusive fitness holds
that individual humans act not only in terms of maximizing their own personal
survival and reproduction, but also in light of sacrifice for a kinship group that
shares common genetic roots.25 In the case of nationalism, this kinship
mechanism becomes strongly identified with a much broader group: “Inclusive
fitness and kin selection dictate the family unit as the center of love and
solidarity throughout evolution…the nation is similarly conceived.”26 Although
Shaw and Wong admit that modern communications are a necessary condition
for the shift from family to nation, they nevertheless maintain that in essence
ethnic violence and nationalism are explicable in terms of a primordial
evolutionary motive for genetic fitness. So once again nationalism is naturalized
into an eternal feature of human sociality.

Lurking philosophically within naturalist research programs like sociobiology is

what Clifford Geertz dubbed a “stratigraphic” or subtractive view of human
nature in which the social scientist “peels off layer after layer” of cultural
accretion to find the “subcultural…structural and functional regularities.”27 In
other words, social scientific explanation becomes about subtracting back to
necessary bedrock meanings, beliefs, motives, and desires (in this case a
Darwinian urge whose needs must be met to fulfill evolutionary functions). Yet
the problem with such subtractions away from human culture is that they do not
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actually successfully explain what was promised—namely, why specific

individuals at particular times select nationalist consciousness as a form of
community formation as opposed to remaining within older or alternative forms
of group identification (e.g., peasant villager). Nor does it explain why particular
individuals opt for, say, a rationalist Enlightenment ideology such as Marxist
communism or Classical liberalism (which in many forms can be openly hostile
to the politics of nationalism). Sociobiology presents itself as a universal
explanation of the motives driving nationalist consciousness but actually never
accomplishes this basic task. Instead the structural explanations neglect the
contingent beliefs of particular agents and the meanings of their social worlds.
The effort to subtract or bracket these meanings comes at a steep cost.

What has gone wrong with the sociobiological reduction to a perennial biological
motive will become clear if we consider anti-naturalist research into the
phenomenon of nationalism. Instead of subtracting away meanings to try to find
biograms and primordial urges, more interpretive-minded social scientists have
studied the rise and emergence of nationalism through meta-narratives, seeking
to capture the formation of social imaginaries. Probably the most important
example of such a sensibility is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities,
which argues that nationalist consciousness is not simply reducible to primordial
motives repackaged in a new modern form. Rather, (p.148) “nation-ness, as
well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts” that have “come into historical
being…towards the end of the eighteenth century.”28 The motives structuring
nationalism are part of a large-scale social imaginary—or background set of
meanings which modern people inherit. Specifically, modern people have
learned to imagine themselves as part of communities that “never know most of
their fellow-members” within a secularized, “horizontal comradeship” which is
understood as existing in an immanent, simultaneous present.29 Anderson
narrates the way this represents a break with the enchanted, cosmic worldviews
of the pre-modern age, whose social imaginaries were not horizontal and
immanent within homogenous time. Instead, pre-modern social imaginaries
often assumed a vertical dimension in the community (like the mystical doctrine
of the king’s two bodies in Foucault’s work).

Anderson also narrates the way the social imaginary that made nationalism
possible also produced a unique conception of power—one in which this
immanent, horizontal, bounded group conceives of itself as the ultimate and only
source of legitimate political sovereignty. This leads Anderson to argue that
nationalism is part of a social imaginary that only emerged in a democratic age.
Anderson’s narrative of this shift is complex and far from uncontroversial—
evoking the advent of print capitalism, broad literacy, the homogenization of
linguistic communities, and massive reading publics.30 But at the center of his
research is an anti-naturalist sensibility that the rise of nationalism requires a
story—a meta-narrative of the contingent emergence of new background
meanings that displace older ones. This keeps his work clear of the philosophical
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muddle and circularities of research programs like sociobiology. His research

program is thereby able to engage the rich world of historical meanings that
actually comprise the rise of nationalism. Rather than a sociobiological
structure, nationalism is explained in light of particular meanings and beliefs
that motivated a shift into new kinds of human community.

More detailed historical and empirical studies of the rise of modernity

corroborate Anderson’s thesis that there is a rupture between nationalist
consciousness and earlier forms of community belonging. For example, Eugen
Weber famously argued that rural France well into the nineteenth century was
not composed of communities uniformly participating in a nationalist social
imaginary. Rather, French peasant life in particular was made up of extreme
linguistic, cultural, economic, and political diversity and isolation. The peasants
of nineteenth-century France not only spoke no French but found their
communal identity in the autarkic arrangements of a village (“village
particularisms”) which had persisted since the medieval age.31 The abstract
notion of “France” had to be taught and often coercively forced upon the
peasant communities via schooling and state policing. The idea that “there is a
moral entity to which [a man] must give all, sacrifice all, his life, his future, and
that this entity…is France…had to be learned.”32 In other words, the nationalist
social imaginary was not present in the medieval world. Indeed, (p.149) this
massive shift in consciousness undergone by Europeans in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries marks the very birth and emergence of a nationalist social
imaginary. And although both Anderson (with his emphasis on print capitalism)
and Weber (with his emphasis on roads and railways) do sometimes slide into
slightly reductive approaches, nevertheless the basic thrust of their arguments
remains largely interpretive and anti-naturalist.33

What the meta-narratives constructed by Anderson and Weber demonstrate is

just how problematic and inadequate naturalist approaches are when trying to
offer explanations of the same phenomenon. By comparison, the sociobiological
insistence on a primordial drive at worst ignores the actual beliefs and meanings
of agents within the social world and at best remains a kind of abstract truism.
Strangely, naturalism (normally thought of as an enthusiastically empirical
philosophical movement) must neglect empirical reality and diversity. Social
scientists faced with nationalism need to grapple with why an individual “X” or
group “Y” joined or formed a nationalist movement. But the sociobiological
assertion of a basic kin identification simply does not explain why medieval
peasants became Frenchmen as opposed to simply remaining autarkic in their
kin and ethnic identities. By contrast, with anti-naturalist meta-narratives social
scientists gain the ability to begin accounting for the emergence of nationalist
consciousness and consider what sorts of historically particular motives and
beliefs might drive it (as well as resistance to it). But as long as the reductive

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motive remains “evolutionary,” then sorting through the relevant contingent

beliefs will be difficult, if not impossible.

A similar sensitivity to the narrative emergence of social imaginaries can also

help social scientists avoid the mistake of naturalizing a particular social
imaginary as the universal background conditions of human agency. As we saw
in the case of Pinker, this is a particularly common mistake in the abuse of
rational choice theory. It is also evident in the work of neoclassical economists
like the University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and his coauthor Steven
Dubner, who have become enormously popular through the Freakonomics series.
Among many other findings, Levitt and Dubner observe that because of
informational asymmetries, most real estate agents in America today undersell
their clients’ houses as compared to the sale of their own personal properties.34
Reflecting on the potential ethical dimensions of this self-serving economic
behavior, Levitt and Dubner note: “The point here is not that real estate agents
are bad people but that they simply are people—and people inevitably respond
to incentives. The incentives of the real estate business, as currently configured,
plainly encourage some agents to act against the best interests of their
customers.”35 In other words, rational choice is ontologized into the structure of
human consciousness. Humans are motivated by a calculative rationale of
maximizing preference outcomes—the contingent belief formation of actual
agents is ignored.

(p.150) Such arguments by Levitt and Dubner mark nothing short of an

attempt to universalize the old, discredited nineteenth-century concept of homo
economicus. Yet their efforts to stretch the models of rational choice to a
universal account of human anthropology are simply a crude example of a
subtler mistake made by many in the economics profession today. Indeed, this
very issue was at the center of the debate launched by Karl Polanyi in the 1950s
against what he called “formal” economics. According to Polanyi, the economics
profession at that time had already begun to mistake the “logic of rational
action” in terms of means and scarcity with a universal anthropology.36 What
dropped out entirely was the contingent institutional development of radically
different forms of economy with different forms of human agency. Put differently,
human economic activity is also subject to rival social imaginaries.

One way of reading Polanyi’s classic historical sociology, The Great

Transformation, is as a meta-narrative about how the market system and the
vision of human agency associated with it was a completely historically
contingent development. Indeed, market society involved the emergence of an
entirely new social imaginary—a new way of conceiving of the practices of
exchange and trade as well as a new vision of the human person. Polanyi traces
in great detail how early theorists of capitalism like Adam Smith, Herbert
Spencer, and others propagated the historical myth of the “bartering savage” as
a kind of universal “economic psychology.”37 These historically naïve

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speculations about bartering savages are undoubtedly the antecedent to Levitt

and Dubner’s own cruder push for an imperial use of rational choice in the
human sciences. By contrast, Polanyi draws on extensive anthropological and
ethnographic research to show how various primitive societies functioned
without bartering or haggling, but completely on the basis of reciprocity and
other forms of social exchange.38 Polanyi’s work thus makes clear that the
subjectivity of economic man is not a universal form of consciousness. Instead, it
arose along with the social formation of the market system and early capitalism.
Yet too many economists today mistake one social imaginary (which forms the
background conditions for today’s economic practices) with the background
conditions of human agency everywhere and at all times.39 What is in fact
contingent is turned into something inescapable and necessary.

The only antidote for these deep shortcomings is a turn to anti-naturalist large-
scale narrative sociologies that emphasize the historically contingent nature of
the background social imaginary. Unlike the naturalist examples treated above,
the anti-naturalist study of social imaginaries is able to offer broad explanations
(of the rise and fall of entire civilizations and societies, for example) while
remaining in good faith before the empirical diversity of the human past. The
concept of a social imaginary thus facilitates research possibilities that are not
available within a naturalist grid. The empirical and philosophical once again
work in close tandem. Social scientists need not fear history and its
overwhelming strangeness and diversity.

(p.151) Governmentalities: studies of the state

An area of research that has remained particularly in the thrall of the naturalist
mindset is the modern study of the state. Since the time of Thomas Hobbes,
social theorists of a naturalist persuasion have treated the state as an essential,
unitary, and inescapable political reality. So, for example, in his famous
Leviathan Hobbes gave a unitary account of state power as emerging out of the
very necessities of human psychology in a state of nature. According to Hobbes,
without state power of this sort human life continually threatened to slide back
into a condition of “war, where every man is enemy to every man.”40 For Hobbes,
the violent and fearful psychological condition of human beings in nature
generates a strategic problem in which the only solution becomes modern state
sovereignty. The institutional build of the state was thus an extension of a
natural, universal build of human motivation. In this way, Hobbes advanced one
of the earlier ahistorical, subtraction stories—one that turns the state into a
more or less inescapable consequent of the human psychological antecedent.

By contrast, anti-naturalism and its commitments to contingency can correct

Hobbesian and neo-Hobbesian studies of the state through the concept of
“governmentalities.” Foucault and his followers famously developed the notion
of “governmentality,” having applied their genealogical sensibilities to the way
the heterogeneous practices comprising modern government can be

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disaggregated to construct an alternative sociology of the state and modern

political power. In sharp opposition to Hobbesian naturalism, Foucault sought to
upend conceptions of the state as a “cold monster” that is “absolutely essential,”
rejecting a “mythicized abstraction whose importance is much less than we
think.”41 Governmentality—informed by interpretive philosophical principles—
views the state not as a single entity emerging out of ahistorical psychological
features, but as a kind of historical, contingent, and disaggregated process. As
the neo-Foucauldian Colin Gordon puts it, the central insight of governmental
approaches to the state is that “the state has no essence” and is the result of
historically contingent “practices of government.”42 The neo-Hobbesian view of
the state as driven by a central hub of power—a single sovereign entity with its
many hands on all the crucial levers of power—is simply false. The state is
instead a countless series of sometimes cooperating, sometimes contending
nodes of power. No single sovereign Leviathan agency could exist or ever has
existed. What is needed is not a mechanistic account of the changeless features
of the state, but narratives of the emergence of the state as a cultural practice.
Once again, the grand naturalist generalization fails to explain what it proposes
to clarify—the mechanistic appeal to psychology does not capture the many
contingent vectors forming the multiple nodes of state power.

After having criticized the monolithic fiction of the state as the object of study,
governmentality shifts attention to diverse practices of power—or what (p.152)
Foucault refers to as the “conduct of conduct.”43 Specifically, governmentality
focuses on the practices by which subjects are normalized into stable patterns of
rule. Modern governmentality, according to Foucault, emerged as part of
practices of bio-power and pastoral power.44 In the seventeenth century,
European societies developed a broad concept of “police” as a form of power
that exerted disciplinary control over people and their everyday activities in
school, work, family life, and the market economy. These disciplines had their
origins in the pastoral practices of the ancient church. Yet European societies in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took these disciplines in novel
directions—inculcating industry, efficiency, and orderliness into masses of
citizens. In addition, Foucault argued that modern governmentality was the
result of various practices of bio-power, developed contemporaneously to the
disciplines: human sciences of health, longevity, and productivity that monitored
populations for mortality rates, epidemics, fertility, and other signs of biological
vitality. In other words, what we call the state is an aggregation of various
cultural practices (with roots in religion, the human sciences, and the
disciplines, among other places). Governmentality’s focus on contingency and a
disaggregated picture of the state as a cultural form thus displaces the
naturalist, essentialist vision of state institutions propounded in Hobbesian and
neo-Hobbesian theories.

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It is impossible to do justice to Foucault’s historical narrative of the emergence

of these practices (indeed, much of the force of his analysis comes from
conducting detailed genealogies of these governmental practices). But for our
purposes it is clear how anti-naturalist philosophical concepts can free social
science researchers from the monolithic view of the state and generate a more
empirically sensitive approach to this area of study. Governmentality still
considers the state worthy of study—but what is meant by the state is now a
heterogeneous set of beliefs and practices. This pioneering shift of focus by
Foucault has in turn inspired an entire research agenda of the state by so-called
“Anglo-Foucauldians” who recognize that “the state now appears simply as one
element—whose functionality is historically specific and contextually variable—
in multiple circuits of power, connecting a diversity of authority and forces,
within a wide variety of complex assemblages.”45 In other words, the monolithic,
unitary view of state power has been replaced by an underlying plurality of
agencies.

In addition, Foucault and those he inspired have developed novel accounts of

neoliberalism as one of the chief forms of contemporary governmentality. These
scholars do not view neoliberalism so much as a rejection of state power as a
positive set of state practices intended to manage emergent industrial societies.
So, for example, the welfare state is not seen as the antagonist of neoliberalism,
but rather as a set of strategies developed in order to address (p.153) new
social problems. Public housing, public health, and unemployment programs are
seen by governmentality scholars as practices of disciplining and normalizing
subjects. In other words, they are seen as novel forms of pastoral disciplinary
control and bio-power. This is not necessarily in contradiction to neoliberalism’s
famous championing of competitive market relations that shift responsibility to
individuals. Rather, both the market and neoliberal practices of statecraft were
meant to “actively create the conditions within which entrepreneurial and
competitive conduct is possible.”46 Once the state is no longer viewed as a
monolithic power, the way in which certain state practices coincide with the
push toward neoliberal marketization becomes clearer. The familiar and
intellectually stale binary of the state versus the market must be parsed more
carefully to see which state practices are in fact part of a wider neoliberal
governmentality. In this way, Foucault’s novel genealogical approach to the state
has created new insights and avenues of research concerning the major
ideologies that often shape and seize upon modern state power.

It should now be clear that the claim that anti-naturalist social science is unable
to advance research on a large-scale level of generalization is not credible. In
fact, the exact opposite is true. We have seen through various examples in the
large-scale study of violence, religion, secularity, nationalism, markets, and the
state that anti-naturalists are able to generalize through meta-narratives and
genealogies in a way that remains explanatory while naturalist generalizations in
these domains are plagued by certain problems. Indeed, naturalist
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generalizations often fail to meet the philosophical standards of explanation in

the social sciences—unable to capture the contingent causality that produces
human beliefs, practices, and social reality. Naturalists also often confer a false
universality, necessity, or naturalness to features of social reality that are in fact
culturally contingent and variant. Anti-naturalist concepts like contestability,
discontinuity, social imaginaries, and governmentalities open up new domains of
empirical research. Social scientists should thus shift their research into
diachronic modes like meta-narrative and genealogy.

Clearly anti-naturalist philosophical assumptions generate a completely novel

way of looking at seismic shifts in human social and political reality. This
research agenda, moreover, is capable of producing entire sociologies of
modernity without succumbing to naturalist errors about a supposed “arrow” of
history, or the universal, transcendental subject, or the inevitability of a
particular set of institutions or social background. Unfortunately, as we must rue
continually throughout these pages, philosophy has been sidelined and
neglected by social scientists who believe real science has no use for philosophy.
Fortunately, a number of very innovative scholars have already begun research
in new, hermeneutic directions that do not display this philosophobia.

Notes:
(1.) Charles Taylor, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on
Conceptual Schemes,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) 32.

(2.) Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Dilemmas and
Connections, 214.

(3.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002) 247.

(4.) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman

(New York: Vintage Books, 1989) I, §16.

(5.) Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I.

(6.) Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-

Memory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1977) 152.

(7.) Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 36–7.

(8.) Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(New York: Viking, 2011) 694.

(9.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 679.

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(10.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 680.

(11.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 682–3.

(12.) For examples of critics of Pinker’s empirical findings, see: John Gray,
“Steven Pinker Is Wrong About Violence and War,” The Guardian, March 13,
2015, <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-steven-
pinker-wrong-violence-war-declining> (accessed October 7, 2015); Jeff Lewis,
Media, Culture and Human Violence: From Savage Lovers to Violent Complexity
(London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015).

(13.) Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, 681, 683.

(14.) Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 139.

(15.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 28.

(16.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–308.

(17.) Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012) 6.

(18.) Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153–4.

(19.) For a classic and seminal (if primitive) version of this thesis, see: Auguste
Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, vol. 1, trans. Harriet
Martineau (London: George Bell & Sons, 1896).

(20.) José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1994) 214.

(21.) Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 2007) 3.

(22.) E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975) 547–51.

(23.) Wilson, Sociobiology, 565.

(24.) See, for example: Vernon Reynolds, Vincent Falger, and Ian Vine, eds., The
Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia,
Discrimination, Racism and Nationalism (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Pierre L.
van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1981) 11–12.

(25.) R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong, Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evolution,
Nationalism, and Patriotism (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 26–7.

(26.) Shaw and Wong, Genetic Seeds, 143.

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Historical sociologies

(27.) Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of
Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic
Books, 1973) 37.

(28.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006) 4.

(29.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7.

(30.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44, 82.

(31.) Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural

France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976) 47; see also:
9, 67.

(32.) Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen, 111, 114.

(33.) Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37–46; Weber, Peasants Into

Frenchmen, 195–220, 291.

(34.) Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist

Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (New York: Harper Collins, 2011) 68–73.

(35.) Levitt and Dubner, Freakonomics, 73.

(36.) Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” in Trade and Market in
the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, eds. K. Polanyi, Conrad
Arensberg, and Harry Pearson (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957) 243.

(37.) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011) 46.

(38.) Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 50.

(39.) As Polanyi puts this insight: “The relation between formal economics and
the human economy is, in effect, contingent.” Polanyi, “The Economy as
Instituted Process,” 247.

(40.) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company, 1909–
1914) ch. XIII.

(41.) Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2004) 109.

(42.) Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault

Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and
Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

(43.) Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” 48.

Page 22 of 23
Historical sociologies

(44.) See Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality:
Vol. 1 An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

(45.) Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 5.

(46.) Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, “Introduction,” in

Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of
Government (London: University College London Press, 1996) 5.

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Ethics and democracy

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Ethics and democracy

Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords

An anti-naturalist approach overcomes the strict dichotomy between facts and
values. Social scientists are free to take up ethically engaged research projects if
they are so inclined. This chapter shows how political scientists working within
an interpretive, anti-naturalist framework can legitimately take an interest in
ethical critique, critical sociologies, and democratic theory. Indeed, anti-
naturalist and interpretive philosophy offers social scientists: a better account of
the status of values within social reality; an understanding of the ethical
significance of the human past; and a critique of technocratic forms of political
organization. Interpretive approaches are also linked to a more deliberative
theory of democracy. All this implies social scientists have ethical and not just
conceptual reasons for adopting an interpretive approach.

Keywords:   fact–value dichotomy, normative inquiry, ethics, democratic theory, technocracy

We have been arguing that anti-naturalist philosophy has dramatic

consequences for social scientific research as an empirical enterprise. From
sociology to psychology, from political science to economics, the approaches and
explanations currently employed by researchers are radically reconfigured by
anti-naturalist philosophy. This reconfiguration makes a form of inquiry possible
that houses a broad-tent of philosophers, theorists, social scientists, and
laypeople. For example, our anti-naturalist philosophy is one way to ground the
important work of hermeneutic psychologists like Philip Cushman and his anti-
scientistic notions of selfhood and therapeutic practice.1 Yet it also shares clear
affinities with Jeffrey Alexander and the Yale School of Cultural Sociology who

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see themselves as inheriting the legacy of Clifford Geertz and the “cultural
approach.”2 In the study of race, we find common cause with the famous work of
Stuart Hall and more recently Paul Spickard who insist on a constructivist
approach to racial politics.3 In short, anti-naturalism offers philosophical
resources to a diverse and dynamic range of research programs.

Up to now the reasons we have given as to why social scientists and

philosophers should turn to anti-naturalism have largely centered on problems
of explanation, concept formation, and empirical inquiry. However, we now want
to look at these claims from a different and perhaps surprising angle—namely,
do social scientists and philosophers have ethical and political reasons for
adopting anti-naturalism? This may seem strange because the modern division of
disciplines implies that ethical and political considerations are normative and
therefore logically distinct and separate from the empirical concerns of the
social sciences. But it is our belief that this high wall separating the normative
and the empirical is in fact one more feature of naturalism that is challenged by
anti-naturalist philosophy. Indeed, the empirical and normative dimensions of
human agency can be integrated in certain important ways by a turn toward the
anti-naturalist paradigm. When this shift is made, channels of communication
open between social science, ethics, and political theory that are normally shut
off by the specialized and disciplinary nature of the modern university.

At the most general level our claim is that because ethical and political theories
often imply substantive anthropological conceptions of human agency, there is
an overlap between the concerns of empirical and normative disciplines in the
human sciences.4 However, we must be especially careful in the use of anti-
naturalist terminology when entering into such controversy. (p.157) Most
ethicists today use the term “naturalism” to refer to the rejection of
supernatural sources for ethical life.5 This is clearly not our sense of the term
and we are not taking a position on those particular ethical debates in this
chapter. Instead, we want to focus on the way social scientists have compelling
ethical and political motives for turning to anti-naturalism. We will advance this
argument in three interrelated parts.

First, we argue that anti-naturalism gives social scientists a better account of

the nature and role of values in human life. Social scientists at least extending as
far back as Max Weber have struggled with the question of how to conceptualize
values from a scientific perspective. Too often the result has been the extreme
poles of either a naïve objectivism or a self-defeating subjectivism about values.
But anti-naturalism gives social theorists a much more nuanced and
philosophically tenable account of values in human life. Second, anti-naturalism
reveals the ethical significance of history and the human past. History is not
simply a massive data set or antiquarian archive of facts about the past. Rather,
the past is generative of ethical and value sources within human life. Finally,
anti-naturalism allows social scientists to develop a novel political theory of

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modernity and democratic theory. Anti-naturalism in particular gives reasons

why social scientists ought to favor deliberative democratic forms over
technocratic ones, which rely on naturalist philosophy.

In sum, while social scientists undoubtedly have empirical, conceptual, and

explanatory reasons for turning to anti-naturalism, they also have ethical and
political ones. But to say this is to cast doubt on one of the most fixed
assumptions of modern social science—namely, that there is a strict dichotomy
between description and prescription, empirical and normative, fact and value.
Our views of anti-naturalist theory give philosophers, social scientists, and
policymakers reasons for complicating these binaries.

One caveat before beginning: our goal is to clarify the ways social scientists are
free to engage in the critical and evaluative study of ethical and political life, but
this does not mean we believe social science is the same thing as ethics or
ethical critique. Social science, generally speaking, is concerned with the study
and explanation of human behavior. This need not have overt ethical concerns. It
is perfectly valid, for instance, for social scientists to simply set out to describe
the economic features of globalization or rising authoritarian attitudes in North
Atlantic societies. In other words, social scientists are free to concentrate their
efforts on factual claims and explanations. However, anti-naturalism does give us
a much subtler, more nuanced account of the distinction between facts and
values in social scientific inquiry. But this does not imply that the distinction
should be thrown out altogether. Rather, anti-naturalism shows how one of social
science’s valid research concerns might be ethical and political critique. That is,
social scientists who adopt anti-naturalism are able to critically engage and
normatively evaluate human (p.158) ethical positions. This opens up a shared
space of inquiry between political theory, ethics, and empirical social science.

Anti-naturalism and the nature of ethical values

One of the reasons why social scientists ought to adopt anti-naturalism is
because this framework makes more sense out of the nature of human ethical
life and values. In particular, anti-naturalist theory helps social scientists avoid a
false naturalist dichotomy in which values are either conceived of as an objective
science or else as a completely relativistic, subjective phenomenon. Instead,
anti-naturalist theory offers a conception of social science as having a critical
role to play when it comes to studying values, while also affirming the inherent
contestability of human ethical life. We will begin by scrutinizing the dual
naturalist errors of objectivism and subjectivism when treating values, before
turning to anti-naturalism’s alternative.

Many modern accounts of ethics and values operate on the tacit assumption that
human normative life will eventually reach some kind of objective, normal
science akin to physics, chemistry, and the other hard sciences.6 In particular,
under the sway of naturalism, those concerned with ethics are too often engaged

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in a quest for what Thomas Kuhn dubbed a “normal science.” Kuhn defined
normal science as “research firmly based upon one or more past scientific
achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community
acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.”7
For example, in chemistry or physics today research is carried out within a wider
accumulated set of theoretical assumptions and foundations that are taken as
given. Introductory students can be taught from textbooks in which the
foundations of the discipline are set for all practitioners. In the natural sciences
such agreed-upon foundations are the norm. Those who study ethics, influenced
by naturalism, have often expected or at least hope for a normal science of
human values to develop analogous to the historical progress of the natural
sciences. Then ethics too might have universal foundations that all students of
human values and ethical life would master before inquiring any further into the
subject.

The naturalist drive for a normal science is evident in the founders of some of
the most influential theories of modern ethics. For example, a central premise of
the utilitarian account of ethical life is that the ultimate goal of human action is
happiness defined as pleasure or utility-maximizing. One of the classical figures
of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, implied that this crucial assumption could be
established in the form of an empirical “proof” from the observation of “fact and
experience.”8 A straightforward claim to empirically brute facts thus grounds
Mill’s utilitarianism. There is the belief in Mill (and (p.159) much of
utilitarianism thereafter) that ethics will begin from a set of completely
stabilized assumptions. After all, if chemistry enjoys stability around the periodic
table and physics around Newtonian mechanics, why shouldn’t ethics find a
similar foundational core around utility? As is well known, this set of empirical
assumptions in utilitarian ethics in turn had a massive influence on the social
sciences through neoclassical economics. The conception of human agency
developed by utilitarian philosophers helped create a later affinity for an
idealized model of preference-maximizing rationality within the market.

But utilitarian philosophers are not the only ones who try to ground a theory of
human values on claims that are akin to a normal, objective science. Such
naturalist tendencies are also found (albeit in much different form) in
utilitarianism’s biggest rival in the Anglophone world, deontology. Deontology
holds that all ethical actions comply with universal rules of conduct or duties as
formulated by an ideally rational agent (the word deontology literally means the
study of duty). The founder of deontology, Immanuel Kant, argued that any true
duty could be universalized without contradiction. These duties were to “hold for
every rational being as such” and do so “completely a priori and free from
everything empirical in pure rational concepts only.”9 For example, famously
Kant argued that lying was always morally wrong and that this could be
determined by reason alone because this action could not be universalized.
Ethics thus achieved foundations in what Kant called “apodictic” or absolutely
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certain duties that every rational agent would know he or she had to follow.
Where Mill argued the indisputable foundations of ethics were empirical, Kant
claimed they were evident to reason. Yet the goal was remarkably similar: a
normal science or knowledge achieved among all reasonable practitioners.10 The
first move when studying human values thus becomes to recognize that they are
objectively grounded in a universal framework. Social scientists might go on
studying the empirical diversity of values in the world, but rational inquiry into
ethics on its own terms demonstrates a quasi-scientific convergence. Such
expectations can then fuel empirical expectations about the progress of history
toward a unity of values as modernization and rationalization take place. Indeed,
both Kant and Mill in their own ways expected a sociology of modernity to
involve a kind of developmental logic. These developmental logics were critically
scrutinized at length earlier, but they highlight the way that certain assumptions
about the objective status of ethics can inspire particular visions of how
modernity will develop.

By contrast, anti-naturalism draws attention to the deep problem with the

expectation that values will converge on a normal science. We argued above that
anti-naturalism assumes that human meanings, beliefs, values, identities, and
actions result from historically contingent processes. The natural sciences
typically deal in a kind of Humean or sufficient form of causality, in which the
appearance of a certain set of general antecedent conditions “X” necessitates
(p.160) the occurrence of a consequent set of conditions “Y” (so long as there
are no intervening factors). For instance, as long as the right chemicals,
temperatures, pressures, etc., are in place, the star produces light; or the acid is
neutralized; or the gas solidifies. The goal of the natural sciences in this capacity
is to identify formal, ahistorical conditions that generate specific predictable
outcomes that can be generalized into laws. But in the case of human beliefs and
actions, an antecedent set of conditions “X” is never sufficient to produce a
consequent belief or action “Y.” A person presented with a decision (say, whether
to launch a missile that will harm civilians) can foil expectations and make
unexpected choices because of a creative capacity. Antecedents are never fully
determinative of consequents.11

The upshot of this set of anti-naturalist arguments is that the very stuff of ethics
differs from the natural sciences because it is shaped by the creative use of
language. For this reason anti-naturalism emphasizes the radical historicity of
human belief and practice. Individual agents form their beliefs contingently and
creatively against rival inherited traditions. There is an inherit contestability to
meanings that does not allow for a more straightforward convergence of the
kind found in the natural sciences. This is because ethical systems are the fruit
of contingent forms of causality that can be contested. The model of a good life
or a just society might be expressed in one way but it can be challenged by a
rival set of contingent meanings. Thus, anti-naturalism teaches social scientists

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Ethics and democracy

and ethicists to expect a certain amount of disagreement and debate as

ineliminable.

In particular, anti-naturalism is skeptical of claims to necessary sets of beliefs or

desires. Are all human beings really at bottom pursuing utility as pleasure? Are
all humans somehow necessarily bound to an abstract ideal of rationality
(something often assumed not only by deontologists but also neoclassical
economists and rational choice theorists)? The necessity of any one set of beliefs
is incompatible with the creative contingency of human self-interpretation.
Sensitivity to the historical contingency of human belief formation reveals the
necessity of a certain model of rationality or the pursuit of utility to be false. As
Nietzsche famously quipped regarding utilitarianism: “Man does not strive for
pleasure; only the Englishman does.”12 He equally could have quipped: “man
does not strive to universalize all ethical actions, only Kantians do,” or “man
does not hold all goods to be complete and transitive, only RAND scholars and
neoclassical economists do.”

The serious philosophical point behind Nietzsche’s quip is that the utilitarian
definition of happiness as pleasure through maximizing preferences is peculiar
to a particular historical time and place. In other words, the beliefs and desires
that Mill took to be objectively necessary are in fact internal to a historical
tradition. Indeed, Nietzsche is drawing on a pessimistic strain of German
Romanticism that does not seek universalizing maxims or feelings of utilitarian
pleasure or perhaps even rational consistency. Rather, Nietzsche (p.161)
believed some Europeans might pursue a heroic life while renouncing the
pleasures and perhaps even the wellbeing of the rest of humanity. The point is
not whether there is something objectionable in Nietzsche’s elitist ethical vision
(we believe that there is), but only that he is right to see the starting point for
ethical theory is the field of contingent history and not Mill’s or Kant’s search for
the stable objective assumptions of a normal science. The form of causality
typical of human agency therefore has a massive effect on how social theorists
should conceptualize human values. History and contingency are central to the
proper conceptualization of human values; a normal science akin to the natural
sciences is not.

But there is another important way to draw this key distinction between the
natural sciences and knowledge of human values. Where the facts of ethics are
centrally concerned with phenomena that are part of a particular cultural and
linguistic world, the natural sciences seek facts that exist outside any one of
these worlds. In this vein, Bernard Williams has drawn attention to the
difference between what he dubs the “absolute conception” of facts appropriate
to the natural sciences and the kind of knowledge possible within ethics. The
“absolute conception” of facts in the natural sciences refers to some feature of
reality that exists independently of our experience of it.13 The circumference of
the earth, the velocity of a falling object, and the temperature at which a

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Ethics and democracy

particular liquid turns into a gas all exist independently of our perceptions of
these phenomena.

The proper conception of ethical values also involves claims about facts. For
example, as Williams argues, there is a fact of the matter as to what counts as a
lie or being a coward or expressing gratitude or exercising brutality within a
particular cultural context. These facts about values, moreover, are identifiable
by outsiders to a particular culture so long as they are familiarized with the
relevant criteria.14 This means that within the horizon of a particular social
world there are facts of the matter as to whether a particular political leader is a
habitual liar or acted like a coward (albeit like all facts, they can be disputed).
However, apprehending these ethical facts requires what Williams—following a
pioneer of interpretive social science, Clifford Geertz—dubs “thick” knowledge
of the cultures in question.15 As we saw in our analysis of ethnography, thick
knowledge is a grasp of beliefs and actions within their nuanced webs of
meaning and significance within a life-world.

It follows that there is a deep disanalogy between the natural sciences and the
world of human values. Namely, ethical facts (unlike their counterparts in the
natural sciences) cannot be construed in terms of an absolute conception of the
world. Ethical facts can and do guide all human agents through particular social
worlds—for example, the world of Japanese culinary if someone eats at a sushi
shop in Tokyo or the realm of Latin American Catholicism if a traveler enters a
cathedral in Bogota, Colombia. But these facts about values cannot orient us
within the practices of every social-cultural world. (p.162) Indeed, even when
highly homogenous societies exhibit a great deal of agreement about ethical
facts (something which is not typically part of the experience of pluralistic
modernity), they still do not attain a convergence of the kind achieved in the
natural sciences because their ethical facts are dependent on meanings and
beliefs, not necessary causal features of the physical universe.16

So facts about values need to be carefully conceptualized by social theorists and

ethicists alike. They cannot be treated as universally objective or translatable
across cultural contexts. Facts about values do not travel across deep cultural
diversity the way luggage or some other brute objects do. One should not expect
to find proto-Kantians or proto-utilitarians when studying different cultures and
milieus. Nor should social scientists expect a logic of development through
history to a final convergence on the underlying facts about values (the way we
saw Fukuyama or Pinker assume earlier).

Does it follow from these arguments that the proper way for social theorists and
ethicists to conceptualize values is in terms of a full-blown relativism? Are values
to be treated by those studying human ethical life as completely subjective?
Ironically, this opposite extreme view is also often inspired by naturalism. In the
modern social sciences it was popularized by Max Weber’s famous claim that

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facts and values “are completely heterogeneous” such that “whenever a man of
science brings in his own value-judgment, a full understanding of the facts
ceases.”17 Weber’s work was enormously influential in spreading the view that a
true science of society requires treating values as purely subjective (although
this is likely a misreading of Weber).18 Here the basic naturalist idea is that
values are not part of the factual, mind-independent furniture of the universe
but are completely mind-dependent. A firm logical distinction is therefore
created between facts on one side and values on the other.

Again, anti-naturalism moves beyond this impasse by conceptualizing the status

of human values in a much different way than that sometimes ascribed to Weber.
Indeed, too often when naturalist expectations are foiled, social scientists veer
into an exaggerated skepticism about the possibility of any objectivity
whatsoever. But this has to do with an exaggerated depreciation of forms of
knowing beyond those typical of the hard sciences. As we argued at length in
Chapters 2 and 3 on philosophy, progress can be made in ethics as in social
science through comparative forms of objectivity and reasoning. In this
conception of objectivity a superior theory or tradition is not selected in absolute
terms by appeals to foundational facts, but instead through comparing which
theory presents an epistemic gain and “error-correction in relation to an earlier
view.”19 Ethical theories and social scientific theories share this form of
objectivity.

However, there is a further feature of anti-naturalist philosophy that breaks from

a simple reduction of values to the subjective and nonfactual. Namely, anti-
naturalism clarifies how social scientific theories are unable to achieve (p.163)
complete neutrality on ethical questions. The central point we want to develop
here is that neither naturalism nor anti-naturalism can remain ethically or
politically innocent because they are inherently evaluative of ethical forms that
draw on their rival to understand human action. More needs to be said to clarify
this crucial point.

Anti-naturalism—although foremost a theory about how to study human behavior

in the social sciences—is not ethically neutral. This can be seen both in its
critical enterprise and in its inspiration of positive, substantive approaches to
ethics and political theory. However, from the outset it is also crucial to state
that anti-naturalism is not allied or fixed by logical chains to any one particular
ethical tradition. Instead, it eliminates certain approaches or ways of thinking
about ethics. In other words, anti-naturalism can tell us what a justifiable ethics
is not. Specifically, anti-naturalist insight undermines ethical theories that rely
on social scientific naturalism for their notions of human agency. Such theories
of values are objectively worse than those that do not rely on naturalism.

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Ethics and democracy

The insight that human beliefs are historically contingent does eliminative work
in the field of ethics as to what sorts of selves we ought or ought not to pursue.
Naturalist conceptions of selfhood and values are excluded from consideration.
Definitely off the table are any ethical theories that rely in some essential way on
naturalist social scientific knowledge to make good on their claims. This is
almost certainly the case for some varieties of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism tries
to maximize happiness or pleasure for the greatest number by calculating the
consequences of particular actions.20 For this reason, utilitarianism is often
entangled in making mass-scale predictions about cause and effect. For example,
will enacting a particular educational policy on standardized testing maximize or
minimize the pleasure of the greatest number within society? What about
employing automated speed enforcement traps to keep drivers from surpassing
the speed limit on streets and highways? Does launching something as complex
as a war increase or decrease utility? Answering such questions requires having
some strongly predictive knowledge of cause and effect in the realm of human
actions and beliefs. The social reforms sought by utilitarians are thus closely tied
to the ability to produce predictive scientific results in the social sciences.21 This
is because for utilitarians the value of actions lies “in their causal properties of
producing valuable states of affairs” as assumed by the utilitarian criterion of
pleasure or utility-maximizing.22

Yet the contingency of causality in human agency entails that no observer, no

matter how benevolent and disinterested, has available the strongly predictive
knowledge of the natural sciences. This is because prediction in the natural
sciences is based on our ability to identify certain antecedent conditions that
necessarily generate a set of consequent results. But no such sufficient causal
bond is available in the case of human beliefs and actions. (p.164) Indeed, no
one—not even utilitarian philosophers—has such strongly predictive knowledge
of human affairs. Of course, future utilitarians who understand the problems
with naturalist social science might try to reform their tradition to disentangle it
from these stronger predictive claims. We have singled out utilitarianism for the
purposes of illustration, but in fact this critique would hold true for any ethical
or political theory that depends upon social scientific naturalism to predict
outcomes within the domain of human action (certain forms of Social Darwinism,
for instance, supposedly scientific strains of Marxism, as well as Pinker’s neo-
Hobbesian liberalism).

So anti-naturalism gives us criteria for evaluating and choosing between ethical

theories as objectively better and worse, without logically binding us to any one
particular tradition of ethics. A further way in which anti-naturalist philosophy
does this is by critiquing ethical systems that reduce beliefs, desires, motives,
and preferences to an ahistorical, essentialist fixed core. We explained in
Chapter 4 on concept formation that essentialism is a naturalist way of
organizing social science that assumes there are bits of social reality that remain
universally constant regardless of time or place. Under the influence of
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Ethics and democracy

naturalism, history and its empirical diversity becomes an obstacle to ethical and
social scientific inquiry alike.23 Complex webs of belief, meaning, and
significance come to appear as stumbling blocks on the road to achieving
scientific and objective status. Once again, primary examples of this naturalist
impairment come from two of the most influential schools of modern ethics,
utilitarianism and deontology.

We have already seen that utilitarianism bases itself on the assumption that
human action should be guided by maximizing the greatest happiness/pleasure
for the greatest number of individuals, while Kant proposed that the goal of
ethical life is to follow universal duties that can be applied equally to all rational
agents. The problem with both traditions, in this respect, is a reduction of
human ethical life to following rules or what others have referred to as
“moralism.” It appears in both cases that the problem of ethical life is
discovering which rules, maxims, or calculus to follow for decision-making.
Moralism marks an intense narrowing of what counts as ethics by modern
philosophers who have focused on rules and obligations. As Williams has put it,
“theorists have particularly tended to favor the most general expressions used in
ethical discussion—good, right, ought,” instead of thick conceptions like lie,
coward, or gratitude, in part because they have been driven by the “reductionist
belief” that the former concepts contained the “more specific ethical
conceptions.”24 So naturalism becomes the vehicle for the narrowing of ethics to
a perennial, ahistorical set of concepts and rule-following concerns. Ethical
motives (insofar as they can be properly called “ethical”) are always and in all
places concerned with, say, maximizing utility or universalizing moral maxims.
Human ethical agency is thus reduced to a set of ahistorical motives that lose
sight of historicity and contingency.

(p.165) Taylor has also been key in criticizing the naturalist reduction of ethics
to morals. In particular he has observed the way this naturalist drive toward
reduction is evident in Kant’s search for a set of formal rules that can sufficiently
guide human action. A formal imperative that gives criteria for universalizing
moral maxims or an imagined original position outside of all historically
contingent beliefs and desires captures the ethical mind. In this way, the
interpretively rich languages of thick historical traditions “get marginalized or
even expunged altogether” in favor of an “epistemologically motivated reduction
and homogenization of the ‘moral.’”25 In this way, “a naturalist account of man
[that] comes in the wake of the scientific revolution” encourages “eschewing
what we might call subject-related properties” or those that cannot be
accounted for from an absolute standpoint free of all historically embedded
perspectives.26 Once again, anti-naturalist philosophical insights give social
theorists and ethicists alike a fuller account of values in human life. The
reduction of ethics to morals proves to be the contingent result of a particular

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set of traditions within liberal societies—not the universal starting point of a

normal science of ethics.

Anti-naturalism thus reveals the naturalist drive toward reduction and

ahistoricism to be premised on a deep philosophical confusion. Historical
contingency is neglected. So social scientists should not remain indifferent in the
field of ethics. Rather, without chaining adherents to a particular view of ethics,
anti-naturalism does critical and eliminative work, disqualifying normative
theories that rely on naturalist conceptions. It follows that the social scientific
view of values cannot be one of either normal science or value relativism.
Rather, social science and ethics cast mutual light on one another in the effort to
properly grasp and conceptualize their status within human life.

The ethical significance of the human past

So far we have seen how anti-naturalist theory gives social scientists an account
of values that avoids naïve objectivism on one side and problematic relativism on
the other. We now want to show that anti-naturalism is not limited to critical and
eliminative work but also has a constructive side when it comes to ethics. This
constructive side makes clear the ethical significance of the human past, which
otherwise social scientists tend to reduce to simply a vast field of bygone facts—
like a massive archive or dataset. By contrast, anti-naturalism highlights the way
that the human self can take on various expressive forms. The past thus
becomes a way to open up new possibilities for human identity.

We have already seen that anti-naturalist philosophy assumes that human beings
creatively and contingently form beliefs against the background of (p.166)
historically inherited traditions. This means human agency is radically historical
in character. Because human agency is radically historical in this way, anti-
naturalist social science research into the past can generate, inspire, and reveal
new untapped sources for ethics and politics. This means history is not a mere
hindrance to theory-building because of its empirical diversity and complexity.
Nor is history simply a descriptive set of past cases. Rather, from the
interpretive viewpoint, history contains certain ethical and political
potentialities. Indeed, some of the most important ethicists of the last two
centuries have made this creative turn toward the interpretive recovery of
history as a vital source for ethics. A few brief examples of actual ethical
programs that take into account anti-naturalist insights will make this point
clear.

One of the path-breaking works in this more anti-naturalist approach to ethics

was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Abuses of History for
Life,” in which he insisted that history was not merely of antiquarian interest but
bore ethical significance. Famously, Nietzsche argued that human beings live an
historical existence insofar as the past is always actively present as a set of
inherited meanings, beliefs, practices, and institutions that he called “horizons.”

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History has ethical “uses” according to Nietzsche because it is a source of

inspiration and criticism for our own specific ethical and political inheritances.27
In his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche used history to carry out both
these critical and inspirational tasks. So he famously attacked the assumption
that “unegoistic” moral intuitions are a universal and necessary feature of
human ethical life. Instead, he saw these as originating in ancient Jewish and
Christian cultures, later becoming secularized through the Enlightenment. So
history could show that what is thought to be a necessary feature of human
ethical belief is actually contingent upon a particular set of cultural
developments. Likewise, Nietzsche sought inspiration in Homeric Greek hero
ethics of self-affirmation and anti-egalitarianism.28 The point here is by no
means to promote Nietzsche’s ethical vision but rather to note the way anti-
naturalist insight unveils the uses of history—both critical and vindicatory—for
ethical life.

A wide range of philosophers has taken this historical and more interpretive turn
with regard to ethics developing an impressive array of views. Perhaps
Nietzsche’s most famous acolyte, Michel Foucault, insisted that historical
inquiry could be put to ethical uses by denaturalizing what is considered natural
and rendering contingent what is believed to be necessary. Foucault thus worked
for much of his life to show that institutions like the asylum, the hospital, the
school, and the prison were the result of particular cultural histories, and not
inescapable features of human social and political life.29 But Foucault likewise
believed that history could be put to inspirational or vindicatory uses in the
search for values to orient human life. Thus, Foucault encouraged his readers to
adopt a “limit attitude,” one that treated the past as a source for the
“experimental” adoption of new values.30 In the latter part of his (p.167) life,
Foucault immersed himself in the ethics of the ancient Greeks and Romans as
part of an effort to formulate new conceptions of self for the present.31

Nietzsche and Foucault return to history to formulate an ethics that breaks with
many of the values of the Enlightenment and of the Christian and Jewish
religions. But this need not be the case. Charles Taylor has also taken this
historical turn in order to discover deeper ethical sources for the project of
modernity and some Enlightenment values. He has also argued that the recovery
of Christian humanism is a better ethical source for modern commitments such
as democracy and human rights.32 Although far more condemnatory about the
nature of modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre has returned to past ethical sources in
order to argue that the virtue ethics of Aristotle provides the most promising
alternative to what he sees as the moral incoherence of late capitalist
societies.33 The point is that the return to history made possible by anti-
naturalist conceptions of social reality can take various rival forms depending
upon which traditions are tapped. The examples here are various and impressive
—for instance, Heidegger’s call for a return to history in order to overcome
modern “homelessness” or in a very different vein, Philip Pettit’s attempt to
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revive the tradition of ancient republicanism.34 Such examples show that anti-
naturalist theory, in addition to critically eliminating certain distorting naturalist
features from ethics, opens up historical sources for self-interpretation and
critique that go far beyond the possibilities of the many ahistorical and reductive
approaches to ethics that are inspired by naturalism.

In addition, taking a historical turn in ethics means that overly voluntaristic or

autonomous conceptions of the ethical subject become increasingly
implausible.35 This is what is still valuable in Foucault’s polemic about the
“death of the subject.”36 Anti-naturalism implies a certain anthropology—and
this positive vision is a point of overlap between social science and ethics.
Specifically, anti-naturalism assumes that human beings always act against a
background of inherited cultural and linguistic beliefs and practices. These are
what Gadamer dubbed “traditions.”37 The importance of situating the subject
historically is seeing that ethically agents always begin from thickly embodied
traditions. Kant’s transcendental subject and Rawls’s original position run afoul
of the deeper historicity of all human ethical thought. As Hegel saw, ethics and
political theory must grapple with the historical, customary world in which
beliefs take form.

In sum, anti-naturalist philosophy conceptualizes the human past and social

reality in such a way that generates a substantive impact on ethical inquiry.
Once naturalism has been abandoned, history is no longer simply antiquarian
but a source of rival and contestable human meanings. This does not mean that
anti-naturalism binds thinkers to any one particular ethic or substantive vision.
Anti-naturalist social scientists and ethicists need not become champions of
Greek thought before Socrates like Nietzsche and (p.168) Williams, limit avant-
gardists like Foucault, neo-Aristotelians like MacIntyre, or Catholic humanists
like Taylor.38 The positive content of ethics is left for particular anti-naturalist
thinkers to continue to sort out and debate through comparative modes of
reasoning and objectivity. Indeed, perhaps some future philosophers will find a
way to reconfigure utilitarianism and deontology so that they free themselves
from naturalist conceptualizations and tendencies. Regardless, what should be
clear are the ways in which anti-naturalism transforms social science’s view of
the ethical dimensions of the human past.

Anti-naturalism and democratic theory

We have suggested that social scientists should turn toward anti-naturalism
because it offers a less problematic account of the role of values in human
ethical and social life. Anti-naturalists conceptualize values as always
contestable and contingent, never a fully objective, normal science, but also not
simply relativistic. This contrasts with naturalist-inspired conceptions of values
as either quasi-scientific or completely subjective. Anti-naturalists also view
ethics and social science alike as a field of meanings that grapple with the
double hermeneutic features of human agency. We want to conclude by showing

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how anti-naturalist philosophy and its conception of the relationship between

social science and values makes a critical theory of modernity and democracy
possible.

Naturalism, because it claims to advance a predictive science of society, can be

used to legitimate top-down, abstractly representative, technocratic, and elitist
forms of power. This means that in democracies there is a tendency by
naturalists to favor rule by experts. This contrasts with anti-naturalism’s
rejection of a specialized science of society and human behavior. Indeed,
because anti-naturalists hold that human beliefs are the products of creative
reasoning, their social theory tends to legitimate more deliberative and
participatory forms of democracy. The reasons for this are philosophical.

Specifically, anti-naturalism makes possible the insight that the philosophical

frameworks guiding social scientific research are never simply doctrines guiding
empirical research and explanation. Rather, naturalism and anti-naturalism are
also either allied or hostile to certain ways of organizing power. This is because
social scientific theory never simply observes reality but also plays a role in
shaping it. Gadamer was one of the first to recognize this when he wrote that
“the chief task” of interpretive theory in politics is to guard “against the
domination of technology based on science…the idolatry of scientific method and
the anonymous authority of the sciences” and in doing so vindicate “the noblest
task of the citizen—decision making according to one’s own responsibility—
instead of conceding that task to the expert.”39 (p.169) We want to briefly give
readers a sense of the rich and complex critique of technocracy that anti-
naturalist social science has generated before turning to a more humanistic and
democratic alternative.40

Currently the dominant paradigm for politics in North Atlantic societies is a form
of representative democracy buttressed by the claims of naturalist experts and
advisors. In the early twentieth century new kinds of ahistorical and formal
naturalism became highly enmeshed in the study of the state. This, we saw, was
a dramatic departure from late nineteenth-century views of politics and the
state, which were conceived in terms of developmental narratives of the
progression of a nation through certain fixed stages.41 Suddenly, social theorists
turned from grand narratives to ahistorical models, correlations, and
classifications said to hold across time and place. Political, social, and economic
outcomes were explained by reference to functional requirements, psychological
typologies, general features of human rationality, and formal analyses of
processes.42

But this set of intellectual developments was also tightly related to actual
changes in power and authority within the flesh-and-blood world of politics. One
of the first groups to recognize this fact was the first British New Left. This was
a group of intellectuals headed by figures like E. P. Thompson, Raymond

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Williams, and Stuart Hall that hoped to articulate a more humanistic form of
socialism.43 What was unique about this movement was the critique it generated
of both Western liberal democracies and Soviet communist regimes as relying on
authority that drew from naturalist theory.

In the Soviet Union, a particularly crude form of Marxism authorized a

hierarchical organization of the state, in which technocratic party elites
engineered society according to supposedly inescapable laws. As Stalin put it,
society could be explained “in accordance with the laws of movement of
matter.”44 This was because “the origin of social ideas, social theories, political
views, and political institutions should not be sought for in the ideas, theories,
views and political institutions themselves but in the conditions of the material
life of society.”45 In this way Stalinism encouraged Soviet leaders to treat human
beings as objects susceptible to scientific manipulation. Leaders of the New Left
like Thompson thus denounced Soviet statism as a form of pseudo-scientific
authority that belittled human agency and justified mass-scale violence.46

A parallel set of criticisms was launched against the influence of naturalism in

liberal capitalist societies. So, the young Alasdair MacIntyre provided a
particularly scathing critique of the central institutions of liberal capitalism as
being highly hierarchical because of an “enormous faith in the ‘levers’ of social
engineering.”47 According to MacIntyre, claims to a technocratic science lifted
bureaucrats, corporate managers, economists, and other sorts of naturalist
authorities and experts into positions of power. For this reason life in the liberal
democracies was increasingly dominated by a politics in which the (p.170)
“mode of understanding human beings resembles the mode of understanding
natural objects in that to understand is to control.”48 Against the naturalist
forms of power in both communist and capitalist countries, the British New Left
tried to stake out a more democratic and humanistic position. So Thompson
insisted on the creative “activity and agency” of human persons as an alternative
to the increasingly mechanistic politics of the age.49

In this way, as early as the mid-twentieth century, anti-naturalist and interpretive

theory was viewed not merely as value neutral and descriptive but as generating
a political critique of some of the most powerful institutions of modernity. Yet
today the language around the state in particular has shifted significantly from
the time of the Cold War. Particularly there has been a turn toward “governance”
strategies that hand off traditional state power to markets and networks. The
turn toward governance was part of a broader critique of the state’s welfare
functions, a call for decentralization, and doubts about the continued efficacy of
the state in the face of globalization. However, none of these changes mean the
naturalism that so worried the British New Left has disappeared. Generally
speaking, the new governance strategies have drawn on two social science
paradigms—the first a naturalist variant of rational choice theory calling for

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markets and the second a naturalist sociological institutionalism advocating

networks.

The turn toward governance strategies began when intellectuals and activists
argued that the twentieth-century state was beleaguered by overload and
inefficiency in a way that required the implementation of fiscal austerity,
monetary control, and the rolling back of services and institutions.50 These
critics drew on rational choice theory to argue that the market or quasi-markets
should replace bureaucracy because of their purported superior efficiency. The
bureaucracy was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with an “entrepreneurial
government” based on competition, markets, customers, and measured
outcomes.51

At the level of national politics, these reforms were inaugurated in the English-
speaking world via Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States.52 The
policymakers brought to power by these movements drew on rational choice
theories like public choice and the principal–agent problem to argue that just as
private sector corporations needed to ensure managers acted on behalf of
shareholders, so too did public administration need to ensure elected
representatives acted on behalf of voters.53 In this manner, a tight analogy was
drawn between the organization of the state and that of markets. Specifically,
the public sector needed to be redesigned by policy elites who understood
rational choice theory to create new incentive environments and quasi-market
setups that aligned the interests of agents (managers/representatives) with their
principals (shareholders/voters). Along with this shift came the popular political
polemics denouncing old-style bureaucracy and public officials, and
championing markets and entrepreneurs.54 Governments (p.171) needed to be
run like businesses not only because the old modes were inefficient, but also
because public officials could not be trusted to work according to bygone
motives like civic self-sacrifice and the public good. A science of rational
behavior would radically overhaul the institutions of the state in the name of
efficiency and economic rationality. In this way, the critique of the state may
have changed the content of naturalist expertise called upon for political power,
but it did not actually challenge the technocratic form. From the perspective of
anti-naturalist social science, one kind of naturalist authority waned even as the
other waxed.

The second type of shift toward governance came later and was in some ways a
critical response to rational choice. These advocates of governance accepted
neoliberal arguments about the inflexible and unresponsive nature of the
traditional hierarchical bureaucracy. They also added their belief that the crisis
of the state was aggravated by globalization, which showed the state could not
go at it alone, but needed to pursue coordinated action with groups within civil
society and across borders. However, unlike the rational choice theorists, these
advocates of networks rejected that good governance comes from individual

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incentive mechanisms within the context of markets and quasi-markets. Indeed,

these advocates for new governance feared the spread of selfish and acquisitive
understandings of citizenship in modern capitalist societies. Instead, they
proposed communitarian forms of trust, social participation, and voluntary
associations as the key to salvaging the state. The state needed to back off
certain traditional bureaucratic functions in order to steer networks of civic
associations, nonprofits, and other nongovernmental actors. What was needed,
in other words, was a proliferation of networks and partnerships.55

Once again, social science naturalism became a form of power and not simply
description. Drawing on sociologists ranging from Emile Durkheim and Pierre
Bourdieu to Herbert Marcuse, advocates of networks claimed that alternative
forms of rationality to those proposed by neoclassical economics needed to be
brought into the picture. Specifically, they championed theories of social norms
and roles within institutional frameworks as shaping human behavior. For
example, so-called new institutionalists argued that individual beliefs and
actions needed to be explained in terms of the institutional settings that
generated them.56 In this way, agency was downplayed in these theories in favor
of the right kinds of social norms shaping institutions as fixing the content of
individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and reasoning.57 Institutions, broadly
understood, became actors themselves, transcending time and space to create
certain social and political outcomes. For this reason, despite all their
differences, advocates of networks were no less naturalistic than rational choice
theorists, rejecting historical contingency and using ahistorical forms of analysis
to identify midlevel or universal generalizations that transcended space and
time. A new kind of naturalist expertise was ushered in to remake the modern
state.

(p.172) In Britain this new policy trend clearly took hold through the New
Labor government of Tony Blair. Under his government, policymakers often
adopted network and institutional theories that emphasized that in areas like
terrorism, the environment, and urban blight, the state faced problems that
crossed too many boundaries and jurisdictions for it to handle alone. These were
so-called “wicked problems” that no one sector of society could face by itself.58
Applying the social science of network governance, these reformers argued that
coordination across agencies as well as public–private partnerships were needed
instead of centralized bureaucracy.59 As with rational choice, the turn away from
the centralized state did not mean renouncing naturalist expertise. Thus, for all
the differences with prior waves of naturalist power, what continued unabated
was the basic project of mechanistically engineering social reality in order to
determine human conduct. In this way, anti-naturalist social science continues to
unmask the false claims to expertise of these later forms, while also shedding
light on how social science has never been a simple observer on political life but
has actually entered into it and transformed it.

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Thus, anti-naturalism entails a particular evaluative stance toward the main

institutions of modernity and the state. The authorization of naturalist expertise
is implicitly critiqued. But what is the alternative to naturalist forms of power
and technocracy? We want to conclude by briefly suggesting certain features of
a more anti-naturalist, deliberative, and democratic theory of society. Against a
mechanistic claim to naturalist, elite authority, anti-naturalism has a rival way of
legitimating the organization of power in democratic societies. This rival
approach is humanistic and participatory—centered on pluralism, devolution,
and dialogue.

Because anti-naturalist philosophy highlights the contingent and contestable

features of human identity, it also brings attention to the diversity or pluralism of
human beliefs, even when they fall under larger shared umbrella categories of
race, class, nation, ideology, or creed. Anti-naturalism thus helps to disaggregate
monolithic caricatures of identity by being sensitive to the nuances of meaning
and belief that make for, say, rival forms of Islam and not one Islam, rival forms
of social democracy and not just one form, etc. Much of this was discussed in
prior chapters. But the point here is that this feature of anti-naturalist
philosophy suggests a pluralist approach to democracy in which the diversity of
citizenship identities is recognized by allowing opportunities for participation,
deliberation, and collective choice at the community or local level. Rather than
treating citizens as homogeneous institutional actors or reducing them to
essentialist monolithic identities, anti-naturalism brings in the role of traditions
and cultures in shaping historically situated identities. In this capacity, anti-
naturalism encourages governments to see citizens as existing in a plurality of
traditions and cultures, not as agents reducible to ahistorical, formal categories.

(p.173) Pluralism in turn suggests devolution of aspects of governance to

diverse associations. Taking the local knowledge and beliefs of citizens seriously
means creating more sites for deliberation, formulation of policies, and
connection with one another. At present, calls for local participation are often
reduced to consultation that sets a grid and narrow parameters for how citizens
are brought into the process. By contrast, the anti-naturalist insistence that the
beliefs of citizens must be engaged in their own cultural context encourages
spaces for listening to citizens’ particular beliefs. This does not necessarily mean
doing away with representative forms of democracy (a move whose viability is
tendentious), but it does mean making new spaces for citizen self-rule that are
sensitive to context.

This ties in closely to a final general conceptual point—namely, an emphasis on

dialogical policy formation. At present there is too often a monologue of
policymaking driven by elite representatives who consult one another or
technocrats who impose a science of society. By contrast, anti-naturalist social
science makes clear the centrality of narrative understanding for grasping
human beliefs and actions. This is because the genre needed to explain the

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contingent causes that comprise human agency is a story or narrative. Anti-

naturalism therefore implies ways in which democratic governance can become
more about telling stories. Citizens, policymakers, and politicians have more
equal access to this basic genre for explaining human actions. The genre of
storytelling does not require a claim to scientific authority or expertise (rather, it
is present already in pre-historical societies and mastered very early on in
human cognitive development). A democracy built on interpretive storytelling
means that civic debates cannot be legitimately plucked into a domain of
naturalist formalism and expertise. We must deliberate and dialogue in the form
of competing narratives or stories. Anti-naturalism suggests forms of political
power and organization that restore the reasonableness and necessity of
storytelling to human life.

The impact of this line of anti-naturalist thinking on public policy is something

we will return to in greater detail in our discussion of the deliberative turn in
policymaking in Chapter 9. But for now it should be clear how anti-naturalism’s
conception of values, social science, and power is much more nuanced than the
naturalist tendency to create a strong split between subject and object. Too
often under the influence of naturalism, social scientists treat their theories as
instrumentally clean and uncontaminated by the world of values they venture
out to study. It is as if social science existed completely outside of the world of
politics. But anti-naturalism reveals a much more nuanced and complex vision of
the relationship between values, politics, and social theory. Because social
science helps inform and shape the world of power, the theories guiding that
social science have important evaluative implications for politics and democracy.
There simply is no clean split between social scientific research and values.

(p.174) Overcoming the fact–value dichotomy

We have argued that anti-naturalism gives a far richer and less problematic
account of values than naturalism does and that social scientists should turn
toward it for this reason. We have also suggested that there are deep ethical and
political implications in choosing anti-naturalism over naturalism but that this is
often obscured or poorly understood by working social scientists. All this
amounts to a rejection of one of the longest-standing and most influential
assumptions of naturalism (and still cherished by many social scientists today):
the idea that there is a strict dichotomy between facts and values. Inaugurated
by David Hume, this doctrine has taken many different forms since, but the basic
idea is that the study of facts is logically distinct from the study of values.
Beginning from factual premises, no evaluative conclusion can be deduced and
vice versa.

The foregoing arguments make clear that the relationship of facts to values is
much more complex than this naturalist assumption would have us believe. After
all, anti-naturalist philosophy begins from certain factual claims about human
anthropology (contingency, self-interpretation, narrativity) and ends with

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important contributions in the field of ethics, democratic theory, and a dramatic

critique of technocratic modernity. In this way, anti-naturalism might help
contribute to the wider critique of the tendency to segregate empirical or factual
knowledge about the world from normative or evaluative claims. The kinds of
knowledge and research we need in a future, more anti-naturalist study of
human beings will break down these divisions. Ethics and social science are in
dialogue not simply for the sake of being well rounded or to conform to a trendy
call for “interdisciplinary” studies, but because they share intimate conceptual
and philosophical concerns. Ethics and values meet up in questions of human
agency and the nature of meanings and explanation. The simplistic binary
between “facts” on one side and “values” on the other must then be abandoned.
The deeper philosophies assumed by social inquiry are at once both empirical
and evaluative, substantively shaping the ethical and political world.

Notes:
(1.) Philip Cushman, “Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated
Psychology,” American Psychologist 45:5 (1990): 599–611; Philip Cushman,
“Psychotherapy as Moral Discourse,” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical
Psychology 13:2 (1993): 103–13; Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self,
Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (New York: Perseus
Books Group, 1995).

(2.) Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton, eds., Interpreting
Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

(3.) Stuart Hall, “Race, The Floating Signifier,” transcript, Media Education
Foundation, 1997: <http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-
Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf>; Paul Spickard, Race in Mind (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).

(4.) For an extended discussion of this claim see: Jason Blakely, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political
Theory and Social Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2016) chap. 5.

(5.) For example: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 121.

(6.) As Bernard Williams notes, ethicists are too often drawn to the idea that “in
a scientific inquiry there should ideally be convergence on an answer…the
answer [that] represents how things are.” Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 136.

(7.) Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 10.

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(8.) J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001) 39.

(9.) Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary

Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
26, 24.

(10.) Arguably the early John Rawls also followed Kant in assuming ethics begins
from a modified version of this rationalist certainty with his notion of an original
position: “The original position may be viewed, then, as a procedural
interpretation of Kant’s conception of autonomy and the categorical imperative.”
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 1999) 226.

(11.) For one of the most recent extended accounts of the relationship of
language to human action and social reality, see: Charles Taylor, The Language
Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016) 264–84, 292–3.

(12.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) 468.

(13.) The line of argument that follows is greatly indebted to Williams’ important
work (albeit we integrate it into our own concern with social science anti-
naturalism). Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 139; see also: 149–50.

(14.) Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 140; see also: 150.

(15.) Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 128, 140; Clifford Geertz, “Thick
Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of
Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 3–30.

(16.) As Williams rightly notes: “I cannot see any convincing theory of knowledge
for the convergence of reflective ethical thought on ethical reality in even a
distant analogy to the scientific case.” Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 152.

(17.) Max Weber, “The Vocation of Science,” in The Essential Max Weber, ed.
Sam Whimster (New York: Routledge, 2004) 279–80.

(18.) This tendency within political science dates back to the birth of the modern
discipline and the behavioral revolution. For a brief account, see: James Farr,
“Remembering the Revolution: Behavioralism in American Political Science,” in
Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions, eds.
James Farr, John Dryzek, and Stephen Leonard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1995) 203, 205.

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(19.) Charles Taylor, “History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy: An

Interview with Charles Taylor,” by Ulf Bohmann and Dario Montero,
Constellations 21:1 (2014): 3. Bernard Williams has also echoed this call for a
comparative form of objectivity in ethics in which “arriving at an ethical life”
that is “objectively founded” will require “practical” forms of convergence and
not theoretical claims about access to an absolute world picture. Williams,
Ethics and the Limits, 171; see also: 154. See also: Charles Taylor, “Explanation
and Practical Reason,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995) 34–60.

(20.) For an introduction to the varieties of utilitarianism, see: J. J. C. Smart, “An

Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics,” in Utilitarianism: For and Against
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 3–74.

(21.) For the relationship of social science positivism to Mill’s ethical and
political philosophy, see: Evaldas Nekrašas, The Positive Mind: Its Development
and Impact on Modernity and Postmodernity (Budapest, Hungary: Central
European University Press, 2016) 88.

(22.) Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Utilitarianism: For and

Against, 84.

(23.) This drive toward simplicity is motivated by a misguided emulation of the

natural sciences: “Why should theoretical simplicity and its criteria be
appropriate?… [Because] some later theorists have…unquestioningly assumed
that an ethical system should try to have the same virtues as a scientific theory.”
Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 106.

(24.) Williams, Ethics and the Limits, 128; see also: 8, 16–17.

(25.) Charles Taylor, “The Diversity of Goods,” in Philosophy and the Human
Sciences, 234. See also: Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989) 71–90.

(26.) Taylor, “The Diversity of Goods,” 242.

(27.) Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,”
in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983) 57–123.

(28.) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann

(New York: Vintage Books, 1989) I.

(29.) Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Vintage Books, 1988); Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1977).

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(30.) Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”, in The Foucault Reader, ed.

Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) 45–6.

(31.) Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College
de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2001).

(32.) Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?”, in Dilemmas and Connections:

Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) 167–87.

(33.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007).

(34.) Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David

Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1993) 242; Philip Pettit,
Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).

(35.) For an early analysis of the connection between determinist forms of

naturalism and a kind of ethical voluntarism in which an individual, autonomous
subject floats above historical and social context, see: Alasdair MacIntyre,
“Notes From the Moral Wilderness,” in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) 31–49.

(36.) Even late in his career Foucault insisted that researchers should “get rid of
the subject” and conduct “a form of history which can account for the
constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having
to make reference to a subject.” Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” interview
by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980) 117.

(37.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum,
2004) 276–7.

(38.) Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 2008) 164–6.

(39.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics and Social Science,” Cultural

Hermeneutics 2:4 (1975): 316.

(40.) For more comprehensive account see: Mark Bevir, Democratic Governance
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Blakely, Alasdair MacIntyre,
Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, chaps. 1–2.

(41.) See: Mark Bevir, “Political Studies as Narrative and Science, 1880–2000,”
Political Studies 54 (2006): 583–606.

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Ethics and democracy

(42.) For the detailed historical background on this shift, see: William Everdell,
The First Moderns (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Theodore
Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of
American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) chaps.
8–10; and Margaret Schabas, A World Ruled by Number: William Stanley Jevons
and the Rise of Mathematical Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1990).

(43.) The best histories of the first British New Left are: Michael Kenny, The
First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1995); Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New
Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1997).

(44.) Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York:

International Publishers, 1940) 15, 30.

(45.) Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 20–1.

(46.) E. P. Thompson, “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines,” The

New Reasoner 1 (1957): 105–43.

(47.) MacIntyre, “Notes From the Moral Wilderness,” 36.

(48.) Alasdair MacIntyre, “Breaking the Chains of Reason,” in Alasdair

MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953–1974, eds. P.
Blackledge and N. D. Davidson (Boston, MA: Brill, 2008) 145–6.

(49.) E. P. Thompson, “The Long Revolution,” New Left Review 9 (1961): 33.

(50.) E.g., Anthony King, “Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s,”

Political Studies 23 (1975): 284–96.

(51.) David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the
Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector (Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, 1992).

(52.) For an account of the rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the United States,
see: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005) chaps. 2–3. On public sector reform, see: Donald Savoie, Thatcher,
Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh
University Press, 1995).

(53.) For literature relating congress to the bureaucracy in the United States,
see, for example: D. Roderick Kiewiet and Matthew McCubbins, The Logic of
Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process (Chicago, IL:

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Ethics and democracy

University of Chicago Press, 1991). For studies focusing on internal bureaucratic

structures and elections, see: Gary Miller, Managerial Dilemmas: The Political
Economy of Hierarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and
James Fearon, “Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting
Good Types Versus Sanctioning Poor Performance,” in Democracy,
Accountability, and Representation, eds. Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and
Bernard Manin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 55–97.

(54.) For one history of these developments in the United States, see: Nancy
MacLean, Democracy in Chains (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017).

(55.) R. A. W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance,

Reflexivity, and Accountability (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997).

(56.) For the varieties of new institutionalism see: P. A. Hall and R. Taylor,
“Political Science and the Three Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44 (1996):
936–57; Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in
Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in
Comparative Analysis, eds. Sven Stienmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank
Longsttretch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 1–32.

(57.) For example: James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering

Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989).

(58.) See: Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of
Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–69; Jeff Conklin, Dialogue Mapping:
Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems (Chichester: Wiley, 2006).

(59.) See, for example: Tony Bovaird, “Public–Private Partnerships: From

Contested Concept to Prevalent Practice,” International Review of
Administrative Sciences 70 (2004): 199–215.

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Public policy

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Public policy
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords

Readers are introduced to how an anti-naturalist framework can ground a
distinctively deliberative and interpretive turn in public policy. Over the last
three decades there has been an important shift among a minority of public
policy scholars toward interpretive and deliberative modes that are critical of
naturalism’s justification of rule by supposedly scientific experts of human
behavior. Like the interpretive turn more generally, this deliberative remaking of
public policy has drawn on a great diversity of philosophical sources, including
phenomenology, discourse theory, Dewey’s pragmatism, and post-structuralism.
While we embrace the fact that this transformation of policy discourse and
practice can be reached by a variety of philosophical routes, we also argue that
an anti-naturalist framework can clarify certain confusions that cloud these
debates.

Keywords:   deliberative policy, dialogical approaches, rule by experts, humanism, public policy

There has been a dramatic and important shift in public policy in the last twenty-
five years. Scholars inspired by a wide variety of philosophical sources—from
phenomenology to post-structuralism, from Habermas’s discourse theory to
Dewey’s pragmatism—have converged on the view that policymaking needs to
take an interpretive and deliberative turn.1 This means rejecting the widespread
naturalist conception of public policy as composed of a technical science.
Instead, these scholars insist that policymaking be rethought as an interpretive

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craft that draws on storytelling, local knowledge, democratic dialogue, and

argumentation.

We heartily affirm these efforts for an interpretive turn in public policy and have
learned a great deal from these path-breaking scholars. However, we also
believe there is a little bit of confusion lingering as to what philosophically
justifies this paradigm shift. Even some of the best works calling for an
interpretive turn still claim that part of what is at stake is methodological and
the need to shift from quantitative to more qualitative research methods.2 This
echoes the larger methodological battle between “quants” and “qualies” that we
have questioned throughout. Alternatively, many interpretive policy scholars also
suggest that an interpretive turn is legitimized by globalization and the
complexity of this phenomenon.3 Yet although we remain highly indebted to the
work of these scholars, we want to quibble with these methodological and
sociological bases for the interpretive turn. Anti-naturalism gives policy scholars
a far better justification for converting to more deliberative approaches.
Philosophy unearths the major issues (not methodology or sociology). The
current debate could benefit from this philosophical clarification and a de-
escalation of quant versus qualie polarization of the field.

A number of interpretive scholars calling for deliberative public policy—Dvora

Yanow and Hendrik Wagenaar, to name a couple—have already done an excellent
job bringing together theoretical, analytic, and empirical concerns in order to
help researchers reflect upon and carry out their inquiries.4 By contrast, our
task is more philosophical. We want to show how an anti-naturalist philosophical
framework supports and legitimates the work of scholars calling for a more
deliberative policy paradigm, while also moving the debate away from certain
common misunderstandings and formulating a distinctive approach to
policymaking.

At the most general level public policy is defined as a set of actions, plans, laws,
and strategies adopted by governments. The norm in most North Atlantic states
today is to treat public policy as the privileged domain of (p.180) technocratic
and scientific authorities, experts who formulate solutions to the problems
facing society in a highly specialized and inaccessible language of law or
economics.5 We want to join deliberative policy scholars (Frank Fischer, John
Forester, Maarten Hajer, Hendrik Wagenaar, Dvora Yanow, and many others) in
arguing that policy should move away from technocratic modes. Of course, as
should by now be familiar, our anti-naturalist brand of interpretivism holds that
grasping human beliefs and actions involves deciphering meanings and not
primarily uncovering technical scientific laws. Our framework thus generates six
major consequences for policy analysis and implementation that support the
deliberative policy turn. First, anti-naturalism justifies policies centered on
narratives or storytelling; second, it reveals policy to be inherently contestable;
third, it shows that policymaking should be more self-consciously normative;

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fourth, it explains the importance of contextual cultural and historical

knowledge; fifth, it legitimizes a more deliberative and democratic approach;
and finally, it brings attention to the performative dimensions of all policy
formation. The result of these six factors is a full-blown alternative to conducting
public policy (one that theoretically grounds the work of an increasingly
important group of deliberative scholars).

Ultimately, as Aristotle famously noted, the goal of political knowledge is action.

The hope of most political actors is to gain greater discernment and clairvoyance
when pursuing their goals. We believe anti-naturalism is currently the best
option for dealing with the difficulties and unpredictable character of the
political world. Far from being purely theoretical and academic, anti-naturalism
is part of the state of the art in the pursuit of real-world politics. As such,
statesmen, politicos, and ordinary citizens (not just scholars and theoreticians)
will find reflections of relevance to their own concerns in these pages.

Policy narratives
Those calling for a deliberative turn in public policy agree that narratives or
storytelling should become the central genre or form for crafting policy. So, for
example, John Forester notes that in the world of policymaking stories are
absolutely necessary in order to do certain “kinds of work: descriptive work of
reportage, moral work of constructing character and reputation…political work
of identifying friends and foes…deliberative work of considering means and
ends, what is relevant and significant, what is possible and what matters.”6
Deborah Stone has similarly argued that public policy problems only emerge
against some background narrative about how a phenomenon relates to human
action and responsibility.7 However, sometimes this laudable work is justified in
terms of replacing “quantitative policy analysis” and the “neutral (p.181)
methods” of the natural sciences with more qualitative approaches.8 The
problem, however, is not one of stigmatizing or jettisoning quantitative methods.
As we have already argued at length, method pluralism allows for social
scientists and policy actors to use both qualitative and quantitative methods in
good faith. Rather, philosophical reasons are what legitimize the shift toward
using narratives or stories in policymaking.

So, why are stories so important to policymaking? Readers will recall that one of
anti-naturalism’s major premises is that human beliefs and actions are the result
of what we referred to as a (weak) rational agency. Normal human agency
involves deliberation over beliefs, reasons, desires, and motives. This means
human beings believe, act, or embody meanings in one way, but if they reflected
differently, they might also believe, act, or embody meanings in a completely
different manner. In other words, any one belief, action, or practice is contingent
upon other beliefs and meanings. Thus, human agency spins holistic webs of
meaning that cannot be explained by formal causal laws. Instead, stories or
narratives are the genre or form that captures the meaning holism of a

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purposeful agent. This is because stories recount beliefs and meanings as only
one possible set of happenings or state of affairs. A story always implies that
given other beliefs, meanings, and actions, the whole chain of events may have
gone very differently.

Because policymaking itself tries to prescribe or account for a field of human

beliefs and actions, it should not surprise us to see that policy is always
implicitly narrative. An example from the real world will help clarify how this is
so. In 2007, Quebec was embroiled in an intense political controversy over
immigration and how to accommodate the practices of religious minorities—
particularly Muslims and Sikh immigrants—into a secular liberal state and a
French-Catholic majority. A number of high-profile incidents reported by the
local media (including a Muslim girl who wanted to play sports wearing a
headscarf as well as a Sikh boy trying to wear his Kirpan or small ceremonial
dagger to school) inspired a public narrative of religious alarm, in which Quebec
was depicted as a society torn by major rifts and loss of its traditional Catholic
identity.9 In this context, two of Quebec’s most prominent intellectuals, Charles
Taylor and Gérard Bouchard, were asked by the provincial government to
publicly inquire into what constituted “reasonable accommodation” for religious
minority practices in order to formulate recommendations to the state.

One of the central findings of the Bouchard-Taylor report was that Quebec’s
media had dangerously and inaccurately circulated a story of crisis. This
narrative was in turn championed by “hardline secularists and conservative
Catholics” to advance “hostility towards foreigners, cloak[ing] itself in liberal
values such as gender equality and the protection of civic space” while “the
media fanned the embers.”10 In fact, contrary to the impression created by
Quebec’s media at that time, Bouchard and Taylor argued that cases of (p.182)
minority accommodation were “relatively rare” and the wider “situation is
under control.”11 Indeed, “a warm, cordial atmosphere and obvious pleasure in
engaging in debate prevailed at almost all” of the citizen forums held by the
commission.12 So, Bouchard and Taylor’s approach to the public policy problem
was in part to challenge a dominant narrative of crisis by presenting a counter-
narrative of de-escalation and a sense of civic health and unity across cultural
lines.

Needless to say, Bouchard and Taylor’s critique of the crisis narrative generated
controversy in Quebec. But for our purposes it is important to highlight the
inescapability of a narrative for trying to account for the significance of
accommodating minority religious communities in Quebec. The meaning of a
little Muslim girl wearing a headscarf while playing soccer depends on how this
action is related to other meanings and actions in the web. Is this headscarf a
sign of social disintegration and loss of identity? Or is it instead a reasonable
and healthy symbol of civic pluralism? Against the crisis narrative’s view that
Muslim headscarves are anti-democratic, the Bouchard-Taylor commission

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instead found that “women who wear the headscarf attach different meanings to
it and respond to different motives,” with only a small minority in Quebec
signaling anti-democratic attitudes while for many the headscarf symbolized a
“strong feminist current” albeit one that “differs from the feminism prevailing in
Quebec.”13 The point is that some narrative must be implicitly adopted to
characterize the significance of the actions. Thus Forester, Stone, and other
scholars calling for a narrative turn in policy analysis are right to claim that
narrativity is inescapable.14 The question is always which narrative is the best
one, and not whether to have narratives at all.

Unfortunately, naturalism’s glorification of the natural sciences too often leads

to the prejudice that narratives are primarily a genre pertaining to the “soft”
disciplines and ways of thinking typical of the humanities. The role of narratives
in public policy is thus sidelined or repressed in favor of the naturalist pursuit of
correlations, elaborate, mathematized choice theory models, and quasi-scientific
covering laws. Emphasizing technical “rules and regulations pertaining to
effective performance,” naturalist public policy often becomes entangled in
heavy jargon under the banner of true science.15 By contrast, anti-naturalism
draws attention to the central role of narratives for public policy. Once
narratives are brought to the surface, it also becomes clear that unlike technical,
law-like correlations, narratives are a popular and democratically accessible
form. As interpretive policy scholar Frank Fischer rightly notes, policy narratives
often embody some widely familiar genre from literature or drama. So there are
policy stories of decline, and others of progress, comedy, crisis, tragedy, farce,
reconciliation, reform, or melodrama. In all these cases, the story is as important
as debates over specific facts because it often organizes the significance or
weight of particular facts.16

(p.183) Finally, recall that narratives are neither here nor there when it comes
to the ongoing debates between quantitative versus qualitative methods. One
can tell a story that incorporates quantitative methods like statistics and the
latest opinion polling; likewise, one can try to build stories drawn from
qualitative methods like doing ethnographic fieldwork. The point is not to drop
expert knowledge altogether but to stop using it to cloak an underlying narrative
in the prestige of science. Instead, expert knowledge in the social sciences
should be put in the service of openly popular uses of narrative. This means the
ordinary citizen can better grasp the place of technical method within the larger
narrative whole.

Contestability
Narrativity is closely related to another feature of deliberative policymaking—
namely, contestability. The literature on deliberative policymaking is rightly
insistent that policies must stop being presented as the single, official scientific
account, and instead recognize the contestability and argumentative dimensions
of all policy formation.17 Policymaking is not about unveiling a universal

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mechanics. Instead, “the policy process is—at least in part—a struggle to get one
or another meaning established as the accepted one.”18 However, sometimes it
is mistakenly claimed that this interpretive turn has to do with a sociological
shift undergone by globalization or post-modernity. So some authors have
suggested that a turn toward contestability better matches “today’s decentered
world of governance” and is related to the advent of the “Information Age.”19
But the underlying reasons to opt for this turn are not relative to a particular
age or set of sociological developments. Instead, they are the result of more
abiding philosophical issues.

Anti-naturalism brings attention to the expressive dimensions of human agency.

As expressive agents, humans continually devise new meanings, which in turn
inform their actions and practices. For this reason we have argued that social
reality is in fact composed of meanings and does not primarily involve the
uncovering of brute mechanical bonds as is often found in the natural sciences.
How does this generate the conclusion that all policymaking is inherently
contestable? The contingency of meanings implies that the beliefs and practices
comprising social reality may be one way, but they could be radically different.
Certain features of the natural world are for all intents and purposes necessary
or given to us in a way that would be absurd for us to contest (for example, the
speed of light, the nature of a DNA helix, the rate of a falling object, the
gravitational and magnetic forces). By contrast, social reality and the policies
made by political actors can always be contested because they (p.184) could
always be expressive of some other rival set of meanings. This is no less true for
public policy than it was when we looked at ethical values.

Yet the dream of naturalism is to discover an absolute level of description—the

indisputable scientific language of politics and social theory. The job of the
policymaker under the sway of the naturalist paradigm becomes to find this
language and scientifically resolve the means of how to achieve certain goals. To
challenge a scientifically unassailable theory of society or human behavior then
appears irrational. By contrast, anti-naturalism highlights that human affairs are
always open to dispute. What kind of a society do we want? What sort of citizens
ought we to be? How will the meaning of a given policy impact the meanings we
already hold? Is this particular policy on, say, crime or economics expressive of
one tradition or ethical framework versus another? The world of policymaking is
about starting discussions concerning meaning and interpretation of a given set
of actions or objectives, and not about applying the one and only set of rational
instruments for resolving problems.

For example, what is the effect of naming a policy the “war on terror” or “radical
Islamic extremism” versus a “war on Wahhabism” or a “war on ISIS”? How do
these meanings effect the accomplishment of military objectives that require the
cooperation of highly heterogeneous groups of both Sunni and Shiite Muslims
spanning different ethnic and theological groupings? How do the different

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expressions of the opponent reflect different meanings of democracy? The

contestability of meanings calls attention to the need to avoid unilaterally
devising or applying terms without considering the meanings, practices, and
traditions of the populations involved. What will calling something a war on
“Islamic extremism” do to the ability to cooperate with democratically minded
Muslims? What might it do to our own practices and institutions? Whether
certain terms will help or thwart policy is not something that can be settled
beforehand by devising a neutral and indisputable policy vocabulary. In this way,
the contestability of meanings implies that central policy structures and actors
can never hope to simply control and freeze the meanings of particular
legislation and policy action. Policymakers should not expect to legislate
meanings from the top down. Instead, the meaning of a given policy will depend
on a confrontation with the existing practices and traditions of those to whom
the policy is directed.20 There is always a contest over interpretation.

Clearly, if this is the case, then the contestability of policy is a perennial feature
of human social and political life, and not the result of a particular shift in era
toward globalization, networks, post-modernity, information, or any other
dramatic sociological change we are currently undergoing. Instead, as anti-
naturalism makes clear, contestability is a philosophical feature of expressivity.

(p.185) Ethical engagement

The need for public policy to become more self-consciously narrative and
contestable is closely tied to a third claim made by interpretive policy scholars:
namely, that policy needs to be normatively and ethically engaged. For example,
scholars like Fischer and Stone astutely recognize that policy narratives tend to
exude particular evaluative slants. So they observe that a story about the
fragmentation of a group or agency against “a narrative backdrop of concern
with order and efficiency…is usually also a call for reorganization.”21 We saw
above that narratives about a crisis of religious assimilation can also imply
politics of exclusion and nationalist backlashes. As John Forester puts it, policy
“stories are ethically loaded through and through.”22 Part of the reason for this
does indeed have to do with the way in which stories give an interpretive view of
the significance or meaning of phenomena and events. Stories have implied
protagonists, antagonists, goals, and purposes. A story’s implied protagonists
can succeed or be frustrated. Similarly, stories always pick out relevant versus
non-relevant features of reality.

This line of thought links up to the anti-naturalist argument we made in the prior
section: because policies are expressive of meanings (and not some brute
mechanics) they can be contested for what they dub significant and worthy of
attention and achievement. Is the accommodation of religious minorities in
Quebec symptomatic of the breakdown of liberal norms or is it an innocuous
instance of religious freedom calling for democratic tolerance? Are minority
Muslims and their religious practices antagonists to democracy or signs of

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healthy pluralism? Is Quebecker nationalism a defense of democracy or its

unwitting betrayal? Clearly, how the significance or meanings of these actors
and events is interpreted via some narrative has wide-reaching ethical and
normative implications. Indeed, this implies that the meanings of social and
political reality are ethically contestable all the way down. Ought our policies be
expressive of a commitment to equality and liberty? Or should we instead favor
policies that protect the identity of a particular ethnicity or cultural heritage?
The meanings that are instantiated within our public policy are never closed to
ethical questioning.

But our anti-naturalist framework also points to further, deeper ethical affinities
between the interpretive turn and policymaking. In particular, we have argued
that because anti-naturalism assumes a humanistic view of individual agency, it
is inherently critical of reductively technocratic treatments of human beings.
Humans, anti-naturalism holds, are creative agents whose reasons for action
need to be understood and engaged on their own terms. Their creativity makes
them inappropriate objects for mechanistic manipulation akin to engineering in
the natural sciences. The relevance of these arguments to public policy is that all
policies treating humans as inert, (p.186) mute objects subject to manipulation
are at one and the same time philosophically illusory and unethical. In this
sense, anti-naturalism self-consciously ties the deliberative scholars’ critique of
technocracy to the deeper historical tradition of humanism. The new deliberative
policy turn has roots in prior humanisms and their defense of the integrity of the
human subject.

Yet as many of the deliberative policy scholars note, there is a persistent

tendency within naturalist-inspired public policy to treat human beings as
subject to mechanistic manipulation. The naturalist ideal of the scientist as an
impartial, neutral observer free from ideological commitments often leads
policymakers to present themselves as technicians neutrally implementing
policy. The policymaker is like the scientist in his or her laboratory, applying
theories to empirical cases. But the underlying assumption is that human affairs
are in principle manipulable. For example, the economists John Donahue and
Steven Levitt have infamously argued that legalizing abortions lowers crime
rates across cultural groups and time periods because crime is tightly correlated
with unwanted children, and unwanted children with criminality and other social
ills.23 The clear implication of their research is that human agency is driven by
quasi-automatic triggers. Unwanted children are in aggregate statistically
destined to criminality. Lurking in the background of such a theory are implied
prejudices against the poor, their prospects as families, and the value of their
children for society at large. One wonders what meanings ethnography might
have revealed to Donahue and Levitt about the supposed “unwantedness” of
children among the poor.

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By contrast, an anti-naturalist philosophical framework shows any supposedly

necessary causal chains binding unwantedness and criminality to be
philosophically confused. Because human beings are creative agents, the
relationship between feeling unwanted and committing crimes is purely
contingent. One might tell a story about why some people who are unwanted
turn to crime, but the idea that they are bonded through a causal generalization
(that can in turn be tied to claims about disproportionately aborting children
who come from the poor) is wildly off the mark. Rather, like so many of the
heroes of Charles Dickens’s novels, poor kids who are unwanted might instead
form beliefs about the importance of being generous and compassionate with
strangers.24 Conversely, instead of criminality, an early experience of family
dysfunction followed by later economic success might instead lead an individual
to develop an exaggerated sense of priggish autonomy and a moralistic attitude
about those in his community who are caught in crime and underachievement.25
Even in aggregate, there is no reason to suppose that the alleged unwantedness
of poor children will lead to criminality as opposed to, say, political resistance,
spiritual revival, or some other not yet imagined cultural form.

The point is that there simply is no necessary causal bond that forces a story of
unwantedness to also end up being a tale of criminality, instead of another (p.
187) set of contingently related beliefs and actions. Whether the story of an
unwanted child will lead a predictable cohort of the poor inexorably toward
criminality cannot be decided beforehand via a supposedly value-free science of
social mechanics. The creative agency of individual human beings defies this
technocracy.

Cultural context
In addition to narrativity, contestability, and ethical engagement, an interpretive
turn in policymaking also means paying more attention to cultural context.
Scholars like Dvora Yanow have done crucial work highlighting the need for
“local knowledge” when conducting policy analysis.26 And our discussion of the
imposition of terms like “unwantedness” on those in poverty underscores the
need for such inquiry to avoid massive and politically sinister
misunderstandings.

Once again, our anti-naturalist philosophical framework justifies the calls made
by pioneers like Yanow. However, as philosophers we must quibble when Yanow
sometimes implies that the “presuppositions” differentiating an interpretive
approach to policy are “interpretive methods” that contrast with “analytical
methods” modeled after the “scientific method.”27 The problem is there is no
such thing as a logically binding “interpretive method” versus a naturalist one.
Our anti-naturalist framework instead arrives at the need for local knowledge
without this reduction to method polarization.

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In our view, the reason policymakers should not neglect local knowledge is
because human actions, practices, and institutions are embedded within
particular traditions, backgrounds, and life-worlds. These life-worlds and
traditions are the result of certain historical trajectories and past legacies of
beliefs and practices of other agents. It follows that social reality is composed of
worlds of meaning such that the actions and practices of specific individuals or a
societal milieu can be badly misunderstood if they are not viewed in light of the
specific matrices of beliefs, meanings, and traditions held by those agents.

Yanow remains a vital source for chronicling the misunderstandings and self-
defeating actions that ensue when policymakers neglect these local contexts. To
take only one example, Yanow recounts the case of the development of drought
remedies that called for the digging of more wells in a region with nomadic tribe
peoples. The policymakers neglected the local traditions and practices of the
tribesmen who attached social prestige to the size of their herds, and therefore
increased their livestock to match the available new wells. In doing so, the policy
of more wells actually worsened the drought conditions it was intended to
address.28 By contrast, an anti-naturalist framework for (p.188) policymaking
always encourages familiarity with a particular problem as embedded in the
cultural contexts of a specific place. This local knowledge can save policymakers
from the spell of a naïve ethnocentrism, which superimposes the same structure
of belief everywhere. One cannot assume that more wells will be met by the
same actions regardless of the people involved. What the local people valorize
will have much to do with how they respond to the increase in well access.

Note that in our version of this argument, we do not rely on any claim about
methods. Say the contextual knowledge a policymaker wants to extract is from
the census data of Los Angeles or London. There is nothing philosophically
barring the use of quantitative methods as part of a wider research strategy
aimed at local knowledge. So an urban planner could use mass surveys or
statistics to gain some picture of public opinion in L.A. or London. Of course,
sometimes this might lead to a neglect of local knowledge, but in other cases it
might be an important factor in acquiring it. Quantitative methods are not fated
or determined to neglect local knowledge—it is all in how they are used.
Likewise, a policymaker could spend months doing ethnographic research on the
customs and habits of Los Angelenos and still leap to naturalist explanations and
modes of thought that neglect particular beliefs and meanings of actors. As we
established in Chapter 5 on methods, there is nothing that prohibits
ethnographic means from being used for naturalist ends.

If the problem is not quantitative methods, how then does naturalism neglect
local knowledge? Naturalist-inspired public policy tends to neglect context in
favor of formalism. Naturalists often make claims to necessary causal bonds that
link two formal variables together as they migrate through highly heterogeneous
cultural and historical contexts. Other times, naturalists set up formal decision

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or game theories that supposedly capture the logical essence of an institution or

practice and allow them to ignore context. This is very common, for instance, in
the so-called public choice approach, which has come to dominate the study of
American institutions and guide much neoliberal policy.29 Of course, rational
choice might be put to interpretive uses but only if the holistic nature of
meanings is kept firmly within the policymaking enterprise. The various methods
of the social sciences can be retained by policymakers but only if the importance
of context is not lost.

Dialogue and deliberation

The centrality of cultural context, ethical engagement, contestability, and
narrativity implies a critique of forms of mainstream policy expertise in the
North Atlantic liberal democracies. Indeed, many interpretive policy scholars
have noted that naturalist policymaking has a tight fit with a “particular form
(p.189) of thin, representative democracy, in which…the better informed few
prescribe for the less informed many” (something we discussed in the context of
ethics).30 Yet, as John Dryzek shrewdly observes, “the technological
manipulation of causal systems by an elite composed of, or advised by, analysts”
is perpetually foiled by the “intentional actions of human agents.”31

Once more, this turn away from naturalist technocracy is not contingent upon an
epochal sociological shift to the age of globalization as some scholars suggest,
nor is it the result of the “complexity” of the issues involved in the social
sciences.32 What in fact legitimizes the turn toward more dialogical and
deliberative forms of public policy is the conceptual critique of naturalism.
Technocratic and elite policy expertise depends on claims to a special scientific
knowledge of society. The assumption is that policy elites have access to a
specialized science of society that allows them to strongly predict outcomes. But
if anti-naturalism is correct, then the kinds of causal relationships needed for
strong, predictive technocratic expertise are simply unavailable in the social
sciences. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has succinctly put it: “our social
order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone’s [scientific]
control.”33

As the deliberative policy scholars have perceptively seen, hermeneutics has a

democratizing effect on public policy. Consider the factors we have been looking
at so far. If public policy is primarily narrative (and not a technical science), then
its explanatory form is as readily available to the laymen as to experts. Similarly,
the contingency of meanings implies that all citizens may contest and ethically
engage public policy and social reality (not simply the experts). This point was
made in terms of democratic theory but it revamps public policy as well. Finally,
the importance of cultural context for understanding beliefs, actions, and
practices implies that those carrying out public policy would do well to be in
dialogue with those with whom they are hoping to live under a policy decision.

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In this way, our anti-naturalist framework grounds the claims of deliberative

policy scholars who have been calling for the reconceptualization of policy
analysts as “facilitators” rather than quasi-scientific technicians.34 Part of this
shift in viewpoint means seeing the populations that are targets of policymaking
as collaborators and not merely as a field of objects to which policy is applied. As
Fischer puts it: “whereas the goal in the technical community is to find the one
best solution to a problem,” the deliberative turn in policymaking seeks “to find
the workable decision that holds the decision-making participants together.”35 A
facilitator’s goal is thus “to work to increase understanding among the
participants in ways that help reduce conflict and generate cooperative behavior
in the face of differences.”36 Rather than a policy elite simply formulating and
applying theories, a deliberative turn in policymaking views dialogue between
different sectors of society as vital. Differing stakeholders in a policy process
teach and mutually inform each other of their views (p.190) and special
knowledge. Judith Innes and David Booher speak of deliberative policymaking as
having the potential to become a “joint exercise” where participants are given
the chance to ask questions of the experts, while also “brainstorming and
scenario building, often with different players adding pieces to build a shared
story.”37

Some readers might be thinking that all this sounds a bit wooly and idealistic.
After all, did we not say that the deliberative and dialogical turn is also
accompanied by a heightened awareness of the inherent contestability of all
social and political reality? At this point an objection might be raised against our
attempt to legitimize this turn in policymaking. Namely, is this call for
democratic deliberation viable in practice? And what of the many policy debates
that exist at the intersection of society and the natural sciences and undoubtedly
involve highly technical knowledge? For example, is the interpretive and
deliberative model really helpful when governments must resolve some dilemma
with the economy or the environment? Is not rule by experts and technocrats
still necessary in such cases?

Perhaps the best way to begin addressing doubts about the practical viability of
a deliberative and dialogical turn in policymaking is to briefly analyze an actual
example of this kind of policy succeeding. If this paradigm in policymaking can
be shown as successful in an actual concrete situation, then perhaps this goes
some way toward allaying this type of objection. As Rousseau once famously
quipped: “it seems to me good logic to reason from the actual to the possible.”38
In this context, Sarah Connick and Judith E. Innes provide an especially helpful
case study of deliberative policy approaches when dealing with California’s
complex water laws. Briefly summarizing this case—while also integrating it into
an anti-naturalist framework—will help address these doubts.

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What is of great value in Connick and Innes’s work is their confirmation that
deliberative policy can outperform naturalist paradigms in the technically
complex domains like California’s water laws. California is infamous nationwide
for the complexity and intensity of conflict around its water policy (sometimes
colloquially referred to as “water wars”). The issues involved almost always
include highly technical economic factors and problems in the environmental
sciences. This poses the question of whether the policy problems are simply too
difficult for anyone but scientific elites to handle. In this light, we will briefly
consider Connick and Innes’s findings studying the San Francisco Estuary
Project (SFEP).

SFEP was a policy group assembled by the government in the early 1990s to
attempt a consensual proposal for environmentally restoring and managing this
important waterway. The group consisted of diverse stakeholders and
governmental agencies, many with intensely conflicting interests, including
environmentalists, agriculturalists, urban water users, business leaders, and
developers. Indeed, so ferocious was the initial disagreement that Connick and
(p.191) Innes report there was no consensus on “the estuary’s problems” or
even “that there was a problem.”39 This conundrum should not surprise readers
given what we have been arguing about the interpretive nature of political
phenomena. Policymaking is always an interpretive issue about human beliefs,
meanings, actions, and practices. In the world of policy, some evaluative story
must be told about the existence of a problem, what this problem means to the
political community, and who if anyone can or should fix it. Problems do not
appear on the radar of governments as value-neutral facts. In this sense, the
deep disagreement that Connick and Innes report is ultimately centered on the
contested meaning or significance of the estuary for political life. This involves
technical issues of the natural sciences, but these are always embedded within a
narrative stream of contested political meanings.

The reality that the world of political action is composed of contested meanings
helps shed light on Connick and Innes’s finding that the deliberative approach to
policy formation adopted by SFEP exhibited a number of concrete advantages
over naturalist approaches. First, for all their differences, the diverse
stakeholders comprising SFEP were able to learn from one another. The
deliberative policy processes educated all involved in how agreement over both
scientific facts and cultural meanings is achieved (something lost sight of in the
naturalist mindset that attempts to simply apply a scientific solution devised by
experts to social reality). So, for example, the scientists in the group were able
to shed light on the technical problems of the estuary in a way that enriched and
informed laypeople’s own positions on the issue. This information was then
translated into more democratically accessible language about the estuary that
was communicated to the public.40 No less important, the scientists on SFEP
learned from the laypeople about the nature of the political process. Scientists
reported that they had become overly accustomed to an “experimental mode” of
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thought in which hypotheses are simply systematically applied to an object, but

through their deliberative meetings they came to appreciate that politics
required a different dialogical mode of inquiry.41 Once we accept anti-
naturalism’s insight that policy is always about contested meanings and
narratives, it becomes clear that any findings of the natural sciences will need to
be effectively embedded within an interpretive web or narrative structure about
what to do about it. In democratic societies, this means that successful policies
will not be possible if they fail to be grafted into a story communicable to a
wider public. SFEP needed not simply to prove a set of facts, but to achieve
consensus on what the significance of these facts was for political life.

This brings us to a second related advantage of the deliberative and interpretive

approach over a naturalist one. Namely, it has the power to generate legitimacy
among participants. Connick and Innes report that at the beginning of policy
disagreements of this kind there is often extreme suspicion of the facts
presented by any other stakeholder. This can lead to “adversary science” (p.
192) in which conflicting sides build parallel sets of facts and theories in
isolated silos.42 In such an environment, pseudo-scientific theories proliferate.
By contrast, the SFEP’s deliberative approach yielded a shared set of facts even
among stakeholders hostile to the interests of environmental scientists.43 As
SFEP moved onto making policy recommendations, this collaborative and
dialogical process generated a sense of buy-in and legitimacy that made the final
document remarkably influential with government agencies and in future public
debates.44 Again, this should be of no surprise to an anti-naturalist. Legitimacy
is only achieved in the domain of meaning or significance. It is not some magical
property that is conferred on any decision made by scientific experts. In
democracies in particular, citizens tend to identify more strongly with decisions
in which they partook or their views were actively incorporated. This also
implies that when such deliberative practices do not flourish, society can
become stalemated in suspicion and adversarial theory-building. The result in
American society has been a polarization where opponents are in silos of “fake”
news and only one side believes it has any contact with reality.

Finally, Connick and Innes argue that the above features of a deliberative
approach to policy can also result in high-quality decisions. So SFEP developed a
water quality index that became a major point of reference among rival
constituencies in ongoing debates over water policy.45 Technical findings of the
natural sciences were successfully embedded into the world of cultural and
political meanings. This is not to say that simply implementing a deliberative and
interpretive approach to policy guarantees success. Like all human endeavors,
interpretive policy is a risk that must deal with the freedom of human agency
and vulnerability to everything from slight errors to spectacular failures.46 But
only a particularly crude form of naturalism would expect to see policy as simply
the resolution of problems like solving arithmetic or building a piece of
infrastructure. As Connick and Innes rightly note, a deliberative approach has
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virtues that extend beyond any one victory or defeat—including strengthening a

sense of civic engagement and opening up informal channels by which
stakeholders might preempt future problems.47 In short, what we see emerging
from interpretive policymaking strategies is a different, more engaged and
egalitarian form of democracy.

Performativity
One of the main features of all policymaking that becomes apparent in the turn
toward interpretivism is the way that particular policy styles enact different
kinds of political realities. As we just saw, an anti-naturalist policy style has the
potential to reinforce deliberative democratic values and educate participants in
what it means to self-rule. By contrast, a naturalist approach (p.193) might
enact forms of political reality that are technocratic and based on claims to
expert rule and power, in which a populace largely becomes a passive spectator
on democracy with diminishing senses of efficacy. This brings us to the
performative dimensions of policymaking.

Scholars like Maarten Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar have written perceptively on
how people can be described by a given policy (for example, as “protestors”
versus “collaborators”) in such ways that have a huge impact on politics itself.
As they put it, in the case of public policy so often “representation of an issue…is
the issue.”48 Fischer dubs this the “constructing [of] target populations” in
which certain groups and individuals are conceptualized as a threat, a help, a
problem, neutral, etc.49 However, as in the other features of the interpretive turn
in public policy, there could be more clarity over what justifies such awareness
of performativity.50

How does an anti-naturalist philosophical framework legitimize claims to the

performative dimensions of public policy? Here again we affirm the important
work of scholars like Wagenaar who wrestle with the way in which human beings
embody meanings.51 Because social science theories are themselves composed
of meanings and beliefs, it follows that the very concepts, language, and
explanations used by social scientists and policymakers in turn shape political
reality. This means there is no firm boundary between the description of an
object in social reality and its constitution. If enough agents take concepts on
board from, say, public choice theory versus deliberative interpretivism, then the
world is in a very real sense reconstituted and reshaped by these beliefs. New
institutions and practices arise that are expressive of these new beliefs and
theories.

This performative dimension of policymaking can have enormous political stakes

—changing policy outcomes, reshaping institutions, and even generating a
revolutionary remaking of the political order. In American politics such
constructions have had powerful consequences on politics. For example, Helen
Ingram and Anne L. Schneider have tracked how groups conceptualized as

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“advantaged target populations” enjoy “significant political power resources”

and also approval as “deserving people” (often “business, science, the military,
the middleclass, and white people” are constructed in this way).52 These
contrast dramatically with “deviant” groups “such as terrorists, gang members,
and criminals who have few, if any, legitimate political power resources and are
viewed as dangerous and of no value to the society.”53 In all these ways,
“planning analyses not only depicts but also constructs the issues at hand…
policy-making is a constant discursive struggle over the criteria of social
classification, the boundaries of problem categories, the intersubjective
interpretation of common experiences, the conceptual framing of problems, and
the definition of ideas.”54

A concrete example occurs in the work of Bernard Harcourt, who has argued
that the “Broken Windows” policing instituted by Mayor Rudolph (p.194)
Giuliani in New York City carried with it certain conceptions of “order” versus
“disorder.” In particular, minor crimes more typically committed by the urban
poor (e.g., turnstile jumping, loitering, graffiti painting) were policed far more
heavily than those frequently committed by the rich (e.g., tax evasion, white-
collar fraud, not cleaning up when walking a dog). In other words, the concept of
“disorder” was enacted in such a way that it led to far more punitive treatment
of the poor and racial minorities than the white upper class.55 The construction
of Broken Windows categories therefore had strongly performative dimensions
when enacted as a form of policing and policy that have entrenched racial
discrimination and unequal treatment of citizens.

Yet the performative dimensions of policy language can also be harnessed in

attempts to heal societal wounds and enact reconciliation. The Bouchard-Taylor
report is an excellent example of this aspect of the performative power of policy
analysis. Indeed, the commission’s explicit intention was to create forums that
combatted a sense of crisis and disunity in Quebec by opening shared spaces for
debate and dialogue. Among other things, these public forums were intended to
give performative recognition to victims of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism (the
report’s very subtitle reads “A Time for Reconciliation”). The performative power
of such reconciliation policies has received much attention at least since South
Africa’s famous Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Similar to that much more
famous case, Bouchard and Taylor’s report was also executed in such a way as to
give voice to both the experiences of religious minorities and the cultural fears
and anxieties of more nationalistic French-Canadians. Indeed, the co-chairs
explicitly defended this deliberative way of constructing public policy, arguing
that it gave victims of discrimination public recognition, fostered civic unity, and
corrected the myth of a crisis of legitimacy, showing that a wide consensus
existed on common language, equality, and secularism across differing religious
and ethnic groups in Quebec.56

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Quebec’s Muslim population in particular reported high levels of satisfaction

with this aspect of the commission’s work.57 The effect of such attempts to
publicly recognize ethnic and religious discrimination reflected not only a self-
conscious effort to enact a process of reconciliation, but also an attempt to shift
the terms of the debate away from simply the need for immigrants to conform to
French-Canadian values.58 Instead, both immigrants and longtime nationalists
faced the challenge of meeting the standards of the shared democratic norms of
Quebec’s state. In this way, the very enactment or performance of the
commission’s work “somewhat calmed things down” such that the “crisis
diagnosis” did not “genuinely apply.”59 Indeed, Bouchard and Taylor even
suggested that “the lull [in sense of crisis] that has occurred over the past year
is due, by and large, to our Commission’s investigation: Quebecers expressed
themselves…[and] the media themselves altered the tenor of their reporting.”60

(p.195) When making concrete recommendations for policy implementation by

the Quebec government, Bouchard and Taylor’s report also called for the state to
adopt the kinds of interpretive practices that had been employed by the
commission itself. So, when weighing specific future cases of accommodating
minority religious practices, Bouchard and Taylor recommended the government
employ forms of decision-making that were contextual and deliberative in
approach. Quebec and other multicultural democracies will surely face
continuing controversies over acceptable versus unacceptable accommodations
of minorities (for instance, should minorities receive special vacation time for
their holy days or only what are frequently de facto Christian holidays?). A
“contextual” approach means taking into account the uniqueness of local
knowledge to “avoid unwarranted generalizations,” instead adopting a “case-by-
case approach.”61 This means a deliberative way of engaging in dialogue with
the particular institutions, individuals, and groups involved in any such decision
should be enacted. In these ways the commission clearly sets an example of the
goal of performatively enacting the deliberative and argumentative ethos
suggested by the hermeneutic turn—though obviously the ultimate success of
this particular policy is for others to sort out.

“As if” naturalism were true

Naturalism appears defeated on nearly every set of grounds philosophically. So
can social scientists and policymakers ever rightfully make use of naturalist
assumptions? Colin Hay has developed a provocative case for the usefulness of
sometimes treating naturalist assumptions as though they were true in order to
develop insights or political warnings. That is, naturalist theories might be used
not in any meaningful way as descriptive or explanatory of social reality, but
instead as helpful heuristics deployed by social scientists and policymakers.

In Chapter 5 on methods we already considered at length how rational choice

theory might be treated “as if” it were true for the sake of generating political
warnings about, say, the squandering of public goods due to a free-rider

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problem.62 The purpose of such a use of rational choice theory should not be
mistaken (as social scientists under the sway of naturalism often do) for a
description of reality, but instead as a kind of thought experiment that can
“reveal the consequences of a world (unlike our own) in which the hypothecated
assumptions were true.”63 This basic move might also apply to a broad swath of
the naturalist concepts and theories we have studied so far in this volume.

For instance, behavioralists in political science, busy seeking correlations in

order to establish regular patterns (say, that incumbents in the U.S. Congress
tend to win reelection under certain circumstances), might untether their (p.
196) work from the naturalist goal of describing and explaining the world.
Instead of seeking universal, mechanistic covering laws, these political scientists
might just make “the convenient assumption that any regularities thereby
observed will continue to hold in the future.”64 In other words, they could act as
if naturalism were true, knowing full well the point would no longer be whether
the research corresponded to political reality but only that policymakers and
social scientists found it useful as a kind of thought experiment.

A similar point might be made about the naturalist concept formation treated in
earlier chapters. In particular, we established at length that essentialism,
atomism, and reification are highly distortive of social reality. So in our
discussion of Foucauldian governmentality, we saw that treating the state as an
ahistorical, unitary agency is highly distortive of the actual historical
contingency of the state. Indeed, shifting to an anti-naturalist, interpretive
analysis of the state not only frees social scientific concepts of distortions but
also yields new insights. However, Hay notes that the “conceptual abstraction”
of the state might for heuristic purposes be treated by social scientists “as if” it
possessed a certain unity and agency.65 Doing so might be more convenient for
certain policy discussions or could yield certain insights as to the institutional
constraints that politicians face when they enter into office.66 Indeed, Hay even
suggests that “the majority of self-proclaimed political scientists proceed as if a
natural science of the political were possible” even as “far fewer would now
regard this as much more than a convenient, simplifying and perhaps necessary
assumption.”67

So what are we to make of Hay’s as-if defense of naturalism? Philosophically, we

agree with Hay that such a move is valid and perhaps may even be useful on
occasion. Hay is right to draw attention to this research possibility while also
insisting that a naturalist, “predictive science of the political [is] impossible.”68
As Hay himself recognizes, this dramatically changes the status of all naturalist
research. Naturalist research cannot go on as usual. Suddenly, all such
naturalist social science must accept that it neither primarily describes nor
explains political reality but instead actively distorts it. Indeed, social scientists

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pursuing this as-if line of inquiry would have to present themselves as builders
of elaborate thought experiments, not rigorous, empirically minded scientists.

One of the ongoing labors of this book has been to catalogue the many ways in
which naturalist philosophy distorts political and social reality. Surely many
working social scientists and researchers would very much like to accurately
describe and explain political reality. For them the cost of as-if naturalist
research may very well be too high. This points to certain inherent limitations in
an as-if treatment of naturalism. Moreover, as-if naturalists must also consider
how helpful false or purposefully distortive theories are when navigating in the
world. Although nothing keeps an as-if naturalist from using his or her findings
to bolster humanistic or deliberative political ends, we have (p.197) also seen
that there is the risk that these forms of understanding be used to make false
claims to hierarchical and scientistic authority. In short, even if social scientists
and policymakers wanted to simply adopt naturalism on an as-if basis, the reach
and importance of such a research program would be greatly diminished. It is
difficult to imagine a society whose entire public policy is willingly run on the
basis of a turn away from social reality in favor of abstract academic models and
thought experiments. Meanwhile, the interpretive turn offers an entire paradigm
of social research with the advantage of knowledge about the world that is both
more philosophically defensible and more likely to generate insights into
practical human affairs.

Notes:
(1.) For an approach inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatism see: Frank Fischer,
Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009); for one drawing on selected elements of Habermas see: John
Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990). For books that effectively convey the range
and diversity of interpretive approaches to public policy analysis, see: Frank
Fischer and John Forester, eds., The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and
Planning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Frank Fischer and
Herbert Gottweis, eds., The Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as
Communicative Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Hendrik
Wagenaar, Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2011); Maarten Hajer and Hendrik Wagenaar, eds.,
Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

(2.) For example: Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiii.

(3.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiv; Judith E. Innes and
David Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking: Governance Through Dialogue,” in
Deliberative Policy Analysis, eds. Hajer and Wagenaar, 35–6; Sarah Connick and
Judith E. Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making: Applying

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Complexity Thinking to Evaluation,” Journal of Environmental Planning and

Management 46:2 (2003): 179–80.

(4.) Dvora Yanow, Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications, 2000) 20–93; Wagenaar, Meaning in Action, 241–74.

(5.) For a more detailed account of these forms of naturalist power see: Mark
Bevir, Democratic Governance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)
178–87.

(6.) John Forester, “Learning From Practice Stories: The Priority of Practical
Judgment,” in The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis, 195.

(7.) See: Deborah Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,”
Political Science Quarterly 104:2 (1989): 281–300.

(8.) Hajer and Wagenaar, eds., Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiii.

(9.) Meena Sharify-Funk, “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable

Accommodation’: Analyzing the Bouchard-Taylor Report and Its Impact on the
Canadian Province of Quebec,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30:4 (2010):
538.

(10.) Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the Future: A Time for
Reconciliation (Quebec City: Gouvernement du Quebec, 2008) 187, 186.

(11.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 25.

(12.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 36.

(13.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 234.

(14.) Stone, “Causal Stories,” 282.

(15.) Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 204.

(16.) Frank Fischer, Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative
Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 169–71.

(17.) Fischer and Forester, eds., The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and
Planning.

(18.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 65.

(19.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiv; Innes and Booher,
“Collaborative Policymaking,” 35–6.

(20.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 64–5.

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(21.) Fischer cites the work of Deborah Stone to make this claim: Fischer,
Democracy and Expertise, 206.

(22.) Forester, “Learning From Practice Stories,” 195.

(23.) John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, “The Impact of Legalized Abortion
on Crime,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics CXVI:2 (2001): 379–420.

(24.) See, for example: Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York: Penguin Books,
2002).

(25.) For a memoir that is one part autobiography and another part social
commentary of this kind, see: J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family
and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

(26.) Dvora Yanow, “Accessing Local Knowledge,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis,

231, 236; Dvora Yanow, Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 2000) 5.

(27.) Yanow, Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis, 5.

(28.) Yanow, “Accessing Local Knowledge,” 236.

(29.) For a seminal early tract in public choice theory of this kind, see: James M.
Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol.
3: The Calculus of Consent (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999).

(30.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiii. See also: Connick
and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 178.

(31.) Dryzek, Discursive Democracy, 115–16.

(32.) Hajer and Wagenaar, Deliberative Policy Analysis, xiv; Innes and Booher,
“Collaborative Policymaking,” 35–6; Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of
Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 179–80.

(33.) Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame, 2007) 107.

(34.) See, for example: Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 221; Frank Fischer,
“Beyond Empiricism,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis, eds. Hajer and Wagenaar,
224–5; Innes and Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking,” 38, 40.

(35.) Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 160.

(36.) Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 161.

(37.) Innes and Booher, “Collaborative Policymaking,” 44.

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(38.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (New
York: Penguin Books, 1968) 137.

(39.) Sarah Connick and Judith E. Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” in The
Consensus Building Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reaching Agreement,
eds. Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, and Jennifer Thomas-Larmer
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999) 805.

(40.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 812.

(41.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 812.

(42.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 822. See also:
Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 185.

(43.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 822.

(44.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 814, 824; Connick and
Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 186–7.

(45.) Connick and Innes, “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 813.

(46.) For example, see Connick and Innes’s critiques of the shortcomings of
SFEP: “San Francisco Estuary Project,” 821, 823.

(47.) Connick and Innes, “Outcomes of Collaborative Water Policy Making,” 184–
5.

(48.) Hajer and Wagenaar, “Introduction,” in Deliberative Policy Analysis, 30.

(49.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 66.

(50.) Fischer, Reframing Public Policy, 22.

(51.) Here we have some similarities with: S. D. Noam Cook and Hendrik
Wagenaar, “Navigating the Eternally Unfolding Present: Toward an
Epistemology of Practice,” The American Review of Public Administration 42:1
(2012): 3–38.

(52.) Anne L. Schneider and Helen M. Ingram, “Introduction,” in Deserving and

Entitled: Social Constructions and Public Policy (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2005) 17. Another important interpretive piece of work in this
area focusing more exclusively on race is: Dvora Yanow, Constructing “Race”
and “Ethnicity” in America: Category-Making in Public Policy and Administration
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003).

(53.) Schneider and Ingram, “Introduction,” in Deserving and Entitled, 17.

Page 22 of 23
Public policy

(54.) Fischer and Forester, “Introduction,” in The Argumentative Turn in Policy

Analysis, 1–2. See also: Fischer, Democracy and Expertise, 168–87.

(55.) Bernard Harcourt, “Policing Disorder: Can We Reduce Serious Crime by

Punishing Petty Offenses?”, Boston Review (April/May 2002), <http://
bostonreview.net/archives/BR27.2/harcourt.html>.

(56.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 36–7.

(57.) Sharify-Funk, “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable Accommodation,’”

535–53. Some have argued that the commission report was particularly effective
in reassuring religious minorities, but less adept in addressing Quebec
nationalists. For a mostly positive assessment of the commission see: Sharify-
Funk, “Muslims and the Politics of ‘Reasonable Accommodation,’” 535–53; for a
mostly critical one see: Gada Mahrouse, “‘Reasonable Accommodation’ in
Quebec: The Limits of Participation and Dialogue,” Race & Class 52:1 (2010):
85–96.

(58.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 232–5.

(59.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 38–9.

(60.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 76.

(61.) Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 168.

(62.) See also: Colin Hay, “Theory, Stylized Heuristic, or Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
The Status of Rational Choice Theory in Public Administration,” Public
Administration 82:1 (2004): 39–62.

(63.) Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002) 39.

(64.) Hay, Political Analysis, 44.

(65.) Colin Hay, “Neither Real nor Fictitious but ‘As If Real’? A Political Ontology
of the State,” The British Journal of Sociology 65:3 (2014): 459.

(66.) Hay, “Neither Real nor Fictitious but ‘As If Real’?” 472–5.

(67.) Hay, Political Analysis, 138.

(68.) Hay, Political Analysis, 48.

Page 23 of 23
Conclusion

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

Conclusion
Mark Bevir
Jason Blakely

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198832942.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords

Anti-naturalism’s effect on the study of human behavior and society is profound
and comprehensive. In terms of empirical inquiry, a new approach to explanation
and concept formation is generated. In terms of normative inquiry, the wall
dividing the study of values versus facts comes tumbling down. Where
naturalism built barriers separating ethics, political theory, and social science,
anti-naturalism instead builds bridges and opens access to areas of mutual
concern. An interpretive turn also generates a uniquely humanistic approach to
civic life, democracy, and public policy....

Anti-naturalism’s effect on the study of human behavior and society is profound

and comprehensive. In terms of empirical inquiry, a new approach to explanation
and concept formation is generated. In terms of normative inquiry, the wall
dividing the study of values versus facts comes tumbling down. Where
naturalism built barriers separating ethics, political theory, and social science,
anti-naturalism instead builds bridges and opens access to areas of mutual
concern. An interpretive turn also generates a uniquely humanistic approach to
civic life, democracy, and public policy.

In addition, we have shown how anti-naturalism is capable of encompassing the

best insights of a wide range of philosophical traditions—including pragmatists,
post-structuralists, analytic philosophers, neo-Aristotelians, phenomenologists,
Hegelians, social constructivists, and many others who in the case of the
philosophy of social science can cooperate in reasonable harmony. The point of

Page 1 of 3
Conclusion

this has been to achieve greater philosophical clarity and consensus about what
social scientists are doing when they set out to study and explain human beings
and their societies from an interpretive perspective.

Indeed, the interpretive turn, clarified by anti-naturalist philosophy, might join

together the intellectual dynamism of thinkers often thought of in oppositional
terms: Michel Foucault and John Searle, Charles Taylor and Friedrich Nietzsche,
E. P. Thompson and Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel.
This does not mean that disagreements and tensions disappear. It rather means
that the interpretive tradition is capable of a very broad overlapping consensus
among otherwise divergent thinkers. What joins them is a view of human agency
and society as constructed out of meanings. A narrative and historical view of
the social sciences in turn unlocks rich new ways of studying the world. Expert
and amateur social scientists alike can step into the immersive field of meanings
and venture their best interpretations.

Ethnographies, mass-scale sociologies, genealogies, and countless other genres

of narrative explanation are open to study when one has left the idea of an
absolute, exclusive, and hegemonic scientific explanation of society behind. Like
a rich poem or text, the understanding of society itself is enacted through an
endless and hopefully virtuous circle of interpretations. Interpretive social
science does not expect a final, historical vantage point that will speak
preemptively for all further reflection or inquiry. Nor does it maintain that
society is finally only about institutions, or rational actors, or evolutionary
genetics, or stimulus triggers in the environment, or neurons firing in the brain,
or some other absolute, brute feature of a machine-like cosmos. Rather, (p.202)
the meanings that interlock and generate the worlds of human life are
themselves subject to perpetual waves of historical change and flux.

For this reason, the future holds new, yet unknown understandings of the
present and the past. The future is even the bringer of new pasts. And this is not
due to the historical provisionality of a march toward absolute science, but
rather is the result of the very nature of social and political reality itself. What
Jorge Luis Borges said of literary fiction is indeed true of social reality, as well:
“literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single
book is not.”1 The same can be said of the density of events and everyday
happenings, wars and treaties, practices and habits, institutions and social
spaces, religions and mores that are the stuff of human life. The meaning of
human society is not exhaustible for the simple reason that the meaning of a
single human life has not yet been exhausted.

Notes:
(1.) Jorge Luis Borges, “A Note on (Toward) Bernard Shaw,” in Labyrinths (New
York: New Directions Publishing Company, 2007) 213–14.

Page 2 of 3
Index

Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-Naturalist

Approach
Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely

Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780198832942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832942.001.0001

(p.203) Index
actions 66–67, 116
and beliefs, constitutive relationship between 23–24
as brute data 33–35
contingent 35–36, 51, 54, 138, 142
holistic nature of 23–24
and narrative 24–25
Adams, Herbert 3–4
Adcock, Robert 77
age, and voter behavior 68–70
agency 45–48, 53, 116, 156–157, 181
situated 48–49, 53–54, 62
ahistoricism 44–45, 49–51, 54
Alexander, Jeffrey 156
Alexander, Michelle 121–122
Al–Qaida 120
American Way of Life 128–129
analytic philosophy 13–14, 35
Anderson, Benedict 147–149
Anglo-Foucauldians 152
anti-essentialism 72–73, 80
anti-humanism 44–50, 53–54, 61–62
anti-naturalism 2, 9–15, 18–19, 44–45
basic philosophical features 19–20
concept formation 80–85
and naturalism contrasted 32–33
anti-Semitism 26–27
Aristotle 167, 180
Aryan physics 26–27
atomism 5–6, 8, 95, 196
authoritarianism 75–76
autonomy 27–28, 45–48

Page 1 of 13
Index

axioms of rational choice theory 104–107

Ayer, A. J. 32
behavioral genetics 36–37
behavioral political science 5–8, 35, 196
beliefs 48–49, 66, 68, 95, 116–122, 128
and actions, constitutive relationship between 23–24
and age of voters 69–70
as brute data 33–35
changes in 25–27
contingent 30–31, 35–36, 49, 51, 53–54, 82, 99–100, 138–139, 142, 160
dilemmatic sources of 25–27, 29–30, 82
explaining 21–22
holistic nature of 20–23
inter-subjective 28, 31
and narrative 24–25
pathological sources of 25–27
racial 121–122
repressed changes in 26
and self-interpretation 24
and social background 29
understanding 21
Bellah, Robert 83–84
Bernstein, Richard 32
Bidney, David 55
big data 34
bio-power 151–153
black identity 121–122
Blair, Tony 172
Bloom, Allan 59–60
Booher, David 189–190
Borges, Jorge Luis 202
Bouchard, Gérard 181–182, 194–195
Bourdieu, Pierre 171
Brady, Henry 68
Broken Windows policing, New York 194
brute data, beliefs and actions as 33–35
brute fact reification 66–67, 69, 142–143
Bueno de Mesquito, Bruce 77–79
Burgess, John 3–4
Burke, Edmund 128–129
California, water policy 190–192
capitalism 141, 150, 169–170
indigenous 130
case studies 7–8, 96–97, 100–101
causality 35–38
certainty 59–60
Chicago school of political science 5–6
Christian culture 166–167
circular definition 58–59
Page 2 of 13
Index

civic engagement 123–125
civil religion 83–84
civil society 171
clash of civilizations thesis 117–119
Collier, David 65–68, 71–73, 77
colonialism, and ethnography 93–94
communism 147, 169–170
community 147–149
completeness axiom 104–107
(p.204) Comte, Auguste 3–4, 138
concept formation 10, 65–85
anti-naturalist 80–85
naturalist 65–66, 196
essentialism 70–76, 164, 196
linguistic instrumentalism 76–80
reification 66–70, 196
concepts
descriptive 80–82
explanatory 80, 82–83
family resemblance 72–73, 80–82
conceptual stretching 71–73
conceptual traveling 71
Connick, Sarah 190–192
contentious politics 10, 73–74
contestability 139, 142–144, 153, 160
in policymaking 183–185
contingency 30–31, 35–36, 49, 51, 53–54, 82, 99–100, 138–139, 142, 151–152, 160–161,
174
counter-democracy 124–125
criminal identity 121–122
criminality 186–187
critique 45, 60–62
cross-sectional surveys 94–95
cultural approach 156
cultural practices 122–128
cultural studies 131
culture(s) 6, 131, 172
popular/mass 131
and public policy 187–188
Cushman, Philip 156
Darwinism 3–4, 146–147
data analysis methods 89, 96–103
case studies 7–8, 96–97, 100–101
grounded theory 96–97, 101–102
Q methodology 96–97, 102–103
random sampling 96–100
statistical inference 96–100
data collection methods 89–96
ethnography 19, 88–94
Page 3 of 13
Index

interviews 90, 94–96
surveys 5–6, 94–96
Davidson, Donald 13–14, 55–56
death of the subject 44–47, 53
deductive theory 6
definitional circularity 58–59
deliberative democracy 168, 172–173
deliberative public policy 179–180, 183, 189–192
democracy 68, 75–77, 79, 92, 101, 167
deliberative 168, 172–173
participatory 168
representative 169, 173, 189 see also counter-democracy
democratic peace theory 58–59, 74–75
democratic theory 27, 157, 168–173
Denton, Melinda Lundquist 98–100
deontology 159–160, 164, 167–168
Derrida, Jacques 53
Descartes, Rene 3
descriptive concepts 80–82
Desmond, Matthew 91
developmental historicism 3–5, 138
devolution 172–173
Dewey, John 12–14
diachronic research 11–12, 116, 135–136
dialogical policy formation 172–173, 189–192
dictatorship 79
dilemmatic beliefs 25–27, 29–30, 82
discontinuity 138–139, 142–144, 153
discourses 46–48, 51–53, 56–57, 61
disenchantment thesis 30–31
Donahue, John 186
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 26–27
Demons 26
drugs 121–122
Dryzek, John 189
Dubner, Steven 149–150
Durkheim, Emile 171
duty see deontology
Easton, David 6
economics 4–5, 105, 107–108, 149–150, 158–160
Einstein, Albert 26–27
empiricism 5–8, 55–56
end of history thesis 129–130
Enlightenment 166–167
entrepreneurial government 170–171
epistemes 46–48, 52, 57, 61
epistemology 13–14
essentialism 70–76, 117, 196
strong 71–74
Page 4 of 13
Index

weak 71–75
ethical critique 12, 157–158
ethical engagement, of public policy 185–187, 189
ethical neutrality 162–163
ethics 27, 156–165, 174
deontological 159, 164, 167–168
facts of 161–162
Greek/Roman 166–167
historical turn in 165–168
utilitarian 4–5, 106–107, 158–161, 163–164, 167–168
virtue 167
(p.205) ethnography 19, 88–94
and colonialism 93–94
and naturalist research 92–93
post-colonial turn in 93–94
ethnomethodology 44
evolutionary theory 3–4, 146–147
experts/expertise 39, 168–170, 172, 179–180, 189, 193
explanation 21–22, 35–36, 45, 49–54, 61, 67–68, 103–104
explanatory concepts 80, 82–83
facts 6, 12
ethical 161–162
natural sciences 161
shared 58–60
fact–value dichotomy 162, 174
family resemblance concepts 72–73, 80–82
Finer, Herman 5
Fischer, Frank 179–180, 182–183, 185, 189–190, 193
Flyvbjerg, Bent 14
folk naturalisms 120–121
folk psychology 32
Forester, John 179–182, 185
formalism 4–5, 8
formal modeling 104–110
Foucault, Michel 28, 44–53, 56–57, 61, 106–107, 142–144, 147–148, 167–168, 201
anti-humanist position 46–48, 54, 61
death of the subject 46–47, 53, 167
discourses 46–48, 51–53, 56–57, 61
epistemes 46–48, 52, 57, 61
and ethics 166–167
genealogical approach 31, 46–47, 138–140, 143–144
governmentality 151–153
power, regimes of 46–48, 52–53
foundationalism 58–62
Freeman, Edward 3–4
free-rider problem 105
French peasant communities 148–149
Fukuyama, Francis 129–130
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 13–14, 20, 29, 44, 48–49, 167–169
Page 5 of 13
Index

Galileo 3
game theory 105, 109
Geertz, Clifford 147, 156, 161
genealogy 31, 44–47, 135–140, 143–144, 152–153
Gerring, John 100–101
Giuliani, Rudolph 194
globalization 129–130, 171, 179
Goffman, Alice 91, 122
Gordon, Colin 151
governance 170–172
market 170–171
network 170–172
governmentalities 151–153, 196
Gramsci, Antonio 131
Gray, John 129–130
Greek ethics 166–167
Green, J. R. 3–4
grounded theory 96–97, 101–102
Habeck, Mary 120
Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck 119
Hajer, Maarten 179–180, 193
Hall, Stuart 131, 156, 169
Hansen, John Mark 68–70
happiness/pleasure 158–161, 164
Harcourt, Bernard 194
Hartz, Louis 128–130
Hay, Colin 7–8, 12–13, 37–38, 48, 104–105, 108–109, 195–196
Hegel, G. W. F. 3–4, 167, 201
Hegelianism 14–15, 44
hegemony 131
Heidegger, Martin 24, 44–45, 167, 201
Hempel, Carl 67
hermeneutic circle 20–23, 33, 75–76, 99
heuristics 89, 103–110
high culture 131
Hispanic identity 121
historical institutionalism 7–8
historical sociologies 135–153
historicism 53–54, 82
developmental 3–5, 138
history 29–31, 160–161
ethical significance of 157, 165–168
and social background 29–30
Hobbes, Thomas 3, 151
Hochschild, Arlie Russell 91
homo economicus 150
horizon, Gadamer’s concept of 48–49
humanism 39, 185–186 see also anti-humanism
human rights 167
Page 6 of 13
Index

Hume, David 174
Huntington, Samuel P. 117–120
Husserl, Edmund 44–48
hypothesis testing 6–7
idealism 3–4
ideal types 50
identity 116–122
criminal 121–122
(p.206) Islamic versus Western 116–120
racial 121–122
ideology 12, 26–27, 61–62
incarceration of racial minorities 122, 144
inclusive fitness logic 146–147
incommensurability 57–58
incommensurable goods 106–108
induction 6–7
Ingram, Helen 77
Innes, Judith E. 189–192
institutional theory 171–172
institutions 123–128
invisible 125
interpretive turn 2, 9–15, 44–45, 201
interviews 90, 94–96
in-depth 90
semi-structured 95–96
structured 95–96
Islam 116–120
Japan 130
Jevons, William Stanley 4–5
Jewish culture 166–167
judgment 124–125
Kant, Immanuel 159, 164–165, 167
kinship 146–147
knowledge-power 56–57, 61
Kuhn, Thomas 158
ladder of abstraction 71
ladder of generality 72
Lampland, Martha 126
language 28–29, 47 see also linguistic instrumentalism
large-N statistics 7–8
law-like explanation 35–37
legitimacy 124–125, 192
Lenard, Philipp 26–27
Levitsky, Steven 68
Levitt, Steven 149–150, 186
liberalism 128–129, 147
linguistic instrumentalism 76–80
object-side 77, 79, 117–118
subject-side 76–79
Page 7 of 13
Index

Lippmann, Walter 6
Locke, John 128–129
logical positivism 55
longitudinal surveys 94–95
Lyotard, Jean-Francois 136
McAdam, Doug 73–74
MacIntyre, Alasdair 24, 37, 167–170
MacLeish, Kenneth 90–91
Mahon, James 71–73
Maoz, Zeev 74–75
Marcuse, Herbert 171
markets 150, 152–153, 170–171
Marx, Karl 3–4, 128–129, 138
Marxism 35, 163–164, 169
mass incarceration 122, 144
mass/popular culture 131
mass surveys 94–96, 99
materialism 3
Mead, Margaret 92–93
meaning 46–47, 55–56, 67–68
age and voter behavior 69–70
contestability of 139, 142–144, 153, 160, 183–184
meaning holism 20–21, 33–34, 55–56, 67, 99
Merriam, Charles 5–6
meta–narratives 135–140, 153
methods 10–11, 14, 88–111
heuristics 89, 103–110
multi–methods 89, 94, 96, 108, 110–111 see also data analysis; data collection
methods; qualitative methods; qualitative–quantitative debate; quantitative
methods
midlevel theory 6–7
Mill, J. S. 4–5, 138, 158–159
modernity 144–145, 157, 160–161, 167–168
Moore, Kathleen 119, 159
moralism 164–165
Morrow, James 77–78
multi-methods 89, 94, 96, 108, 110–111
narratives 24–25, 54, 62, 82–83, 173
and objectivity 44–45
and public policy 180–183, 189 see also meta-narratives
nationalism 146–149
National Survey of Youth and Religion 98
nation-ness 147–148
naturalism 2–9, 18, 50–51
as anti-democratic 39
as anti-humanistic 39, 153
and anti-naturalism contrasted 32–33
“as if” defense of 195–197
assumptions
Page 8 of 13
Index

beliefs and actions as brute facts 33–35

goal of scientific knowledge is predictive power 36–39
(p.207) scientific explanation seeks general causal laws 35–36
concept formation 65–66, 196
essentialism 70–76, 164, 196
linguistic instrumentalism 76–80
reification 66–70, 196
and economics 149–150
and ethical values 158–159
and ethnographic techniques 92–93
folk 120–121
and institutions 123–126
and nationalist social imaginary 146–147, 149
and race 121
as rejection of scientism 19
secularization thesis 144–145
and the state 151
and traditions 128–129
and violence studies 140–142, 144
natural sciences 2–3, 12, 18–19, 24, 26, 32–33, 36, 59–60, 126, 158–161, 163–164
neoclassical economics 4–5, 105, 149–150, 158–160
neoliberalism 131, 152–153, 171
network governance 170–172
New Age spirituality 145
new institutionalism 171
New Labor 131, 172
New Left 2, 14–15, 130–131, 169–170
New York, Broken Windows policing 194
Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 137–140, 160–161, 166–168, 201
nongovernmental actors 171
normal science 158–161
normativity 61
Norris, Pippa 124
objectivity 45, 54–62, 115, 162
observer-participation 90, 92–93
O’Donnell, Guillermo 77
ontology 13–14
Orientalism 118–119
original position 167
Pader, Ellen 91–92
Panofsky, Aaron 36–37
panopticism 143–144
participatory democracy 168
pastoral power 151–152
pathologies 25–27
Patrick, Glenda 67
peasant communities, nineteenth century France 148–149
peasant resistance, Southeast Asia 131–132
Pentland, Alex 18, 34
Page 9 of 13
Index

performativity, public policy 193–195

Pettit, Philip 167
phenomenological sociology 44
phenomenology CP3 10, 12–14, 32, 44–47, 50, 54–55, 60
phronesis 14
Pinker, Steven 140–142, 144, 163–164
pleasure/happiness 158–161, 164
pluralism 172–173
Polanyi, Karl 150
policymaking see public policy
political science 5–8
behavioral approach 5–8, 35, 196
case study analysis in 100–101
concept formation in 66–70, 73–79
historical institutionalism in 7–8
rational choice theory in 7–8
politics 3–4
popular culture 131
Porter, Theodore 126–127
positivism 3–4, 6–8
post-structuralism 10, 12–14, 28, 44–47, 52–53, 61 see also Foucault, Michel
power 31, 52–53, 56–57, 148, 151–153
regimes of 46–48, 52–53 see also knowledge-power
practices 28, 31, 47, 49 see also cultural practices
pragmatism 12–14
prediction 36–39, 163–164
principal–agent problem 170–171
prisoner’s dilemma 140
prospect theory 107
public choice approach 170–171, 188
public opinion 6, 124–125
public policy 12–13, 27
contestability 183–185
cultural context of 187–188
deliberative 179–180, 183, 189–192, 195
dialogical 172–173, 189–192
ethical engagement 185–187, 189
legitimacy 192
narratives or stories in 180–183, 189
performative dimensions of 193–195
public–private partnerships 172
puppets 50–51
Putnam, Robert 123–125
Q methodology 96–97, 102–103
qualitative methods 10–11, 88–89, 180–181
(p.208) qualitative–quantitative debate 88–89, 93–95, 179, 183
quantification 5–6, 126–128
quantitative methods 10–11, 88–89, 180–181, 188 see also qualitative–quantitative
debate
Page 10 of 13
Index

Quebec, accommodation of religious minorities 181–182, 185, 194–195

race 121–122, 156
radial categories 72
random sampling 96–100
rational choice theory 7–8, 38, 89, 104–110, 140–142, 149–150, 160, 170–171, 195–196
axiomatization 104–107
rationality 56–57
Rawls, John 167
Reagan, Ronald 170–171
reason/reasoning 35
local 49
reconciliation policies 194
referents of concepts 67, 77
regicide 143
reification 66–70, 102–103, 196
rejection, democracy of 125
relativism 56–60
religion 30–31, 98–100, 140, 144–145, 167
civil 83–84
religious minorities, Quebec 181–182, 185, 194–195
representative democracy 169, 173, 189
repression 26
reputation 124–125
resistance 128, 130–132
Ricoeur, Paul 24
Rios, Victor 122
Roman ethics 167
Rosanvallon, Pierre 124–125
Rosenstone, Steven 68–70
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 190
Russett, Bruce 74–75
Russia 130 see also Soviet Union
Said, Edward 118–119
San Francisco Estuary Project (SFEP) 190–192
Sartori, Giovanni 65–67, 71, 76–77
Schaffer, Frederic 92
Schmitter, Philippe C. 77
Schneider, Anne L. 193–194
Schutz, Alfred 44–52, 54–56, 60
scientism 61–62
naturalism as rejection of 19
Scott, James C. 131–132
Searle, John 13–14, 201
secularization 30–31, 140, 144–145
selectorate theory 10, 77–79
self-deception 26–27
self-interpretation 24, 27–30, 81, 100, 124, 160, 174
Shaw, R. Paul 146–147
situated agency 48–49, 53–54, 62
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Index

Siverson, Ralph 77–78
small improvements argument 106
Smith, Adam 150
Smith, Alastair 77–79
Smith, Christian 98–100
Smith, Jane 119
Smith, Rogers M. 129–130
social background 27–29, 31, 33, 46–49, 54
and belief formation 29
and history 29–30
social capital 123–124
social choice theory 105
social constructivism 13–14, 19–20
Social Darwinism 163–164
social engineering 37, 169–170
social imaginaries 145–150, 153
socialism 129–131, 169
social physics 18, 34
sociobiology 146–149
Southeast Asia, peasant resistance 131–132
Soviet Union 169
Spencer, Herbert 150
Spickard, Paul 156
Stalinism 169
standardization 126–128
Stark, Johannes 26–27
Star, Susan Leigh 126
state 170–171, 196
governmental approaches to 151–153
naturalist study of 151
statistical inference 96–100
statistics 5–6, 88–89
large-N 7–8
Stone, Deborah 180–182, 185
strong essentialism 71–74
Stubbs, William 3–4
subjectivity 45–49
surveillance 124–125, 143–144
survey research 5–6, 94–96, 99
synchronic research 11, 116, 135
Tarrow, Sidney 73–74
Taylor, Charles 13–14, 24, 30–31, 44, 48, 61, 136, 139–140, 144–145, 165, 167–168,
181–182, 194–195, 201
(p.209) technocracy 36–37, 39, 168–172, 179–180, 189, 193
Thatcherism 131
Thatcher, Margaret 170–171
theory 57–60
midlevel 6–7
thick descriptions 90–92, 161
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Index

Thompson, E. P. 130–131, 169–170, 201

Tilly, Charles 73–74
Tocqueville, Alexis de 128–129
traditions 46–49, 53–54, 82, 128–130, 167, 172
multiple 129–130
resistance to 128, 130–132
tragedy of the commons 105
transcendental subject 167
transitivity axiom 104–105
tribalism 146
truth 57
understanding 21
unity of science movement 32
utilitarianism 4–5, 106–107, 158–161, 163–164, 167–168
value-neutrality 60–61
values 12, 157–165, 168, 173–174
violence 140–144
virtue ethics 167
voter behavior 66, 68–70, 95
Wagenaar, Hendrik 179–180, 193
Wallas, Graham 5–6
War on Drugs 121–122
warfare 146–147
weak essentialism 71–75
Weber, Eugen 148–149
Weber, Max 50, 99–100, 157
welfare state 152–153
wellbeing 99–100
wicked problems 172
Williams, Bernard 139–140, 161, 164, 167–168
Williams, Raymond 130–131, 169
Wilson, E. O. 146–147
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 13–14, 20–21, 44–45, 72–73, 80–81, 201
women, Islamic 119
Wong, Yuwa 146–147
working class 130–131
Yale School of Cultural Sociology 156
Yanow, Dvora 179–180, 187–188

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