| Review of: | The Disorder of Political Inquiry by Keith Topper |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Jason Frank |
| Reviewed in: | Constellations |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 1, Pages 147-156 |
Book Reviews
Political science in the United States has been roiled in recent years by one of its periodic
Keith Topper's
Since pragmatism is the approach arguably closest to Topper's own, and an uncritical methodological pluralism one of his primary targets, it is fitting that half the book is taken up with an exploration of the work of Richard Rorty. Topper turns to Rorty first to show how both naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches to the human sciences rely on a specious understanding of the natural sciences, one ultimately based in a "mirror of nature" account of representation. However, unlike Rorty, and in defense of such hermeneutic approaches as those of Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Topper insists on the pragmatic value of maintaining an ontological distinction between the natural and the human sciences. The absence of a foundational distinction between these inquiries is no reason, Topper argues, for a pragmatist to ignore practically meaningful differences between them (79). Although all sciences may be interpretive, the human sciences are doubly so, insofar as their objects are self-interpreting beings, whose interpretations may be impacted by the scientific research itself, and whose self-interpretations are "causally efficacious" (34). Topper cites Ian Hacking's pithy explanation: "Calling a quark a quark makes no difference to the quark" (213). In the first three chapters of the book, Topper deftly uses Rorty's own pragmatic criteria to challenge Rorty's work in the philosophy of social science and normative political theory. Topper questions again and again "the pragmatism of Rorty's pragmatism" (65), contending that "a consistently articulated pragmatism entails ...a rejection of some of Rorty's own putatively pragmatist claims" (59).
While many aspects of Rorty's work come under fire in these chapters (including his account of language games), Topper's critiques cluster around two broad claims. The first is that Rorty's philosophical attempt to deflate the pretensions of foundationalism ultimately remains bound to foundationalism's metatheoretical preoccupations. Topper counsels readers to turn their attention instead to the rough ground of exemplary research. This charge, however, could amount simply to calling Rorty, who is trained as a philosopher, a philosopher; Topper's more serious claim centers on Rorty's theory of political "redescription." When Topper judges this theory by the pragmatic criterion of whether it allows us to resolve concrete social or political questions, it seems to fail miserably. In Topper's convincing account, redescription looks more like a complacent reinscription of the prevailing liberal norms of strong voluntarism and fixed relations between the public and private realm. "Rorty's recommendations not only fail to help identify pressure points for change," Topper argues, "they represent a flight from that very task" (107). Furthermore, Topper writes, Rorty offers "vague suggestions that avoid entirely the difficult practical issues" (105).
Topper's critique of Rorty in the book's first half is so devastating that by the end of the discussion one is left wondering why he spends so much time engaging Rorty's work in the first place. After Topper details the "facile and complacent" aspects of Rorty's work (98), it is difficult to see how he can still maintain that Rorty provides "unquestionably one of the more ambitious efforts to rejuvenate liberalism's most attractive ideals" (93). In any case, the initial critical encounter with Rorty's linguistic pragmatism nicely sets up the positive and reconstructive accounts of the book's second half.
A key principle at stake in Topper's arguments against Rorty is the meaning of realism, which Topper believes Rorty associates too readily with discredited foundationalisms. In the book's second half, Topper attempts to salvage a pragmatic, critical realism that can accommodate constitutive uncertainty and yet sustain the possibility of a more actively interventionist social science. To do so, Topper engages with the work of Roy Bhaskar and Pierre Bourdieu. Each of these chapters can stand on its own for its admirably lucid presentation of the ideas of these complex theorists, while simultaneously contributing to the patchwork of Topper's larger argument. Topper admires the "emancipatory ambition" of thinkers like Bhaskar, Richard Boyd, Jeffrey Isaac, and Ian Shapiro and their attempts to enlist post-positivist social inquiry in overcoming the distorted self-understandings and hidden forms of domination that inhabit our political institutions and practices.
The discussion of Bhaskar's work, which stands in for the broader movement of critical realism, is philosophically the book's most demanding. Topper ably manages his account of Bhaskar's technical arguments concerning the ontological terrains of the real, the actual, and the empirical. He also gives a helpful overview of Bhaskar's influential critique of Humean causality in the natural and human sciences in favor of a biological theory of emergence - that is, "the theory that complex forms of life emerge from more basic forms, but are not always predictable from, or reducible to them" (124). Here, too, Topper maintains a critical distance from some of Bhaskar's conclusions, noting in particular how Bhaskar's affirmation of the immanent reality of law-like statements and correlations between social objects assumes an analogy between natural and social sciences that cannot be proven on Bhaskar's own terms. The theory is based on the assumption that these regularities exist. As with his critique of Rorty, Topper thinks that the hermeneutic position is given short shrift in Bhaskar's work.
Of all the thinkers engaged in the study, it is perhaps Bourdieu that Topper admires most and criticizes least (although some readers will suspect the implied characterization of Bourdieu's work as representatively poststructuralist). [4] Topper makes a persuasive case that political scientists should pay more attention to Bourdieu, whose work has more significantly impacted sociology and anthropology than political science. In particular, Topper suggests that Bourdieu's thought might productively revitalize the largely moribund power debates in American political science. Topper contends that Bourdieu, as one of the leading theorists of everyday forms of domination and the central role of the body in encoding histories and power, offers an exemplary model for reorienting contemporary political inquiry.
As with the chapter on Bhaskar, Topper provides a very clear account of Bourdieu's theory of habitus, field, and capital. But, unlike the chapter on Bhaskar, Topper does not go as deeply into Bourdieu's ethnographic methodology, focusing instead primarily on the content areas of his research. As a result, the Bourdieu chapter may be the best in the book, but it also seems to hang on its own. Occasionally, differences between the thinkers Topper engages are underexplored in his "ecumenical" account's emphasis on continuity over discontinuity (differences that may be importantly stylistic as well as epistemological - an issue Topper never raises). This inattention to key distinctions seems especially the case with the chapters on Bhaskar and Bourdieu. Topper seeks to identify a common ground between Bourdieu's "ethos of disturbance" and Bhaskar's insistence on a critical realism, but this reader was left wanting a fuller presentation of the differences between them.
Topper's defense of "thoroughly pragmatic" criteria in judging approaches to political inquiry offers a thoughtful position in debates that tend to alternate between calls for unified normal science and an unconstrained methodological pluralism. One can imagine a productive conversation oriented by the pragmatic criteria Topper affirms emerging between different methodological positions. Throughout the book Topper himself very generously engages prominent examples of qualitative, quantitative, and rational-choice research, exemplifying the "trading zone" approach his own study recommends. While defending pragmatic criteria, Topper is rightly wary of the common plea for "relevance," or for "problem-driven" rather than "theory-driven" research (184-5). "Problem-driven" social science on its own is insufficient to the critical ethos Topper affirms, in that it remains fundamentally reactive to problems "thrown up" by the political world without exploring the dynamics of what Michel Foucault called "problematization" itself. [5] Such "problem-driven" research is always at risk of reifying existing political arrangements, and critical political inquiry at its best might instead problematize and reveal political relations where they were not commonly thought to exist. The concept of "relevance" is similarly determined by context. It can be used not only to bring research back to practical, worldly concerns, but also, more disturbingly, to contain more experimental research aimed at opening up different ways of conceptualizing and intervening in the political status quo. [6] An insistence on timely "relevance" can establish a worrisome and uncritical symmetry between researcher and the object of research; in Theodor Lowi's words, political inquiry should avoid simply becoming what it studies. [7]
It is this challenge that Topper's critical pragmatism takes up and asks his readers to pursue, but his "thoroughly pragmatic" criteria may not in the end be sufficient to the goal. The criteria that Topper affirms may productively orient the critical historical judgments he counsels, but may not provide the best framework for assessing the value of contemporary research. As Nietzsche clearly recognized, the determinations of use are usually retrospective constructions. Timeliness is important in politics as well as political research, but there are also virtues in refusing to be governed by its imperatives; there is an argument for making political inquiry untimely as well.
[1]See Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds.,
[2]Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,"
[3]For an elaboration, see Peter Galison, "Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief," in Mario Biagioli, ed.,
[4]Judith Butler, for example, criticizes Bourdieu's "realism" from a poststructuralist perspective, arguing against his attempt to anchor the power of language in an external and prediscursive social praxis. See Judith Butler,
[5]See Michel Foucault, "Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations," in
[6]Bonnie Honig made a similar point in a panel on Perestroika during the 2002 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston.
[7]Theodore J. Lowi, "The State in Political Science: How We Become What We Study," in James Farr and Raymond Sedelman, eds.