Book in Review: Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007. 288 pp. $150.00 (cloth), $41.95 (paper)

• Author: Keith Topper
• Published date: 01 October 2010
• Date: 01 October 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591710372871
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory

38(5) 731 –738

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Books in Review

Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory,

by Jason Glynos and David Howarth. Abingdon,

UK: Routledge, 2007. 288 pp. $150.00 (cloth), $41.95 (paper).

Reviewed by: Keith Topper, University of California, Irvine

DOI: 10.1177/0090591710372871

After a sustained period of neglect, the past ten years have been punctuated

by a new round of disputes about the distinctive character, purpose and proper

conduct of social scientific inquiry. Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s edi-

fying book, Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory,

is both an important intervention into these debates and a valuable instru-

ment for tracking continuity and change across various incarnations of the

Methodenstreit. Like earlier generations of critics, Glynos and Howarth

regard the “growing unease” in the social sciences today as a reaction to a

pair of powerful trends: first, the “the increasing scientism of the dominant

approaches and methods of social and political theory” (p. 2), and, second,

“the extraordinary resilience” in the social sciences of one influential species

of scientism, namely, positivism. In their view, the “unilateral forward march”

of positivism and scientism fuels misconceptions of social and political

inquiry that simultaneously diminish its scope and impoverish its practice.

To anyone acquainted with the methodological disputes in political science

since the advent of the behavioral revolution in the 1950s, this depiction of

the current crisis will surely seem, as Yogi Berra once remarked, “like déjà

vous all over again.” Yet resilience in the face of sustained criticism is one of

the most notable features of positivism and scientism; they are, to borrow

from Paul Krugman, among the most tenacious zombie doctrines—“ideas

that you kill repeatedly but refuse to die”1—in all of social science. So while

Glynos and Howarth’s characterization of the present crisis may sound famil-

iar, their framing of the key issues, as well as their account of alternatives to

positivism, charts new terrain. Earlier methodological controversies were cast

largely as disputes between the proponents of three distinct and (according to

many) mutually exclusive conceptions of social inquiry—explanatory, inter-

pretive, and critical. Glynos and Howarth analyze but also transcend these

conceptions by focusing on three recent trends in social theory: a rising interest

in the role of causal mechanisms, poststructuralism, and discourse theory.