The conceit framing Keith Topper's fine and necessary book is that the state of social science methods has grown so disordered it has even come to public attention, first when the journal Social Text unwittingly published Alan Sokal's parody of poststructuralist jargon and the now defunct Lingua Franca exposed the hoax, and then when the so-called Perestroika movement emerged to challenge dominant approaches in political science. Because the first instance attacked the perceived consequences of epistemic relativism in the social sciences generally and the latter the rigor mortis resulting from an allegedly hegemonic notion of scientific rigor in its discipline in particular, Topper's conceit allows him to play the role of Odysseus steering through the straits, lashed to his hermeneutic mast while shunning the Manichean siren songs of scientific monism to the one side and empty pluralism on the other, and heading for more open, ecumenical waters. It also enables him to claim that all this tacking to and fro has a public, political import. Indeed, he asserts that his primary concern in this book is “with a set of contemporary questions about the ways in which particular methodological commitments enable or constrain one's capacity to identify and act upon opaque power relations that sustain forms of domination” (p. 12).
Topper is a good critical guide through the troubled waters of methodological dispute. The basic outlines of that dispute are well known. It has revolved for a long time around the question of the relationship of the social to the natural sciences, generally involving arguments over the nature of their respective objects of study and pitting those who argue that one method of study fits all against others who claim, on ontological and/or epistemological grounds, that the social sciences require methods peculiar to them. Topper does not waste much time on the background to all this and moves instead into an extremely well-informed engagement with recent debates. His purpose is to develop a form of hermeneutics that is both pragmatic and antinaturalist without being antirealist. Although fully half of the text is devoted to a thoroughgoing critique of Richard Rorty's pragmatism and antifoundationalism, which Topper finds both not pragmatic enough and burdened with its own metaphysical baggage, and another chapter explores Roy Bhaskar's critical realism, the main purpose of these chapters is to explicate and defend the hermeneutics Topper associates primarily with Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor. Even though Topper agrees with Rorty that “there is no language-independent, pretheoretical access to either nature or social life,” he rejects Rorty's claim that there are therefore no important differences between the natural and social sciences (p. 75). Instead, Topper turns to the claim of Dreyfus and Taylor that the social sciences display a doubly hermeneutic character. While both natural and social science entail “a shared background of meanings and practices” that make interpretation integral to their functioning, the social sciences have as their objects self-interpreting subjects. Thus, social science “requires both (1) a grasp of the background webs of meaning and practices that are the precondition of all science and all intelligibility, and (2) an understanding of the background self-interpretations of the objects (persons, groups, cultures, classes, and the like) being studied. Moreover, this second feature places constraints on the first, namely, that social scientific vocabularies must retain some connection to the self-interpretations of the objects being studied” (p. 76).
On his own terms, it is important for Topper to demonstrate that this hermeneutical approach makes possible the sort of exposure of power relations supporting domination that is his purpose. He rightfully criticizes Rorty on just this point, arguing that Rorty's strict separation of incommensurable private and public spheres—represented in his writings as the ironist's realm of self-creation and the liberal realm of justice, respectively—and failure to provide sustained descriptions of the social practices that underlie private projects “follows the time-honored liberal practice of insisting solely on a division of these spheres, while ignoring their historical and conceptual interrelations” (p. 101). In contrast, among the examples consistent with the hermeneutical principles Topper advocates, the most significant are to be found in Pierre Bourdieu's several studies of social and political institutions. In his chapter on Bourdieu, whom Topper sees as unfortunately neglected in Anglophone political theory, Topper characterizes Bourdieu's work as involving the explication of “the precise ways in which contingent social norms, practices, and structures become ‘naturalized’” and thus is intended “to open new spaces of political agency and resistance, to liberate social and political actors by enabling them to shape and act upon those forces that previously shaped and acted upon them, and to facilitate interventions in those chains of causality that restrict the development of more vital democratic institutions and practices” (p. 157). By attending to the nondiscursive sources of what Topper calls “ordinary violences,” such as in linguistic or cultural competences, Bourdieu exposes dimensions of power that “are neither simply consented to nor simply imposed” (p. 180) and are otherwise opaque to the view of many institutionally centered approaches in political science.
Having put Bourdieu forward as a style of inquiry that conforms to the basic tenets of his pragmatic hermeneutics, Topper returns, in his concluding chapter, to Perestroika and the calls for methodological pluralism. Here, Topper claims that he is staking out a unique position by claiming that, rather than affixing positive or negative judgments to this or that method, “we are likely to gain better purchase on the stakes of methodological debates if we examine closely the potential gains and losses that attend the use of particular methodological approaches in specific contexts” (p. 189). Using Bourdieu's work as a benchmark, Topper then assesses several well-known examples of work either in the area of quantitative research or rational choice theory. His judgments here may be controversial, but his points are generally well taken and his larger intention to provide the basis for judging the contributions to political inquiry of specific works rather than to advance either monolithic dogmas or anything goes vacuities should be welcomed.
Topper likely overstates the public political stakes in the methodology wars—it is doubtful that anyone beyond the shores of academe is really paying attention—but that does not diminish the value of this responsibly thoughtful book to those of us trying to negotiate our way through the reefs.
