Sheldon Wolin's Philosophy of Social Science

• In Event: Political Theory, Discipline, and Method

Abstract

In recent years, scholarly attention to the work of Sheldon Wolin has been largely trained on either his provocative conception of democracy as “fugitive” or his significant achievements as a historian of political theory and, relatedly, an ardent defender of the specificity of politics and the political. Without dismissing these features of Wolin’s thinking, this essay emphasizes and draws lessons from a rather different thematic strand in his work – namely, his philosophical meditations on social science. In referring to Wolin’s ‘philosophy of social science’ in this essay, I have two things chiefly in mind: first, his understanding of the methods and contributions of the empirical research practiced in the social sciences in general and political science in particular; and second, his position on the relationship in which political theory stands with regard to such research.

After an Introduction that sets out some of the regnant perspectives on Wolin’s broader political theory as well as his engagement with social science, the essay’s first two substantive sections track the aforementioned definition of Wolin’s philosophy of social science. The first of these sections looks at Wolin’s reading, evidenced in several texts, of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in order to reconstruct how Wolin understood the outlook, approach, and results of the “behavioral revolution” in political science during the middle of the twentieth century. In particular I suggest, contra common depictions of his position, that Wolin was sympathetic towards the “new political science” in some important ways. The second substantive section offers a new interpretation of how Wolin framed the relationship between political theory and empirical social science by closely examining what, in “Political Theory as a Vocation,” he points to as the resources that “traditional” theory can provide – namely, those “qualities of thinking and feelings which are not readily formulable but pertain to a capacity for discriminative judgment.” The third and final substantive section of the essay asks what lessons for contemporary political thought and practice may be drawn from Wolin’s philosophy of social science. I suggest that these lessons extend quite a bit beyond disciplinary bounds – beyond, that is, the sometimes-hoped-for, sometimes-mocked union of political theory and empirical political science. Rather, Wolin’s philosophy of social science sheds some important light on how the intellectual habits valued by political theory may be fruitfully combined with the methods and results of our contemporary social science – especially social science aimed at explaining the degree and sources of social inequality – in order to ground political action. Wolin’s philosophy of social science helps us see that political theory and empirical political science find some reciprocity not (or not merely) in the research carried out in political science departments but instead in the epistemological needs that each can meet in the course of democratic life.

Author

• Hari Ramesh, Wesleyan University