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Reading 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2006

Kirstie M. McClure
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles (kmmac@ucla.edu)

Extract

What has the discipline that calls itself “political science” to do with literary studies, anthropology, the philosophy of language, structural linguistics, or hermeneutics? With postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, and other such pursuits? Anne Norton's 95 Theses raises these questions at the nexus of “Politics, Culture, and Method.” Asked to consider this work both generally and with an eye to its potential impact on the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory and disciplinary or subfield divisions, I find myself caught between the terms of the invitation and the implosion of those terms for which the Theses offer no small spark. Curiously though, its most incendiary aspects appear not in Norton's own measured prose, but rather on its dust jacket. The back cover, for example, dubs it “an attack on the social science establishment,” while an inner flap applauds Norton as a “political scientist” who has launched “a polemic against the orthodoxy of her own field.” There, too, strident phrasing names the polemical target: “the antiquated and stultifying models in the textbooks on method, in courses on methodology, championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science.” Norton, we're told, “opens the gates to more new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria.”Kirstie M. McClure is Associate Professor of Political Science and English at University of California, Los Angeles (kmmac@ucla.edu).

Type
REVIEW SYMPOSIUM
Copyright
© 2006 American Political Science Association

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