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Politics, Economics, and Political Economy*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
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DISSATISFACTION WITH ESTABLISHED MODES OF SCHOLARSHIP IS A contemporary manifestation common to all the social sciences in varying degrees. In the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, which in its widespread adoption seems in no small measure to have contribted to the new waves of methodological consciousness, the prevailing ‘paradigms’, which were largely consolidated in the 1950s, are being explicitly and often vehemently challenged. A burgeoning critical literature is readily apparent throughout the social sciences and, for that matter, beyond.
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References
1 Cf. Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago, Chicago, second edition, 1970.Google Scholar
2 Wright Mills, C., The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, New York, 1959 Google Scholar, is usually credited with firing the first salvo. See also, for example: the works of Erving Goffman which run from Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre, Monographs, No. 2, 1956, to Relations in Public: Microstudies of Public Order, Harper and Row, New York, 1971; A. V. Cicourel, Methods and Measurement in Sociology, Free Press of Glencoe, New York, 1964; Berger, Peter L. and Luckman, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: a Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Allen Lane, London, 1967;Google Scholar Garfinkel, Harold, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice‐Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1967;Google Scholar Gouldner, Alvin W., The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Heinemann, London, 1971;Google Scholar Friedrichs, Robert W., A Sociology of Sociology, Free Press, New York, 1970;Google Scholar and Murphy, Robert F., The Dialectics of Social Life: Alarms and Excursions in Anthropological Theory, Allen & Unwin, New York, 1971.Google Scholar
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17 A brief analysis is attempted in Smith, Trevor, Anti‐Politics: Consensus, Reform and Protest in Britain, Charles Knight, London, 1972 Google Scholar, Chapter VII, ‘The Practice of Modern Government’, particularly pp. 36–44.
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21 I am fully aware that in much of what follows my treatment may justly be seen as too sweeping and cavalier. This is mainly because of my own ignorance, but results partly from a firm conviction that the social sciences generally, and not least political science, require more rather than less rough, broad‐brush approaches; elegant nit‐picking can go too far.
22 Lindbeck, Assar, The Political Economy of the New Left: An Outsider's View, Harper & Row, New York, 1971.Google Scholar
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28 John Knapp, for one. See his ‘Economics or Political Economy’, op. cit.
29 Cmnd. 1432 (1961).
30 Cmnd. 3638 (1968).
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61 The best example I know of discriminate borrowing (in this case from psychoanalysis) but not assimilating is Stanley Hoffman's masterly ‘Heroic Leadership: the Case of Modern France’, in L. J. Edinger (ed.), Political Leadership in Industrial Societies: Studies in Comparative Analysis, Wiley, New York, 1967.