The Politics of Paradigms
The Politics of Paradigms

Author: George A. Reisch

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1438473672

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Uncovers long-ignored political themes—ideology, propaganda, mind control, and Orwellian history—at work within the pages of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Politics of Paradigms shows that America’s most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn’s political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America’s McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn’s well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world. “This book raises and explores important questions about the ideological background of some of the most important work in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. It challenges conventional wisdom about the ideological neutrality of that work.” — Peter S. Fosl, editor of The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom

Politics and Paradigms
Politics and Paradigms

Author: Andrew C. Janos

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780804713337

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Recent economic and political developments in the Third World and in Communist and advanced industrial societies have challenged some of the most cherished assumptions of social science, forcing social scientists to rethink many of the categories of their discipline. In a concisely written and provocative book, the author traces this process of rethinking. He does so by going back to the nineteenth-century origins of political sociology and economy, and by exploring more recent attempts by American scholarship to fashion from the writings of Smith, Marx, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim a new universal theory of modernization and political change. The author argues that these attempts led to a new intellectual crisis, which could be resolved only by a "paradigm shift," that is, by refocusing the discipline from the classical concept of social relations to a new global concept of the division of labor and systems of exchange. Overall, the volume may be read both as an intellectual history of modern political science, and as an attempt to fashion an analytical tool for empirical research. As such, it will be of interest to students of political philosophy as well as of comparative politics.

Paradigms in Political Economy
Paradigms in Political Economy

Author: Kavous Ardalan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-06

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1317356330

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Social theory can usefully be conceived in terms of four key paradigms: functionalist, interpretive, radical humanist, and radical structuralist. The four paradigms are founded upon different assumptions about the nature of social science and the nature of society. Each generates theories, concepts, and analytical tools which are different from those of other paradigms and together they provide a more balanced understanding of the phenomenon under consideration. This book demonstrates that an understanding of these different paradigms and how they can be applied leads to a better understanding of the multi-faceted nature of political economy. Any explanation of a given phenomenon is based on a worldview. The premise of this book is that any worldview can be associated with one of the four key paradigms. Each chapter of the book takes an important phenomenon (i.e., the state, justice, freedom, democracy, liberal democracy, media, and the great recession) and discusses it from the four different viewpoints. It emphasizes that the four views expressed are equally scientific and informative. They look at the phenomenon from their certain paradigmatic perspective and together provide a more balanced understanding of the phenomenon under consideration. The diversity of economics research possibilities referred to in this book is vast. While each paradigm advocates a research strategy that is logically coherent, in terms of underlying assumptions, these vary from paradigm to paradigm. The phenomenon to be researched can be conceptualized and studied in many different ways, each generating distinctive kinds of insight and understanding. This book is for those who study political economy as well as economic theory and philosophy.

Paradigms of Political Power
Paradigms of Political Power

Author: John R. Champlin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1351500929

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Generations of men have used the notion of "power" to make sense of their political experience. Despite the fact that the term has recently fallen into comparative disfavor, the scholarly debate over the nature of power continues, with experts still striving to obtain an exact understanding of what power really is. The works collected by John R. Champlin here clearly set forth all the important arguments in the lively dispute, with a focus on the essential question: can the concept of power be used to unify the study of politics?The contributors to this work search for a definition of power, assess the value of serious political analysis in terms of power, and illustrate applications of the "power concept" to issues locally, nationally, and internationally. Hans Morgenthau supports a power-based political theory; he is countered by Charles A. McClelland and James G. March. Seeking a coherent, useful definition of the term, Thomas Hobbes investigates power in terms of its cause, and Dorothy Emmet draws up a list of distinct uses of power. Theodore Lowi achieves a fresh start on power studies by distinguishing "arenas" of power according to expectations of costs and benefits. The Lowi contribution bears on the debate over how the United States is to be characterized. Opposing C. Wright Mills' theory of the power elite as well as the idea of pluralism, Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz find that opportunities for participation in political decisions and power are very unequally distributed.This unique debate on the definition of power, engaging all sides in direct dialogue with one another, includes the work of important leading scholars in this area of thought. Together with an excellent introduction by the editor, the debate gives an active dimension to this book that will enliven all college classes and interested audiences.

Beyond Paradigms
Beyond Paradigms

Author: Rudra Sil

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2010-08-31

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1137013591

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While paradigm-bound research has generated powerful insights in international relations, it has fostered a tunnel vision that hinders progress and widens the chasm between theory and policy. In this important new book, Sil and Katzenstein draw upon recent scholarship to illustrate the benefits of a more pragmatic and eclectic style of research.

Paradigms and Sand Castles
Paradigms and Sand Castles

Author: Barbara Geddes

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-03-25

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0472023977

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Paradigms and Sand Castles demonstrates the relationship between thoughtful research design and the collection of persuasive evidence in support of theory. It teaches the craft of research through interesting and carefully selected examples from the field of comparative development studies. Barbara Geddes is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice
Policy Paradigms in Theory and Practice

Author: John Hogan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-07-13

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 113743404X

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The contributors investigate policy paradigms and their ability to explain the policy process actors, ideas, discourses and strategies employed to provide readers with a better understanding of public policy and its dynamics.

Instituting Thought
Instituting Thought

Author: Roberto Esposito

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-08-20

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1509546448

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This new book by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito addresses the profound crisis of contemporary politics and examines some of the philosophical approaches that have been used to try to understand and go beyond this crisis. Two approaches have been particularly influential – one indebted to the thought of Martin Heidegger, the other indebted to Gilles Deleuze. While opposed in their political thrust and orientation, both approaches remain trapped within the political ontology that has framed our conceptual language for some time. In order to move beyond this political ontology, Esposito turns to a third approach that he characterizes as ‘instituting thought’. Indebted to the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this third approach recognizes that the road to reconstructing a productive relation between ontology and politics, one that is both realistic and innovative, lies in instituting praxis. Building on this insight, Esposito conceptualizes social being as neither univocal nor plurivocal but as cross-cut by the dual semantics of political conflict. This new book by one of the most original European philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, social and political theory and the humanities generally.

Political Anthropology
Political Anthropology

Author: Donald V Kurtz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-13

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0429966814

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The field of political anthropology is complicated by a breadth and depth of interests that include every kind of ethnographically and historically represented political community, and nearly every kind of recorded political practice, behavior, and organization. To make sense of this array of information, political anthropologists examine political topics and issues in the context of research paradigms that include structural-functionalism, pro-cessualism, political economy, political evolution, and, arguably, post-modernism. In Political Anthropology, Donald V. Kurtz examines how anthropologists think about politics, political organizations, and problems fundamental to political anthropology. He explores the ideas with which they address universal political concerns, the paradigms that direct political research by anthropologists, and political topics of special interest.