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less plausible and resonant in so far as they played by the rules of disciplinary games and appealed to disciplinary communities. As Margaret R. Somers puts it, “Within a knowledge culture, narratives … not only convey information but serve epistemological purposes. They do so by establishing veracity through the integrity of their storied form. This suggests that in the first instance the success or failure of truth claims embedded in narratives depends less on empirical verification and more on the logic and rhetorical persuasiveness of the narrative.”⁴³

      Seventh, by foregrounding the involvement of the investigator in the investigation, the cultural turn accepts the inability to achieve either full objectivity, the distance from the object of study for which the historians had longed, or the rapport so ardently imagined by classical anthropology. The observer/analyst is situated in both time and place, is educated in a particular way, and comes with her own subjectivity. She is involved despite herself, or because of herself, and is now free to reflect on her own position. Self-reflexivity parallels the whole constructivist thrust of the cultural turn, bringing the constitution of both structure and agent back to the observer/analyst. As the introduction to an influential collection explains, the ethnographers represented in the volume “see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes … Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts.” The “historical predicament of ethnography” is precisely that “it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures.”⁴⁴ Any attempt to represent and explain culture must by necessity be historicist and self-reflexive.

      The list of stances and preferences of those having turned can be further extended, as can the new fields of inquiry that cultural interpretivists have opened up. The concern with the body and the self, and the whole question of the production of subjectivities, come to mind. While some historians and sociologists returned to the creation of new mega-historical narratives, only very partially informed by insights from cultural studies, others, particularly cultural historians, explored micro-history, a style of work in which the full context of a historical moment can be grasped.⁴⁵ The image of historians in the mind of some social scientists has been of laborers toiling in the fields of data collection, whereas in fact the cultural turn has granted a general permission to historians to practice their own kind of intellectual imperialism, expanding the range of legitimate topics. If politics is profoundly culturally constructed, and culture is fraught with political meanings and practice, and both are produced in time, then historians can easily move past the disciplinary border guards at the softening edges of anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science.

      Discourse and representations, of course, are central to the cultural turn, but in recent years some culturalists have pulled back from the desire to replace older materialist accounts with purely discursive ones. A noticeable trend, reflected unevenly in Beyond the Cultural Turn, was not so much an abandonment of the ground gained by the turn toward discourse, language, and culture, but a reassessment of the place of the material and the structural, or what is often referred to as “the social.” An oversimplified materialist or structural determination is not to be replaced by an equally one-sided cultural or discursive determination.⁴⁶ The turn back to the material and social is evident in Sewell’s writings, notably in an essay on Geertz where he retrieves the materiality of the anthropologist’s location of symbolization in the evolution of the human mind. “If Geertz is right as I [Sewell] firmly believe he is, semiotic systems are not unworldly or ghostly or imaginary; they are as integral to the life of our species as respiration, digestion, or reproduction. Materialists, this suggests, should stop worrying and love the symbol.”⁴⁷ “Beyond,” here, is in part a return, a going back, but even going back or beyond involves the journeys that one has already made and the consequent learning that has taken place. As Dorothy says, and Salman Rushdie reminds us: “There’s no place like home.”⁴⁸

       Where Does That Leave Political Science?

      As a discipline, political science has hardly been touched by the cultural turn. The few influenced by the hermeneutic direction implicit in the linguistic, historical, and cultural turns have found themselves at a “separate table” within comparative politics, one set far from those engaged in rational-choice or game-theoretic work, a bit closer to those interested in new institutionalist and historical approaches, and closest to political theorists and international relations scholars of a constructivist bent.⁴⁹ The resistance of those who see themselves to be both the core and the future of the discipline to the approaches and preferences of cultural interpretivists begins with a specific view of science, and a commitment to a particular politics that has informed much of political science. From its inception, American political science has held “aspirations to be both truly scientific and a servant of democracy, aspirations abetted by deep faith that these two enterprises went hand in hand.”⁵⁰ But this basically liberal agenda contains within it an irreconcilable tension between asserting the importance of political agency, so fundamental to democratic citizenship, and providing “full causal accounts of politics, usually on the model of natural sciences that deny any conscious agency to the phenomena they study.”⁵¹

      Historically, political science, a field bound more by the object of its study, that is politics, than by any consensus on the method of study, has engaged with a subject that even the most naturalistic and materialist investigators would agree is, unlike natural sciences, constituted by the activities and self-understandings of human actors, among them political scientists.⁵² In its initial phase of professionalization between the two world wars, political science stressed objective study, free from ideological preferences and values, and elaborated a naturalistic view of political behavior as determined by specific environments rather than universal laws. Empirical particularistic studies, accurate description and measurement of observable phenomena, were seen to be the basis for a truly objective science of politics. Leaders in the field, like Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, eschewed rationalistic explanations, a priori reasoning, theories dependent on innate drives or instincts, or elaborate system-building. The meaning of political behavior was to be discovered in how politics operated in practice.

      Edward Purcell has eloquently told the story of how this objectivism and an appreciation of cultural differences led researchers increasingly toward a moral neutrality and relativism that contradicted their personal commitment to democracy.⁵³ Their empirical findings confirmed that elite groups were able to dominate the majority of the population in democratic polities, and studies of public opinion and voting behavior undermined claims that humans were informed judges of their own interests. Eventually, the shock of the Great Depression, the struggle against Nazism, and the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union stimulated a re-evaluation of democratic theory and encouraged a more positive evaluation of the actual practices of American democracy.

      In the years following World War II the discipline grew enormously and found links to public influence and power. Challenged by McCarthyism, political scientists sought shelter behind their claims to objectivity and neutrality. Yet celebratory theories of pluralism and cultural consensus dominated the analyses of American politics. Elites still ran things, they argued, but no single elite group dominated in the free-for-all of contested politics and all groups could compete. Without examining the barriers of class, race, and gender that gave coherence to this congenial system, the critical edge of political studies diminished. Students of politics joined in the general anti-Communist patriotism of the day, developing the theory of totalitarianism that neatly homogenized Stalinism and Hitlerism and contrasted the T-model with Western democracy. Across the social sciences “Marx was replaced by Freud, the word ‘capitalism’ dropped out of social theory after the war, and class became stratification.”⁵⁴ When Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom requested clearance to teach a course on planning in the late 1940s, the Yale economics department asked that they label it “Critique of Planning” instead.⁵⁵ And the group of social scientists at the University of Chicago who chose the term “behavioral sciences” to describe their endeavor did so consciously, in order to appear neutral and not confuse congressional funders who “might confound social science with socialism.”⁵⁶

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