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The Aristotelian concept of phronesis or practical wisdom has played a prominent role in the long and deep wake of the Perestroika controversy in political science, where a diverse group of practitioners rallied in opposition to the perceived hegemony of quantitative methods in the discipline. As scholars like Bent Flyvbjerg have proposed the contours of a post-Perestroikan social science, political scientists and theorists have taken his use of the idea of practical wisdom to herald the dawning of a new social science, less beholden to notions of method. This paper examines the post-Perestroikan appropriation of Aristotle using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s interpretation of phronesis as a starting point. Viewed from this vantage, contemporary uses of phronesis seem less like the foundations for a new social science, and more like a new spin on the old arguments about method that have characterized social science since the mid-1800s.

Many scholars view Max Weber's exposition of an “ethic of responsibility” in his 1919 lecture “Politik als Beruf” as a defense of pragmatic political action. This article re-examines Weber's argument in the context of his social scientific writings. It argues that Weber's political “ethic” is far more demanding than commentators have hitherto supposed. The conception of responsibility that emerges from Weber's work poses a serious challenge to the conventional modern equation of “acting responsibly” with “pursuing collectively desirable ends in an instrumentally rational fashion.”

Contemporary issues in the philosophy of science, and the recent turn to scientific realism in political theory, prompt both a reconsideration of the nature of theory in social scientific inquiry and an examination of current attempts to appropriate philosophical arguments in support of images of theory and the relationship between social science and political practice. Metatheoretical claims about the explanation of social phenomena and about the possibilities of a critical social science are not a substitute for a substantive theory of social reality and a confrontation with the practical issue of the relationship between political theory and politics.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, a philosopher who became an armchair anthropologist, continues to be of interest to both anthropologists and philosophers. His first and most important anthropological work, How Natives Think, was originally published in 1910 and translated into English only in 1926-three years after his second and next most important anthropological work had been translated: Primitive Mentality, originally published in 1922. For this reprint of How Natives Think anthropologist C. Scott Littleton has written a provocative fifty-page introduction. He argues that Levy-Bruhl has been both less reviled (pp. xxi-xxvii) and more influential (pp. xxvii-xlii) among anthropologists than is recognized. Levy-Bruhl, he claims, "anticipated," if not abetted, the trend in anthropology toward "cognitive relativity." There are various kinds of relativism. Moral relativism denies that

The dominant tendency in contemporary philosophy of natural and social science is antipositivist. That much is easy to ascertain even by a cursory survey of books and articles. But what are antipositivists against? Whether dead or alive, their enemy is difficult to identify on the basis of antipositivist accounts which vary considerably one from another. A brief glance at those accounts will suffice to show that antipositivists do not have an identity either, they are a motley group with different interests, motives and backgrounds. In the present article I shall restrict my attention to those antipositivists who are, broadly speaking, in the empiricist tradition and whose main complaint against positivism is that as a descriptive account of empirical science it is too narrow and as a methodological programme it is a too restrictive brand of empiricism. I shall argue that the basic antipositivist criticisms are relevant and effective against what I shall call positivism in the strict sense but not against a variety of scientists and philosophers also labelled positivists in some vague sense of the word. It is, therefore, in the antipositivists' own interest-unless their aim is confusion rather than rational discussion-to identify their opponents more precisely. I shall also argue that whereas positivism in the strict sense is in fact for many purposes an unnecessarily restrictive brand of empiricism, this does not apply to a variety of doctrines or programmes often subsumed under 'positivism' in the broad and vague sense and that many views and principles the antipositivists regard as their own (and so non-positivist) have been part of their opponents' doctrines for some time now.

THE hope which originally inspired methodology was the hope of finding a method of enquiry which would be both necessary and sufficient to guide the scientist unerringly to truth. This hope has died a natural death. Today, methodology has the more modest task of establishing certain rules and requirements which are necessary to prohibit some wrong-headed moves but insufficient to guarantee success. These rules and requirements, which circumscribe scientific enquiries without steering them in any specific direction, are of the two main kinds, formal and material. So far as I can see, the formal rules of scientific method (which comprise both logical rules and certain realistic and fruitful stipulations) are equally applicable to all the empirical sciences. You cannot, for example, deduce a universal law from a finite number of observations whether you are a physicist, a biologist, or an anthropologist. Again, a single comprehensive explanation of a whole range of phenomena is preferable to isolated explanations of each of those phenomena, whatever your field of enquiry. I shall therefore confine myself to the more disputable (I had nearly said ' more disreputable') and metaphysically impregnated part of methodology which tries to establish the appropriate material requirements which the contents of the premisses of an explanatory theory in a particular field ought to satisfy. These requirements may be called regulative principles. Fundamental differences in the subjectmatters of different sciences-differences to which formal methodolo

REUD writes: "We must look around for analogies."' He is certain he X will find them, as have other men before him. Social thought, like theology or physics or poetry, has always availed itself of analogy. All thought systems have used models to mediate between clusters of experience or events, showing them, by the connection located pivotally in the model, to be analogous. Indeed, analogy has been considered a necessary first step in all abstraction and law. Analogies may be a long way round to the truth, but "multiple failures have taught us the unwelcome lesson, that man can only arrive at ... understanding . .. by a very circuitous route." The great questions are "not accessible directly."2 Rather, as Henry James taught the art of the novel, they must be approached by indirection, though perhaps not so indirectly as James himself found necessary. The way to knowledge is from one level of meaning to another, the one level mirroring the next. Nineteenth-century thought accepted the way more eagerly than many generations before it. Gierke assessed all medieval political thought as dependent upon the method of analogy and the model of macrocosm-microcosm.3 It was not until the nineteenth century that the method and the model again rose to pre-eminence.4 In his dependence upon the method of analogy and the model of macrocosmmicrocosm, Freud was a typical product of his century. Although his dependence is not explicit (as it was for the German organismic political philosophers, such as Bluntschli, and for natural philosophers such as Lotze and Fechner5), the analogical method is the key to the Freudian system, theoretic as well as therapeutic. It is the purpose of this paper to examine critically the basic theoretic construct of Freudianism: the analogy between the individual and the social and between the psychological and the historical.