Polity and Society

This book deconstructs competing paradigms in political science and sociology in order to demonstrate metaphysical, methodological, and normative assumptions that underpin the paradigms themselves. Haas covers alternative paradigms in seven fields of middle-range theory--development, community power, presidential voting, ethnic voting, civil strife, international violence, and international community--in both political science and sociology. Haas concludes that competing theorists...
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This book deconstructs competing paradigms in political science and sociology in order to demonstrate metaphysical, methodological, and normative assumptions that underpin the paradigms themselves. Haas covers alternative paradigms in seven fields of middle-range theory--development, community power, presidential voting, ethnic voting, civil strife, international violence, and international community--in both political science and sociology. Haas concludes that competing theorists argue ideologically when they should be discussing their differences in terms of underlying philosophical assumptions. Many disputes between theorists are naive from a philosophical point of view.

This unique contribution to social science theory attempts to clarify the issues in the fields of political science and sociology. Haas demonstrates some of the confusions: Some debates are between scholars who are unaware that they agree on paradigms; many scholars are not even testing their own paradigms because they have not examined the basic philosophical assumptions of their theories. Many paradigmatic debates fail to focus on issues of normative importance and thus have little relevance to policy; methodological differences should lead to multimethodological research designs rather than monomethodological disputation. This important study will be of value to practitioners and students in the fields of political science and sociology.