The purpose of this paper is to sketch some of the implications, prospective and retrospective, of the primacy of method in the present study of politics and to do it by way of a contrast, which is deliberately heightened, but hopefully not caricatured, between the vocation of the “methodist”1 and the vocation of the theorist. My discussion will be centered around the kinds of activity involved...

Contingent events are probabilistic. Acknowledging that realized contingencies alter observed political outcomes, however, does little to advance the systematic study of politics. This paper suggests that political science should focus on understanding how foreseeable contingencies, rather than truly “exogenous” unforeseeable events, alter political behavior. The most useful tool for understand...

The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact’ often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society li...

In this issue of PLOS Pathogens, we are introducing a new front matter series to allow individual scientists from the many fields that encompass our community of editors, authors, and readers to comment on why the fundamental research in their labs, and that of their collaborators, matters. The genesis of this idea comes from the apparent gulf between working scientists and the general public t...

Resilience has emerged as a policy response in an era of public concern about disasters and risks that include fear of terrorism and environmental or economic catastrophe. Resilience is both a refreshing and a problematic concept. It is refreshing in that it creates new opportunities for interdisciplinary research and vividly reminds us that the material world matters in our social lives, polit...

In February 2009, the US Congress passed a US$787 billion stimulus package designed to put the country on the road to economic recovery. Thereafter, managing ‘the stimulus story’ became, as Time magazine reported, ‘a full-time White House preoccupation’ (Scherer, 2009: 31). Obama and his team understood that without a concerted effort to communicate the plan, it would almost certainly fail in t...

This article responds to Staricco’s critique of cultural political economy (CPE) for being inherently constructivist because of its emphasis on the ontologically foundational role of semiosis (senseand meaning-making) in social life. Staricco recommends the Amsterdam School of transnational historical materialism as a more immediately productive and insightful approach to developing a regulatio...