Howard Burton - How Social Science Creates the World - A Conversation with Mark Bevir

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the worlds leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldnt otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright 2014, 2020 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-030-6

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. Creating a Political Philosopher

II. The Power of Philosophy

III. What is Political Science, Anyway?

IV. Knowing Ones Limits

V. Missing The Boat

VI. Networks

VII. Analyzing Governance

VIII. The Mechanisms of Influence

IX. From Theory To Practice

X. Doing Things Better

XI. Starting Over

XII. Going Global

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Mark Bevir in Berkeley, California, on September 9, 2014.

Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies at UC Berkeley.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

One of a Kind

There are many disadvantages to being a physicist. The pay is not very good. Breakthroughs are rare. And your colleagues inevitably tend towards the monomaniacal and hyper-competitive. But one unquestionable upside to the whole gig is the opportunity to publicly announce that your professional responsibilities involve discovering the timeless, all-encompassing laws of the universe.

It is not surprising, then, that physicists tend to overhype that side of things, regularly inventing and casually dropping into conversation such overwrought phrases as penetrating the mind of God or unravelling the secrets of the universe to triumphantly describe their day jobs.

And its perhaps equally unsurprising that many non-physicists are led, consciously or unconsciously, to mimic such self-satisfied sentiments, maintaining that they, too, are equally embroiled in a noble quest to bring order to the seeming chaos of their research domains by uncovering the immutable principles and laws that govern their worlds.

So it is that, for well over a century now, there have been untold numbers of anthropologists, political scientists and sociologists who have developed a wide assortment of theories of aggregate human behaviour predicated on the notion of natural social kinds governed by inflexible social science laws that they have claimed to have discovered, or at least refined.

Mark Bevir, though, will have none of it.

Bevir, professor of political science at UC Berkeley and an internationally acclaimed expert in the theory of governance, believes that any attempt to shoehorn political science into a natural science framework is bound to fail.

The type of explanations we want in the social sciences are different. In the natural sciences, when youre engaging with the natural world youre looking at objects which dont have intentionality; whereas when youre looking at human actors, youre looking at objectspeoplethat clearly do have intentionality, and that we therefore assume are capable of acting for reasons of their own, whether those reasons are conscious, subconscious, or unconscious.

If we make plans with friends, we assume they will act on reasons. If we think about our own selves and were making plans for the future, we assume that we are capable of having reasons. We live our lives and we engage with others as though intentionality is the thing to which we must refer to explain actions.

I think social scientists should therefore explicitly take that into account. And if you do thatif you treat the reasons people have for acting as the causes of their actionthen the type of explanation youre going to offer is very different, because you have to appeal to peoples reasons; and the best way to understand their reasons is to understand the location of those reasons in the wider web of their beliefs and their desires.

That kind of explanation, where youre effectively contextualizingyoure making an action intelligible by locating it in the context of a web of beliefs and desiresis very, very different from what we loosely might describe as the search for invariant laws that occurs in the natural sciences.

Political science, according to Bevir, is therefore an interpretive art rather than a science like physics or chemistry is.

Well, fine, you might think. But so what? You can call it whatever you want, but the key question remains: does it work? Does political science actually deliver the goods? Does it help us better understand key concepts such as governance, thus moving us down the path towards building more productive, more equitable, societies?

Theres the rub. Because Mark believes that correctly appreciating what social science is and does has a direct bearing on our everyday social lives.

In other words, if we adopt the false belief that the social world is composed of some unchanging, fundamental entities on par with atoms or moleculesbe they markets or classes or what have youthen we will have no means of recognizing, or even describing, what happens when circumstances change and a new social dynamic is created.

That doesnt happen in physics, of course. Once you know the laws, theres only so much that can possibly happen. And if you discover something else, then you have to go back and revise or extend your laws.

But in a world where possibilities are not governed by pre-set laws, where contingency, traditions and social history rule, its a very different story. And properly appreciating this veritably infinite spectrum of human cultures and societies in which notions such as networks and hierarchies might become embedded lies at the core of the astute political scientists interpretive art.

Put another way: this is not simply about how to be a proper political scientist, sitting in ones ivory tower better analyzing and appreciating evolving human circumstances. Because, essentially, the practice of political science itselfin academe, think tanks, or within government departmentsin turn directly influences social policy.

Were too inclined to think of social science as something thats trying to describe and explain the world as it is. Often, a better way of thinking about social science is as something that creates the world.

I think most social scientists find the idea that social science creates the world very surprising. But if you stop and think for a minute, its blindingly obvious; because every time an idea from the social sciences finds its way into the policymaking world and policymakers act on itwhether its Keynesian ideas about economics, or monetarist ideas about the money supply, or network ideas about network governancewhichever it is, once the idea makes its way from the social scientific community into the policymaking world and then inspires a policy, it becomes real.

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