Method and Methodology in Political Theory

Until fairly recently, political theorists generally avoided explicit discussion of ‘methods’ or ‘methodology’ (by contrast with empirical political science, (in)famously riven by methodological debate). Over the last decade and a half, however, there has been a marked increase of scholarly interest in the subject. But what are scholars talking about when they speak of ‘method’ or ‘methodology’ in the context of political theory? This is not at all obvious, in part because few if any protagonists in these debates provide any precise definitions of ‘method’ or ‘methodology’. In consequence, these debates tend to conflate distinct issues surrounding research aims, techniques, epistemologies and ontologies, and exaggerate the extent to which contrasts between theorists on these issues reflect necessary disputes as opposed to mere differences of contribution. This retreads a fraught path of methodological conflict already walked in political science, which we think political theory would best avoid. In this paper, our aims are twofold. First, we define and clarify the terms and distinctions involved in such debates – distinguishing method from methodology (frequently conflated) as well as from similarly underspecified terms such as ‘technique’ and ‘approach’. Second, we identify what is at stake in these distinctions – why they matter, and to what end they take us. In doing so, we hope to pave the way for a more clear-headed debate in the discipline, identifying the major theoretical and practical questions that underlie our present disagreements, and parsing those that instantiate substantive philosophical disputes, from those that merely reflect different (but mutually compatible) epistemic goals. We conclude by sketching a progressive strategy of future debate which eschews the construction of competing ‘paradigms’ of political theory research – common in empirical political science – and instead furnishes a diverse methodological toolkit, with different tools understood as contributing to normative, theoretical and empirical knowledge in different ways.