ABSTRACT
Since one of the co-authors of this concluding comment announced the “ideational turn” over a dozen years ago (Blyth 1997), the study of ideas and discourse has grown immeasurably. We can now identify numbers of different approaches that “take ideas seriously,” many of which, taken together, can be seen to constitute a fourth “new institutionalism,” beyond rational choice and historical and sociological institutionalism, which the other co-author has termed “discursive institutionalism” (Schmidt 2002, 2008). And yet, the fact that all of the contributions in the book spend a good deal of their time critiquing rationalist approaches in one way or another indicates that one overarching problem remains for scholars who take ideas seriously: the fact that much of mainstream political science still does not. This book offers some compelling reasons why it should.
