ABSTRACT

After a period of neglect, if not hostility, towards ideational explanations, where scholarship on ideas was conducted by a few dedicated researchers on the fringes of the discipline, we are now faced with a burgeoning literature on the role of ideas. Contemporary political analysis – broadly conceived – is awash with talk of ‘ideas’, to the extent that, as Jacobsen (1995: 283) notes, it now seems obligatory for every work to consider the ‘power of ideas’ hypothesis – even if only then to dismiss it. Indeed, even Moravcsik (2001: 185), one of the most materialist students of European integration and political analysis, now concedes that ‘[s]urely few domains are more promising than the study of ideas’. It is this (re)turn to ideational explanations in political analysis that forms the central focus of this book. This turn has taken a variety of different forms and can be understood from different vantage points. But as this already hints, despite the proliferation of ideational accounts in the last decade or so, the debate remains caught up in a series of heated disputes over the ontological foundations, epistemological status and practical pay-off of the turn to ideational explanations. It is thus unsurprising that there is still little clarity about just what sort of an approach an ideational approach is and about what it would take to establish the kind of fully fledged ideational research programme many seem to assume has already been developed.