ABSTRACT
Positivism and empiricism dominate the methodological horizon of the European social sciences. No Western student of Asian politics has freed himself from fundamental dependence on one or both of these two scientific approaches. Positivism and empiricism determine, to an astonishing and often unexamined degree, what we see when we observe the workings of a non-Western society. These two methods form our most consequential pieces of philosophic baggage. They legitimate our enterprise. Sometimes they confound it.
