ABSTRACT
The collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for Sovietologists and, more broadly, the entire discipline of political science. The big development in the twentieth century in terms of social science is certainly the development of empiricism and logical positivism. There is another analytic level beyond the social scientific, what one might call the historical or the political level, in which social sciences are really a stimulant to action. This vision is strongly influenced by Marxian categories, in contrast to social science as a predictor of events or an explainer of past events. The world of social science gets itself into trouble less from having wrong predictions or even right predictions, but really it isn’t so difficult, than by imagining that a unitary policy flows from a unitary set of narratives or predictions or explanations.
