ABSTRACT
In North American political science, the movements and recent debates grouped around the term ‘Perestroika’ have included a renewed interest in interpretation and the linguistic turn of the late 1960s and 1970s. After earlier interventions reached their apogee in the 1970s, an interpretive political science developed across the subfields and even flourished in comparative politics, accounts of American political development, and in critical policy studies. Members of the subfield of political theory, however, were the harbingers and initial defenders of that interpretive approach. Among this cohort, William Connolly and Charles Taylor, Richard Flathman, Hanna Pitkin and Alistair MacIntyre were influenced by – and themselves developed – cross-pollinations between Continental and Anglo-Analytic philosophies of inquiry. These theorists insisted upon the mutual constitution of fact and value and, relatedly, of language, thought and world. Thus, interpretation, as the linguistic turn theorists presented it, supported a perspective on the study of politics that was attentive to the epistemic complications of language and critical of the goal of value-neutrality. The recent renewal of interest in interpretation, as found within the ‘Per-
estroika’ movement, has for the most part merely been a return: a reprise and re-application of the earlier arguments against behavioral approaches to the study of politics. Stephen White has lamented the inferiority of these current debates and initiatives in political science when contrasted with the field’s selfquestioning in the 1970s, a disciplinary critique ‘characterized by a rich discussion’ about what the study of politics could be and should do (White, 2002: 179).1 The takers of the linguistic turn have been congratulated, rightly, for insisting that evaluation is constitutive of the ‘what’ that is politics. Debate over what a more engaged practice of political theory might be has been advanced by theorists working on new approaches to relationships between abstraction and concrete analysis.2 But the linguistic turn itself has been neglected as an object of theoretical solicitude. What interpretive limitations, or even traps, were produced in that initial encounter between political theory and behavioral inquiry? And how do the effects of these limitations persist?
