ABSTRACT
Since the early decades of the twentieth century, emerging positivistic trends within the human and social sciences endeavoured to be ‘scientific’ in broadly the same sense that the term is applied to physics, chemistry, and biology. The objective was to uncover laws or regularities that govern social and political life. Positivism denoted great optimism about the unity of scientific method and faith in the power of formal logic both to permit the definition of abstractions and to describe the structures of permissible inferences. Interpretive theories rejected positivist directions toward crafting a ‘science of politics’, according to which human actions would have to be fixed in their meanings under law-like operations. Interpretivists argue that there is an ineluctable role of interpretation that makes impossible a science of politics, strictly speaking.
