ABSTRACT
Explanation is spoken of as the “chief objective” of science, the “principal preoccupation” of rational man, the goal of all cognitive enterprise. The fact is that the term “explanation” is a word in common use and shares in the vagueness and ambiguity of ordinary language. Roger Brown has provided a convenient inventory of explanation types which permits the classification of explanations tendered and entertained by social scientists in general, and political scientists in particular. Genetic explanations are common strategies in political science. Historical accounts, like that of Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, for example, are replete with genetic accounts. Political inquiry shares, along with the related social and natural sciences, a number of common strategies and produces a variety of common explanatory linguistic artifacts. The objections such persons raise generally invoke references to genetic and “reason analysis” explanations as methodologically distinct social science products.
