1.2 The Discipline of a Discipline

…To subject yourself to some discipline is to be guided by a set of rules for doing certain things in an orderly fashion, rules that are shared among all others subject to the same discipline. Those who share the discipline take a critical reflective attitude toward those aspects of their conduct that fall under those standards (Hart 1961), judging their own conduct and that of others according to those standards (Hughes 1958; Caplow and McGee 1961; Parsons 1968; Sciulli 2007).

…Subjecting yourself to the discipline of a discipline is to accept constraints that are enabling in turn. A discipline imposes order. Its shared codes, traditions, standards, and practices give its practitioners something in common. A shared disciplinary framework channels the collective energies of the profession and facilitates collaborative attacks on common problems. It is what enables underlaborers to stand on the shoulders of giants, at the same time as enabling giants to stand on the accumulated product of underlaborers’ efforts in turn. The division of the universe of knowledge into disciplines and sub-disciplines facilitates division of labor among practitioners who inevitably cannot be expert in all things (Abbott 1988). A shared disciplinary framework is what unobtrusively coordinates all our disparate research efforts and enables the discipline’s findings to cumulate, after a fashion, into some larger synthesis….

An academic discipline is also, nowadays, a profession. But what our profession professes is, by and large, just its own professional competence. Professional associations serve to carve out an occupational niche for practitioners….

1.3 Against Either–Or

There are many who think that the discipline of political science has, over the past half-century, taken wrong turns and gone up blind alleys, that too many eggs have been put in far too few methodological baskets. There are many who think that the disciplinary control exercised over the profession by certain sects has been far too tight.That was the complaint of the Caucus for a New Political Science against behavioralism in the 1960s and 1970s (Easton 1969; Anon 2007) and of the Perestroika movement against rational choice in the 2000s (Schram 2003; Monroe 2005; Rudolph 2005).

Here, however, I want to focus on one characteristic feature of these periodic “great debates” within the profession: their Manichean, Good versus Evil form. Nor is it found in only those major episodes that traumatized the profession as a whole. Even as regards the more substantive “great debates” within each of the various sub- disciplines, there is a remarkable penchant for representing the options in “either– or” fashion. Behavioralist or traditionalist, structure or agency, ideas or interests, realist or idealist, rationalist or interpretivist: you simply have to choose, or so we are constantly told.

On all those dimensions, and many others as well, the only proper response is to refuse to choose. Respond, insistently, “Both!” Both sides to the argument clearly have a point, both are clearly on to something. Elements of both need to be blended, in some judicious manner (not just any will do), into a comprehensive overall account.

“Multi-perspectival approaches” are the embodiment of the refusal to succumb to the demands of “either–or.”The fruitfulness of such approaches, and the willingness of members of the profession not merely to tolerate but to embrace them, is evinced across the ten-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. Constructivists co-edit and coauthor with rationalist-realists (Reus-Smit and Snidal, this volume), critical theorists with post-structuralists (Dryzek, Honig, and Phillips, this volume), qualitative methodologists with quantitative (Box-Steffensmeier, Brady, and Collier, this volume); and all of them celebrate the synergies….

For a brief worked example of how such a multi-perspectival approach might work, consider the “new institutionalism.” Distinction-mongers divide that into multiple distinct “new institutionalisms” which they insist are incompatible in their fun- damental epistemological and ontological assumptions: rational-choice, historical, constructivist, network (Rhodes, Binder, and Rockman 2006, chs. 2–5), discursive (Schmidt 2008). But it is not really all that hard to see coherent ways of synthesizing them all.

2 Where We’re At.............................................................................................................................................