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This Element denaturalises political science, stressing the contestability and contingency of ideas, traditions, subfields, and even the discipline itself. The history of political science is less one of scholars testing and improving theories by reference to data than of their appropriating and transforming ideas, often obscuring or obliterating former meanings, to serve new purposes in shifting political contexts. Political science arose in the late nineteenth century as part of a wider modernism that replaced earlier developmental narratives with more formal explanations. It changed as some scholars yoked together behavioural topics, quantitative techniques, and positivist theory, and as other scholars rejected their doing so. Subfields such as International Relations remained semi-detached and focused on policy as much as theory. Furthermore, the shifting fashions within political science - modernism, behaviouralism, realism, neoliberalism, the new institutionalism - have informed the policies by which governments have tried to tame contingency and govern people.

Historicism and the Human Sciences in Victorian Britain explores the rise and nature of historicist thinking about such varied topics as life, race, character, literature, language, economics, empire, and law. The contributors show that the Victorians typically understood life and society as developing historically in a way that made history central to their intellectual inquiries and their public culture. Although their historicist ideas drew on some Enlightenment themes, they drew at least as much on organic ideas and metaphors in ways that lent them a developmental character. This developmental historicism flourished alongside evolutionary motifs and romantic ideas of the self. The human sciences were approached through narratives, and often narratives of reason and progress. Life, individuals, society, government, and literature all unfolded gradually in accord with underlying principles, such as those of rationality, nationhood, and liberty. This book will appeal to those interested in Victorian Britain, historiography, and intellectual history.

"Pluralism is among the most vital intellectual movements of the modern era. Liberal pluralism helped reinforce and promote greater separation of political and religious spheres. Socialist pluralism promoted the political role of trade unions and the rise of corporatism. Empirical pluralism helped legitimate the role of interest groups in democratic government. Today pluralism inspires thinking about key issues such as multiculturalism and network governance. However, despite pluralism's importance, there are no histories of twentieth-century pluralist thinking. Modern pluralism fills this gap. It explores liberal, socialist and empirical ideas about diversity in Britain and the United States. It shows how pluralists challenged homogenous nations and sovereign states, often promoting sub-national groups as potential sites of self-government. Intellectual historians, political theorists and social scientists collectively explore the historical background to present institutions and debates. The book serves to enrich our understanding of the history of pluralism and its continuing relevance"--

"The Making of British Socialism provides a new interpretation of the emergence of British socialism in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating that it was not a working-class movement demanding state action, but a creative campaign of political hope promoting social justice, personal transformation, and radical democracy."--Provided by publisher

This set describes a broad range of approaches that challenge scientism for its lack of sensitivity to meanings, subjectivity and historical context. It brings together a selection of writings that encompass theory and methods as well as policy and practice