Politics and paradigms : changing theories of change in social science / Andrew C. Janos.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Janos, Andrew C.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political sociology--History.

Political sociology.

Political science--History.

Political science.

History.

Social change--History.

Social change.

Physical Description:

ix, 183 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1986.

Summary:

Recent economic and political developments in the Third World and in Communist and advanced industrial societies have challenged some of the most cherished assumptions of social science, forcing social scientists to rethink many of the categories of their discipline.

In a concisely written and provocative book, the author traces this process of rethinking. He does so by going back to the nineteenth-century origins of political sociology and economy, and by exploring more recent attempts by American scholarship to fashion from the writings of Smith, Marx, Spencer, Weber, and Durkheim a new universal theory of modernization and political change. The author argues that these attempts led to a new intellectual crisis, which could be resolved only by a "paradigm shift," that is, by refocusing the discipline from the classical concept of social relations to a new global concept of the division of labor and systems of exchange. Although the study of most Western societies has been facilitated by this expansion of the earlier framework, the politics of the contemporary West raises special questions concerning the deeper roots of adaptive and innovative behavior. Answering these questions may require yet another paradigm capable of inspiring genuine theories of cultural change.

Overall, the volume may be read both as an intellectual history of modern political science, and as an attempt to fashion an analytical tool for empirical research. As such, it will be of interest to students of political philosophy as well as of comparative politics.

Contents:

1 Images of Change: The Classical Paradigm 7

2 Neo-Classicism: Variations on a Theme 31

3 Breakthrough: From the Social to the Global System 65

4 Communism and Revolution 97

5 The Passing of Industrial Society 127.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0804713324

0804713332

OCLC:

13218565