Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis

Extract

Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis, Paul Pierson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. xii, 196.

Political scientists of the world unite against the decontextual revolution; you have nothing to lose but your n! Okay, there is no such call to arms in Paul Pierson's important new work, but his book is a well-crafted shot across the bow of the dominant strains in political science. As Pierson sees it, too much of political science scholarship rips politics from its historical and institutional context for the sake of generating carefully bounded causal arguments that are often misleading, if not dead wrong, about the sources and effects of political stability and change. Thus, the aim of Politics in Time is to critique and offer an alternative approach to the tendency of analyzing politics by “reducing a moving picture to a snapshot” (104).