Finnegans Wake and Political Science Methods

Abstract

How do the methods of political science relate to the substantive problems that we want to study? Much energy has been spent arguing over the issues raised by this question -- on the nature of science, the making of concepts, the meaning of explanation, and more. These are issues that arise across many domains of inquiry, and although their particular manifestation depends on the subject matter of the field and the intellectual orthodoxies that dominate it, there is a common presumption that ‘method’ and ‘problem’ should align in a particular way. In this essay I examine three popular positions on how method and problem should be brought together, but I start in an unusual place: with Michael Chabon’s recent essay on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.