The Golden Mean and the Golden Hammer: Phronesis and Method in Contemporary Political Science

Abstract

The Aristotelian concept of phronesis or practical wisdom has played a prominent role in the long and deep wake of the Perestroika controversy in political science, where a diverse group of practitioners rallied in opposition to the perceived hegemony of quantitative methods in the discipline. As scholars like Bent Flyvbjerg have proposed the contours of a post-Perestroikan social science, political scientists and theorists have taken his use of the idea of practical wisdom to herald the dawning of a new social science, less beholden to notions of method. This paper examines the post-Perestroikan appropriation of Aristotle using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s interpretation of phronesis as a starting point. Viewed from this vantage, contemporary uses of phronesis seem less like the foundations for a new social science, and more like a new spin on the old arguments about method that have characterized social science since the mid-1800s.