Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics

Extract

Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics. Edited by Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 432p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The volume is the product of a 2002 conference at Yale hosted by Ian Shapiro and Rogers Smith, in which they challenged the discipline to become more problem focused and less method focused. However, as John Mearsheimer notes in the concluding chapter, the contributors “have barely addressed the issue that [the editors] laid out” (p. 389). The result is a collection that is almost entirely method focused, becoming an inadvertent but stimulating addition to the discipline's methodological/epistemological debate.