Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:05:37.642Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social Science and Systemic Failure

A Discussion of Stefan Hedlund's Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2013

Peter Rutland
Peter Rutland*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure. By Stefan Hedlund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 324p. $95.00, cloth, $35.99 paper.

In recent decades the study of social phenomena has been characterized by the increasing specialization of academic subdisciplines. At the same time, social science has had great difficulty in accounting for instances of systemic failure that challenge the artificial typologies often promoted by specialized scholarship. Increasing theoretical sophistication thus arguably has come at the expense of grasping the particular and unique nature of historical events. In Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science, Stefan Hedlund examines the postcommunist Russian encounter with capitalism and the global financial crisis as examples of unprecedented events that challenged social scientists' assumptions about the causes of human behavior and the functioning of social and political institutions. In this symposium a group of political scientists have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on what systemic failure can tell us about social science theorizing.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Type
Review Symposium: Social Science and Systemic Failure
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 879 - 881
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Acemoğlu, Daron, and Robinson, James A.. 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Åslund, Anders. 1995. How Russia Became a Market Economy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Åslund, Anders. 2003. Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Adam. [1757] 1782. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. London: T. Cadell.Google Scholar
Hedlund, Stefan. 2000. Russia's Market Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hedlund, Stefan. 2005. Russian Path Dependence: A People with a Troubled History. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hellman, Joel. 1998. “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Post-communist Transitions.” World Politics 50 (2): 203–34.Google Scholar
North, Douglas, Wallis, John Joseph, and Weingast, Barry. 2009. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rutland, Peter. 2013. “Neoliberalism and the Russian Transition.” Review of International Political Economy 20 (2): 333–62.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, Joseph. 2002. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar