28 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
❖❖❖Etymologically, the term “methodology” arises from the conjunction of three Greek concepts:
meta, hodos, and logos. When used as a prefix in archaic Greek, meta typically implied “sharing,”
“action in common,” or “pursuit or quest.” Hodos was usually translated as “way” but when
combined with logos, which was variously translated as “account,” “explanation,” “truth,” “theory,”
“reason,” or “word,” hodos suggests a very particular way to truth that lies at the deepest level of
being (Wolin 1981). Bringing the three Greek terms together opens possibilities for a variety of
interpretations of methodology: “a shared quest for the way to truth,” “the action thought takes en
route to being,” “a shared account of truth,” or “the way a group legitimates knowledge claims.”
The Greek roots of the term are particularly helpful in highlighting certain facets of methodology.
Methodologies are specific to particular communities of scholars and as such political. The ap-
propriate methodology for any particular inquiry is a matter of contestation, as scholars often
disagree about the “way to truth.” Strategies that are accredited as legitimate means to acquire
truth gain their force from decisions of particular humans working within particular academic
communities; thus there is a power element in the accreditation of knowledge. Power is never the
only factor involved, but neither is it a negligible factor.
Over the course of the twentieth century, specific methodologies have been hailed as the hall-
mark of particular communities of scholars. As academic disciplines broke off from their pro-
genitors and declared their autonomy, methodology often became the terrain upon which battles
were fought. Methodology as a coherent set of ideas about epistemology, strategies of inquiry,
and standards of evidence appropriate to a research process or the production of knowledge came
to define distinctive disciplines. Disciplines with shared allegiance to particular fields of investi-
gation, epistemological assumptions, and methods of inquiry formed coalitions under broad ru-
brics such as the natural sciences, the life sciences, the social sciences, the behavioral sciences,
and the humanities.
Although scholars within and across disciplines continue to disagree about the appropriate
means to produce knowledge, much of the conceptual richness revealed by etymology is masked
by standard texts designed to teach the methodology accredited within political science. Given
the established power hierarchy within the discipline in the aftermath of the behavioral revolu-
tion, “the way” to knowledge has often been presented as if it were uncomplicated, value neutral,
and uncontestable.
Logical positivism, a theoretical account of the nature of science advanced by philosophers
associated with the Vienna Circle in the early-twentieth century, masked the specificity and the
power dimensions of methodology by invoking the unity of science. Indeed, the epistemologi-
cal assumptions that inform positivism have provided the justification for construing the “sci-
entific” production of political knowledge as immune from politics, values, and subjective
bias. Positivist assumptions promised not only an escape from subjectivity and bias, but also to
provide analytic techniques that could generate “laws of politics” or at least law-like generali-
zations that would enable political scientists to explain the existing political world and predict
future political developments.
Although the epistemological presuppositions of positivism have been under attack for more
than forty years, the political developments of the last decade of the twentieth century have pre-
sented a very different kind of challenge to positivist hegemony within political science. None of
the major political events of the past decade were predicted or adequately explained by the domi-
nant paradigms developed within political science. Whether one considers the end of the cold war
and the collapse of the Soviet system; democratization and globalization; political integration