perspective’’ and we ‘‘appreciate... that the roots of the present lie buried deep in
the past, and... that history is past politics and politics is present history’’ (Sait
1938 , 49 ). Because political institutions are ‘‘like coral reefs’’ which have been
‘‘erected without conscious design,’’ and grow by ‘‘slow accretions,’’ the historical
approach is essential (Sait 1938 , 16 ).
Finally, formal-legal analysis is inductive. The great virtue of institutions was
that we could ‘‘turn to theconcretenessof institutions, thefactsof their existence,
the character of theiractionsand theexerciseof their power’’ (Landau 1979 , 181 ;
emphasis in the original). We can draw inferences from repeated observations of
these objects by ‘‘letting the facts speak for themselves’’ (Landau 1979 , 133 ).
In Britain and the USA, formal-legal analysis remains alive and well today in
textbooks, handbooks, and encyclopedias too numerous to cite. Major works are
still written in the idiom. Finer’s ( 1997 ) three-volume history of government
combines a sensitivity to history with a modernist-empiricist belief in comparisons
across time and space, regularities, and neutral evidence. He attempts to explain
how states came to be what they are with a speciWc emphasis on the modern
European nation state. He searches for regularities across time and countries in an
exercise in diachronic comparison. TheHistorysets out to establish the distribu-
tion of the selected forms of government throughout history, and to compare their
general character, strengths, and weaknesses using a standardized typology. It then
provides a history of government from ancient monarchies (about1700 bc)to
1875 ad. As Hayward ( 1999 , 35 ) observes, Finer is either ‘‘the last trump reasserting
an old institutionalism’’ or ‘‘the resounding aYrmation of the potentialities of a
new historical institutionalism within British political science.’’ Given the lack of
any variant of new institutional theory, the result has to be old institutionalism,
and aWne example of an eclectic modernist-empiricism at work.
Formal-legal analysis is a dominant tradition in continental Europe. It was the
dominant tradition in Germany, although challenged after 1945. The challenge is
yet to succeed in, for example, Italy, France, and Spain. Here I can only give aXavor
of the variety that is French political science and establish it as a distinctive
endeavor that runs at times in a diVerent direction to, and at times parallel with,
Anglo-American political science.
There is a strong French tradition of constitutionalism. It is a species of the ‘‘old
institutionalism’’ in that it is descriptive, normative, and legalistic. It focuses on the
formal-legal aspects of institutions, but not on case law. It is another example of
staatswissenschaft. For example, Chevallier ( 1996 , 67 ) argues that ‘‘the growth of the
French liberal state in the nineteenth century led to the predominance of the law
and lawyers emphasizing the guarantee of citizen’s rights and limits on state
power.’’ These jurists monopolized theWeld for nearly a century and it remains a
major inXuence (see for example Chevallier 2002 ). So, despite various challenges,
the 1980 s witnessed ‘‘the resurgence’’ of ‘‘legal dogma’’ with its focus on the state’s
structures and functions (Chevallier 1996 , 73 ).
96 r. a. w. rhodes