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Continental Perspectives and the Study of Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2020
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Anyone attending a political science conference these days is likely to be overwhelmed by the extreme heterogeneity of viewpoints and approaches, a heterogeneity sometimes resembling a hopeless Babel of tongues. For decades there had been talk of paradigm changes and of the erosion of “mainstream” assumptions in the discipline; more recently, this ferment has been heightened by the influx of novel perspectives whose vocabulary and intellectual style bear a distinctly continental cast. Professional reaction to these perspectives has been varied: greeted by some as instant remedies they are bemoaned by others as alien intruders threatening an already fragile consensus. I perceive them as idioms in an ongoing conversation whose lines of argument are not merely whimsical and deserve the attention of political science teachers.
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References
Notes
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