Abstract My approach to the study of politics has been shaped by considerations of time and space, in contrast to the successive behavioural and rational choice approaches that have dominated political science during my career. Situated at the ‘humanities end’ of the social sciences, I have never believed that the of study politics can resemble Newtonian physics but it must nevertheless be rigorous. The study of social science should be problem- rather than methodology-driven and should be relevant. Normative questions are a valid matter for academic study, including real-world and not just hypothetical cases. There is no necessary linear progression in social science but there is necessarily cross-disciplinary fertilization, contestation and revision.
Michael Keating (Thu,) studied this question.