The Return to the State

Three important questions are raised by the “return to the state” movement of recent years. First, are the pluralist, structural functionalist, and Marxist literatures of political science societally reductionist, as this movement contends? Second, does the neostatist paradigm remedy these defects and provide a superior analytical model? Third, regardless of the substantive merits of these arguments, are there heuristic benefits flowing from this critique of the literature? Examination of the evidence leads to a rejection of the first two criticisms. The answer to the third question is more complex. There is merit to the argument that administrative and institutional history has been neglected in the political science of the last decades. This is hardly a “paradigmatic shift”; and it has been purchased at the exorbitant price of encouraging a generation of graduate students to reject their professional history and to engage in vague conceptualization.