Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis,
Paul Pierson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. xii,
196.Political scientists of the world unite against the decontextual
revolution; you have nothing to lose but your n! Okay, there is
no such call to arms in Paul Pierson's important new work, but his
book is a well-crafted shot across the bow of the dominant strains in
political science. As Pierson sees it, too much of political science
scholarship rips politics from its historical and institutional context
for the sake of generating carefully bounded causal arguments that are
often misleading, if not dead wrong, about the sources and effects of
political stability and change. Thus, the aim of Politics in Time
is to critique and offer an alternative approach to the tendency of
analyzing politics by “reducing a moving picture to a
snapshot” (104).
