If we encounter a difficult book and can't read it, we have nothing more than two kinds of thinking: one is to reflect on whether we have enough knowledge accumulation and comprehension to read it, that is, the problem of "whether it is qualified enough"; the other is to ask the writing style and ability of the book, that is, the question of "good or bad".
In the era of subject specialization, the process of a person practicing professional writing is also the process of moving away from the language of life. Specialized terminology within a subject area (even terms for different research directions in the same discipline) and complex clauses make professional writing "unpretentious" and "unpopular". Over time, when a person has developed the skill of professional writing, making people "painful to read", they may be considered to have mastered the expertise of a certain discipline.
It is not that "straightforward" and "popular" are necessarily a good kind of writing, and in the field of humanities and social sciences, this often becomes a pretext for academic populism. Nor does it mean that a study that is "painful to read" is necessarily not a good study. The problem is that some difficult texts are not due to how complicated thinking is done, but entirely because of the misuse of grammar, the abuse of concepts, the misplacing of subordinate sentences, let alone the substance. When readers question, they can always use "this is scientifically researched" as an excuse to block the reader's questioning.
James P. James C. Scott, political anthropologist, professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University, 2020 Albert Scott O. Hirschmann Prize winner.
Bringing the political anthropologist James W. Bush to the Table of Duty C. Scott may be the most appropriate example to think about academic writing.
Domestic readers should not be unfamiliar with the name Scott. His books such as "The Moral Economics of the Peasants", "The Weapon of the Weak", "The Perspective of the State", "The Art of Domination and Resistance", and "Six Treatises on Spontaneity" have all been translated into Chinese, and some have even become academic bestsellers. His writing often enters from "stories" and is good at quoting literary classics. However, he is not doing general writing, this is his academic research and writing style. It may be hard to imagine that although some academic journals regularly send him sample journals, he "disdains" to translate. Amazingly, not only did he not miss the cutting-edge research of his peers, he himself was often considered to be at the forefront and in 2020 became the head of the Albert Schwarzkopf. O. Hirschmann Prize winner. The jury considered him, like Hirschmann, to be a scholar of extraordinary breadth.
He obviously doesn't agree that "if it doesn't hurt to read, it can't be a good social science," but he also doesn't think that "painful to read" research is bad. One of the essential problems he saw was the over-specialization of disciplinary research—though he was referring to political science, especially comparative political studies. More than a decade ago, he spoke to his peers about his concerns and "rebellion" in Passion, Craftsmanship and Methods: An Interview with Comparative Politics. The book interviews fifteen figures from the "Golden Age" of comparative politics, including Huntington, who studied the clash of civilizations and order, in addition to Scott, and Scochepo, who brought the concept of "state" back to social science research.
The following excerpts, authorized by Yali Translation Series, are excerpted from chapter 11 of the new book Passion, Skill, and Methods: Interviews with Comparative Politics, and the excerpts are Scott's discussions on academic writing and the "over-specialization" of the discipline, with deletions and adjustments in the order of the content. For comments, see the original book.
Original interview | Richard Snyder
Excerpts | Rodong
Passion, Skill, and Method: An Interview with Comparative Politics, by Herardo M. L. Munk, Richard Snyder et al., translated by Wang Weihua, Contemporary World Press, Yali Translation Series, January 2022. (Click on the book cover to purchase)
01
Start with the "story"
Q: One of the hallmarks of your work is the frequent citation of literary works. For example, The Weapon of the Weak, The Art of Domination and Rebellion, has many references to balzac and George Eliot's novels. As a social scientist, how did your exposure to fiction influence your research?
A: That's a question. As Dierdre McCloskey shows in his book on rhetoric in economics, powerful stories are a very important part of how people argue in the social sciences. There are different ways to convince others. In the social sciences, there is a tendency to present results as if the study were a true scientific experiment: here is the hypothesis, there is the relevant data, and so on. But such statements usually do not at all encapsulate the actual mental processes that the work actually produces.
One of the ways I try to convince people in my book presentation is to start with a story. I don't always do this, but Weapon of the Weak, The Art of Domination and Rebellion, and National Perspective all start with a story. In Weapons of the Weak, the story is about the rich Haji and the poor. The idea is to somehow bring the reader into the village by presenting real people walking around, by capturing some of the main topics in the book. If the book had started with the second chapter, the theoretical chapter, much fewer people would have read it. At the beginning of The Art of Domination and Rebellion there are several stories, including some things by George Eliot. The book has a laid-back first chapter. The Perspective of the Nation begins with a synopsis of scientific forestry in Saxony and Prussia in the late 18th century. This synopsis is a condensed story of how the state re-engineered the natural world according to an abstract system, and I use it repeatedly in the book because I understand the story in different contexts.
Each story tries to capture the book's arguments in a concrete way. In Weapons of the Weak, this is a personal story, while in A National Perspective it is a synopsis that captures the whole argument. You could say, I gave the reader a little bit of sweetness at the beginning, and they opened the book and said, "Well, it's a lot of fun to read." This technique may come at the expense of seriousness, but I don't think I'll do that.
A National Perspective: How Projects Trying to Improve the Human Condition Fail, [U.S.] James W. Bush C. Scott, translated by Xiaoyi Wang, Social Sciences Academic Press, May 2019.
Q: You wouldn't accept the idea that if it doesn't hurt to read, it can't be a good social science.
A: No, I don't accept that view. That doesn't mean, though, that there can't be good social science research that reads "really" painful. For example, some of Pierre Bourdieu's writings are annoying to read, but you can learn a lot from them. But is this necessary? As much as I admire Bourdieu's writings, I still ask myself, "Did he have to make it so hard?" Couldn't he have said it another way? ”
Q: An extension of this discussion is that political scientists should read more novels.
A: I will not hold a pistol to people's temples and force them to read good literature. They either want to or they don't want to, and reading literature shouldn't be treated like taking vitamins. But I believe that the observations of Tolstoy, Gogol, or George Eliot have many political insights that can be expressed in the terminology of the political science. As advocates of healthy eating say, "What you eat, you are what you are," what you read, who you talk to, what kind of intellectual you are. If you just read political science books and only talk to political scientists, it's like eating only one type of food. If that's all you do, then you won't produce anything new or original. You're just copying the mainstream. If you're going to do political science right, at least a third of what you're reading shouldn't be political science but something else.
Stills from the movie "A Beautiful Mind" (2001).
02
Grammar of writing
Q: You are a notoriously good writer. What is your approach to writing?
A: It took me a long, long time to start writing, because I didn't start writing until I had a detailed outline. I wrote down many good ideas on a large thick piece of paper that the butcher used to wrap the meat.
For example, if I were doing research on the relationship between mountains and valleys, the most important historical fissure in Southeast Asia, I would do a small taxonomy of the valley's stereotypes of mountains. Then I went through all my notes and found all the valley ideas about the mountains. I take notes on everything I look at, so I always have a bunch of electronic and paper notes. And, whenever I have an idea, I write it down and archive it. The whole process produces a series of intermediate ideas about certain big ideas. To write National Perspective, I came up with about 150 ideas, most of which were thrown on the floor of the editing room. Finally, I had a large sheet of butcher's paper, and then I connected all the ideas with a big highlighter. Sometimes before I start writing, I write a brand new outline based on it.
I know a lot of people who are able to write even when they're still in a semi-confused state about what they're writing. Sometimes a lot of problems disappear or resolve themselves during the writing process. This is a skill that I hope I can cultivate more.
I write very slowly. If I write three pages a day, I'm going to want to set off fireworks to celebrate because it's a special day. Usually, when I'm writing with a lot of emotion, I only write one page a day.
"The Weapon of the Weak", [Us] James M. By C. Scott, translated by Zheng Guanghuai et al., Yilin Publishing House, April 2011.
Q: Your first draft must be very beautiful and beautiful.
A: Yes. I wrote by hand, with the eraser of Staedtler. Write a draft at least twice of each sentence, because I don't like to revise it later. I made a great effort to make it what I liked at first sight, and that included finding an appropriate way to tell and express it.
In fact, I don't consider myself a particularly good writer, but I had great teachers at grammar school who told me to start each sentence with a different verbal sketch. If you start with a subject, the next one starts with a verb noun, the next one starts with a clause, and so on. The teacher taught me to change the sentence structure and write short sentences. Here I would like to mention George Orwell's article Politics and English. This is one of the best little books you can read about how to write an essay clearly. Orwell wrote this article in the 1940s, and there are some extremely bad examples of social science writing, although some of them now seem pretty good to us.
Scott in the speech.
Q: Many cumbersome social science terms were not even invented in the 1940s.
A: That's right. One of the things I did for my graduate students was that if they wrote badly, I would take two pages from their assignment and rewrite everything. By the time I'm done, those two pages may turn into a quarter of a page. There is a standard way of writing in the social sciences, procrastinating, oblivious, and we usually don't think much about it. But if McCloskey is right – in a way, everything is a story, and if you've worked tirelessly to finally come up with an idea, then why not present the idea in the most powerful and convincing way possible?
Q: Regarding the form of your work, you seem to prefer to write books rather than articles.
A: I generally don't write articles anymore. If I do, it means I'm writing a book on the subject. If someone asks me to write a paper for a conference or a collection of essays, I'll tell them what I'm doing, and if there's something right for that conference, fine. But my contribution must be directly related to what I am doing. Some scholars live under the hostage of the interests of others, accepting tasks from others, who ask them to write something. As a result, they may learn something they never thought they would learn. In contrast, I have a trail that I have planned myself, and if the work I'm doing is consistent with the one that other people are interested in, that's fine, and I feel flattered. But if not, it's terrible because that's where I'm going.
Q: You rarely collaborate with people on articles or books. Why is that?
A: I think I'm a failure that I didn't write more with other people. I'm a "control freak" when it comes to how an argument is to be argued and presented, but, frankly, it's easier for me to cooperate when my collaborators listen to me. In the Agricultural Studies program, I learned a lot through mutual knowledge, but when it comes to real writing, I am a bit withdrawn. I sometimes think that this helps to form a more condensed, single author voice, but in fact, it is due to temperament.
03
Between art and science
Q: You played a prominent role in the Perestroika movement, and you have been strongly critical of certain trends in political science, such as the increasing emphasis on the rigor of methods and the proliferation of rational choice theories. Are you against rigor?
A: What is considered rigorous? In political science, rigor is almost defined as narrow methodological rigor, and while you can't criticize technical problems, so-called rigor usually doesn't make you any progress, because those techniques are just used to answer trivial questions.
For example, my colleague at Yale, Don Green, respected him because he was one of the smartest people I knew, and he thought political scientists should experiment. He and Alan Gerber conducted an experiment in which two groups of voters were randomly selected, one of which was visited by their neighbors before the election and asked them to vote, while the other group simply wrote to them to vote. Well, they can show that having someone visit voters and ask them to vote can lead to higher turnout than just sending a letter saying they should go to the polls. It's a hard discovery, a real scientific discovery, and experimental design is probably the best you can get. However, I don't think their findings matter at all. This is not an earth-shattering result. Don Green's answer is that even if the results aren't earth-shattering, at least it's reliable. His premise is that if you get enough bricks, you will eventually build a building. I think then you just get a bunch of bricks.
More generally, the conundrum of methodological reductionism is that if someone points out a logical flaw in some step of reasoning and deduction, it looks like an achievement. So-called contributions are beginning to be defined as minor improvements to the tools, and I think that's clearly not what we did in the business. Behind this is the bigger question of whether we are engaged in a real science, and behind this is another question, whether real science will really work according to the model proposed by Popper and Hemper and others.
Q: If political scientists shouldn't aspire to experiment like natural scientists, what should we pursue?
A: It's a big question, and I'm not sure if I have an answer. I don't want to say we're artists, so let's entertain ourselves.
In the classics of syllogism and logic, we can find some basic rules of reasoning that need to be used, not violated. So, I don't think the methodology is a waste of time. Political scientists, however, have to live in the underlying world between art and the natural sciences.
On the one hand, it is an exaggerated and distorted image of natural science, and on the other hand, when we talk about natural science, we will have a bit of a "penis jealousy" complex. We can't really be like the natural sciences, because we study the behavior of human subjects, and these behaviors are influenced by self-reflection. Once you tell people that you've spotted their pattern of behavior, they can change it at will and pee in the soup.
In the case of public opinion research, when I was a graduate student in the 1960s, public opinion research was in its heyday. My longtime colleague in Wisconsin, Murray Edelman, likes to point out that through a questionnaire, you may find that people prefer X or Y, or they think the Supreme Court did a good job. But these are not stable opinions, and if things are slightly different next week, they will change. Moreover, in simple terms, there is no objective political and social reality "out there". This is an important point of semiotics. Goertz makes this point in his article on the interpretation of blinking and twitching. John Dunn also has a great article about how you can never give a satisfactory explanation of people's behavior without providing a phenomenological description of how people themselves think about what they're doing.
Q: Despite the skepticism about the scientific ambitions of political science, do you think the field has accomplished anything in generating knowledge?
A: You're asking me to think about this discipline and its role in the world, but the truth is that I haven't considered this discipline for some time, in part because I think it can only teach me so much. I'm embarrassed to say how long I haven't read anything in the Political Science Review of America – at least 8 years. I still get the publication because if you're a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA), it's automatically sent. Every time I go to an APSA annual meeting, every 4 to 5 years at most, I renew my membership, but then let it expire. I took the American Political Science Review out of my mailbox and threw it in the trash.
But if I act like a responsible adult, I ask myself, "What tangible things have I learned or learned as a political scientist and as a political scientist?" "I will point to Weberian insights about rationality, as well as unprocessed Marxist views on material gain.
I did learn something from semiotics. For example, a few years ago I had an epiphany while driving, and I caught a glimpse of a sticker on the bumper that read, "America, love it or leave." I thought to myself, "Only when I've read those semiotics did I realize that this bumper sticker that says 'America, love it or leave' is actually a reply to another bumper sticker that wasn't posted, 'America, I hate it, I'm leaving.'" This is a statement against the assertion of passive absence. ”
Similarly, if you talk to people from Allentown, Pennsylvania, or Wilkes-Barre, and tell them what a terrible town they come from, they're going to get angry. My wife is from Pittsburgh and she is like that too. The worse the place, the more it needs to be defended. Semiotics tells me that every discourse is actually in dialogue with a different way of seeing the world.
Six Treatises on Spontaneity: Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, by James C. Scott, translated by Ziqi Yuan, Social Sciences Academic Press, April 2019.
Q: You think that contemporary political science places too much emphasis on methodological rigor, leading to a lot of research focusing on trivial issues. So what kind of questions should we ask in our own research?
A: If you look at a whole bunch of PhD dissertations, they can be divided into two categories: one that deals with a powerful and interesting problem, and the other that doesn't. Most papers fall into the latter category because the questions they ask are so boring that they are not worth asking at all in the first place. There are a lot of papers asking questions that I don't even bother to know the answers to. I'd rather see a failed effort to solve an important problem than a successful effort to solve a trivial problem.
Lindblom said it well. According to Lindblom, several brothers in Chicago had tried to fly a plane before the Wright brothers. They failed, and their plane fell into the Chicago River. Lindblom's view was that without this lofty defeat, the Wright brothers would not have been able to achieve their achievements. So, if we take a book like Ben Anderson's Imagined Community, it begins with the question: "Why is there a tomb of the nameless in France and a tomb of the nameless in The United States, but not a grave of the nameless bourgeoisie, the nameless proletariat?" Why do some collective attributes inspire strong emotions and actions, while others can't? "It's a wonderful question. Imaginary Community is a crazy book, but no one would think of it as nothing more than a book that talks about outdated interests.
Scott in his speech.
04
The problem of over-specialization
Q: Aside from the questions that political scientists have to solve, what else is bothering you about this discipline?
A: There is a problem of over-specialization in political science, and I mean, there are more and more small circles of increasingly specialized research that are attractive to fewer and fewer people.
According to my colleague Douglas Ray, someone actually did a study of the average number of readers of a social science journal article, and the result was less than 3 people. Let's imagine that this may be due to only one of the three factors considered, and the average number of readers is actually 9 people.
It still means that the whole business of peer-reviewed journals has no impact on the outside world, just a Rube Goldberg machine designed for tenure, as exemplified by Bruce Lasseter's Journal of Conflict Resolution. Nobody reads those things. It forms a small circle of its own, and the contributors comfort each other. But publishing articles in reference journals still controls tenure, even if only a few of those articles are cited.
I have a critique of the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) on this route. By its standards, I did a good job, so it's not that I can't eat grapes and say grapes are sour. First, self-referentials are also counted. Second, some young professors agreed to refer to each other to improve their chances of earning tenure. Third, critical citations are also counted, and quotes that say this is a piece of and don't deserve it being printed on this piece of paper will still count you in a citation. Fourth, it gives privilege to those who publish articles rather than books. Finally, it gives people who write in English privileged. The Social Science Citation Index is an Anglo-American way of doing things that gives privileges to those who devote themselves to mainstream research in Anglo-American political science.
The Moral Economics of the Peasants, [U.S.] Written by C. Scott, translated by Cheng Lixian et al., Yilin Publishing House, March 2013.
Q: How do you suggest solving the problem of over-specialization?
A: I want to see a requirement that in order to get a new position in political science, you have to prove to other disciplines that this person is important to them as well. That would be exhilarating. What if you had to get someone in another department to say that your work interested them in order to get a tenured teaching position in political science? What if you had to have people from two adjacent disciplines read your material and say, "This looks good," before getting a tenured faculty position? If everyone who receives tenured faculty must be appointed double-employed in both disciplines, what price will each department pay for it? In other words, the second department can't just say, "Yes, Snyder is good for us, we're not against co-hiring," they have to really pay Snyder for part of his time, which costs them real money. I don't have any ideas about how this works institutionally, but I'm groping for a way to constantly get information and judgment from the outside, a way for people to look beyond the shoulders of the discipline. The most basic question is, how do you institutionalize a set of procedures to resist overprofession?
I would like to make the following points to my colleagues.
Given the impermanence of life and the disciplinary constraints of political science, neither you nor I, nor anyone else, are sure where political science is going. No one knows what valuable, glorious research work will be in 5 or 10 years. A sensible and rational system, not knowing what the future will bring, will therefore place a series of bets in many different areas, because light will seep through many windows. Now, for a small department with only a few positions, it may make sense to gamble desperately, just as the University of Rochester succeeded in betting on rational choice theory. But if you make decisions with rolling dice every time, you're either winning or losing. Yale doesn't need to do that. We are large enough to make and should make a lot of wise bets.
My further point is that people who engage in rational choice, if they are surrounded by people who engage in rational choice, will only become more and more stupid, because they will only respond in unison and seek the same breath. Their approach has never been challenged. If you want intelligent rational choice scholars, you have to expose them to challenging, Darwinian natural selection environments that force them to defend themselves on a daily basis. The best rational choice studies will be produced in such a department, where scholars who make rational choices must demonstrate why their work is valuable. Of course, the same is true for those who do not make rational choices. In fact, the last thing I want is a political science department that is just me and people like me.
Stills from the movie The Genius Catcher (2016).
Q: Continuing with your Darwinian metaphor, should we strive for the infinite diversity of species? Should we blossom? Or, how far can intellectual diversity flourish under the roof of a discipline? Will there be limits?
A: Ian Shapiro, chair of the Department of Political Science at Yale University, launched an inspiring program to redesign Yale's hiring efforts by focusing on six or seven long-lasting themes in political science. These topics include distribution, institutional design, and more. I agree with Ian's approach of "telling us something interesting about these topics." We don't care if you're studying Kant and Hegel or doing rational choice research about race relations in the Cincinnati police department. We don't care what tricks you use. It's as Deng Xiaoping said of China's shift to a more market-oriented economic policy: "No matter whether it's a white cat or a black cat, as long as you catch a mouse, you are a good cat." ”
Today's approach to hiring doesn't forget the fact that people have methodological commitments, but it forces them to prove themselves not through their own methods, but through the study of these long-lasting themes of political science that they can actually demonstrate.
Ideally, we'd look at people who want a job and judge how interesting and powerful their ideas are. Hopefully, this judgment will not be closely tied to the method they use. But a lot of things get in the way of people's careers, personal problems, and so on, and hiring is an imprecise science. If you bet on 5 creative newcomers every year, there's a good chance that 3 or 4 of them won't succeed. Therefore, focusing on a candidate's perspective on a long-term topic may be the closest to a satisfactory hiring strategy. But it is wrong to be obsessed with any one method, including the obsession with the "law without a fixed law".
The content of this article is an excerpt from the book Passion, Technique and Method: Interviews with Comparative Politics with permission from the publisher, and the content has been deleted. Interview: [United States] Richard Snyder; Excerpt: Rodong; Introduction Part Proofreader: Fu Chunyan. The cover caption is from a still from The Professor (2018). Welcome to forward to the circle of friends.