John H. Aldrich, James E. Alt, and Arthur Lupia, Positive Changes in Political Science: The Legacy of Richard D. McKelvey's Most Influential Writings

摘要

This volume is a festschrift of McKelvey's revolutionary work of positivist analysis in the social sciences. While we are generally skeptical of edited volumes in their ability to successfully maintain continuity throughout the chapters, this one is a clear exception to the rule. We suspect several reasons for this. First, the importance of McKelvey's work as well as those of his students and colleagues (many of whom are featured in this volume) in shaping the positivist movement in Political Science cannot be overestimated. On this point, this volume delivers exceptionally well. Through both his individual as well as collaborative work, McKelvey helped develop and inspire new directions in both formal empirical and theoretical analysis. Some of McKelvey's most influential articles are provided. In addition, no less than twelve of the book's 22 chapters are devoted to offering the reader an impressive and quite detailed account of how McKelvey's work has affected contemporary research and how it will impact future generations of research. What seems to shine through the various chapters of this volume is how the positivist agenda has been pursued for the expressed purpose of making political science analysis relevant to the real world. This reflects the methodological orientation of the volume's muse. McKelvey's scholarly disposition was practical and pragmatic rather than dogmatic. McKelvey, for example, regarded positivist rationality to be methodological rather than ontological (p. 15). In the concluding chapter for example, John Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn reveal that McKelvey possessed an open mind with regard to scholarly inquiry. They bring out that McKelvey held the view that "an unproven claim is not necessarily an unfounded one" and that "some of the most interesting research is begun without necessarily having an idea of where it will lead" (p. 490).