Pondering how to make my work matter, I recently stumbled upon this:
Flyvbjerg creatively uses Aristotle, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, and others to make his own distinctive argument for an alternative social science. He fuses an Aristotelian concern for phronesis with a Marxist concern for praxis, adding in a Foucauldian critique of Habermas’s preoccupation with consensus to demonstrate that a phronetic social science that can offer a praxis worth pursuing is one that would work within any contextualized setting to challenge power, especially as it is articulated in discourse.[1][2][3][4][5]
Look at that, just two sentences and he’s got Aristotle, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Marx, and Habermas lined up. And it’s all articulated in discourse!
Hmm, maybe I gotta get me some of that praxis.
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Notes:
[1] I didn’t make that quote up. Really I didn’t. If you don’t believe me, see Sanford F. Schram, “Beyond Paradigm: Resisting the Assimilation of Phronetic Social Science.” Politics and Society, vol. 32, no. 3, September 2004, p. 423.
[2] This quote occurs within a scholarly article arguing for methodological pluralism in political science. I’ve got my doubts about political science, whether methodological plural or not. But I believe in methodological pluralism and try to practice it regularly.
[3] Glad that you’re reading these footnotes. You can learn a lot by reading footnotes!
[4] This blog is a scholarly work. It has footnotes so that you’ll know it’s a scholarly work.
[5] Some find God in the details. Some find God in a transcendent world. Scholars associated with the Perestroika movement in political science seem to discount the possibility that both approaches are connected in truth. Even if you’re not looking for God, you can still try a second sailing to enlarge your social science philosophy.