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Man Is by Nature a Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics. Edited by Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 352p. $80.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott's Man Is by Nature a Political Animal brings together some of the most important social scientists working at the intersection of political science, psychology, biology, and cognitive neuroscience. Given recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and given the proliferation of work in political science that draws on these advances, we have decided to invite a range of political scientists to comment on the promise and the limits of this line of inquiry. What can scientific developments in psychology, biology, and neuroscience tell us about "human nature"? Can these discourses reckon with the variation in time and space that has traditionally been at the heart of political science, perhaps even going back to the classic text from which Hatemi and McDermott derive their title, Aristotle's Politics?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The assumed difference and continuing estrangement between political philosophy and political science is a relatively recent development. Both fields sprang from closely entwined concerns about democracy and matters of social and political justice, and today both must still confront their practical as well as cognitive relationship to their subject matter. This issue, however, has receded into the background of these discourses. Ludwig Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy is in effect a vision of social inquiry. His work, when viewed from this perspective, prompts us to reconsider the logical status of various modes of political inquiry: how can these practices, descriptively and normatively, do justice to their subject matter? How can they deal with such foundational issues as the nature of social phenomena, the concepts of representation and interpretation, the problem of knowledge of other minds and what is involved in making explanatory and evaluative judgments about the objects of inquiry? Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThe turn to the philosophy of scientific realism as a meta-theory for the study of International Relations manifests a reluctance to confront the basic problem of the relationship between philosophy and social scientific inquiry. Despite the realists' rejection of traditional empiricism, and particularly the instrumentalist account of scientific theory, the enthusiasm for realism neglects many of the same problems that, more than a generation earlier, were involved in the social scientific embrace of positivism. One of these problems was a lack of understanding regarding the character and history of the philosophy of natural science and its relationship and applicability to the study of social phenomena. Proponents of realism have also neither adequately articulated and defended realism as a philosophical position, and distinguished it from other perspectives, nor confronted the fundamental challenge to realism and other foundationalist philosophies which has been mounted by the contemporary critique of traditional representational philosophy.

Political theorists cannot reasonably maintain an institutional attachment to the discipline of political science and claim a place in the curriculum of the field while professing intellectual autonomy. Political theory is the progeny of American political science, as well as a subfield of the discipline, and it is important to dispel mythologies of political theory as a separate world-historical endeavor. Political theorists, like all social scientists, must realistically come to grips with their cognitive and practical relationship to their subject matter and resist the forms of dislocated rhetoric that sustain their often anomalous condition.