Continuity and Discontinuity in the Analysis of Political Change

Abstract

That political analysts have increasingly turned to the question of structure and agency derives in no small part from concerns about the capacity of existing approaches to deal with complex issues of social and political change. To posit a world in which structuralist analysis will suffice is to assume that political change is effectively confined to relatively marginal modifications of behaviour set within the context of a definitive set of structuring rules or laws which remain essentially static over time. Though such an assumption renders more plausible a conception of political analysis as a social science couched in the image of the natural sciences (as argued in Chapter 2), it is increasingly difficult to reconcile with a world in which the ‘rules of the game’ seem to be in a state of near-constant flux. Though itself hotly disputed, the globalisation thesis would, for instance, suggest that many of the most cherished of political analytical assumptions (of tightly delimited political territories governed by sovereign states, of nation states and national economies as the natural units of political and political economic analysis respectively) are in a process of being transcended (for a flavour of the debate compare Held et al. 1999 with Hirst and Thompson 1999). However sceptical one might (and perhaps should) be about the new globalisation orthodoxy, the point is that were it ever plausible to posit a world in which the rules of the game remained constant over time and were immune from human intervention, it is no longer.