Reflections on analytic eclecticism and the field

Rudra Sil’s and Peter Katzenstein’s Beyond Paradigms is about many things. It is about the philosophy of science; it is an argument for “metatheoretical flexibility” and “theoretical multilingualism”; and perhaps most of all, it is about what they see to be a need for a more pragmatic ethos in the service of better explanations for the complex phenomena that make up our world politics. In addition to these substantive points, it is also, however, very much a response to a perceived and experienced structure and culture of American social science that biases parsimony and strongly pushes us towards mono-causal explanations. In this sense, analytic eclecticism is offered as a corrective to approaches that are seen to prioritize parsimony at the expense of complexity and even “getting the answer right.