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Porsdam, Helle --- "Introduction" [2012] ELECD 284; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000519

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Introduction

Author(s): Porsdam, Helle

Number of pages: 18

Extract:

1. Introduction
Helle Porsdam

Political life, argue Daniel Béland and Robert Henry Cox in their introduc-
tion to Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research (2011), has always been
full of ideas. Yet, for the past half-century or so, the study of ideas and
non-materialist explanations of why human beings do what they do have
been denigrated. Béland and Cox point to the rise of behaviorism as well as
to the resurgence of neo-Marxism within the social sciences as possible
explanations for this dismissive attitude toward ideational approaches.
Today, however, across the social sciences, they write, researchers seem to
have become more aware of the impact of ideas, culture, discourse and
framing processes in general ­ of the way in which `ideas are a primary
source of political behavior... [They] shape how we understand political
problems, give definition to our goals and strategies, and are the currency
we use to communicate about politics.'1
It is not only in the social sciences that ideational approaches have caught
on. In a sense, the assumption that people develop sets of ideas to make
sense of the world and their interactions with each other, and the further
assumption that such ideas then become an important cause of human
action, political, social as well as cultural, have always been there in the
humanities. But they have both been reinforced, at least since the 1970s and
1980s, by broad trends such as the development of interdisciplinary forms
of discourse analysis and ...