Ronald Grigor Suny is Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. Educated at Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he taught Russian/Soviet history at Oberlin College and as the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Indiana, 1972); The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana, 1988, 1994); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana, 1993); and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford, 1998). He is currently writing a biography of Stalin. As a trained historian now working as a political scientist, he is engaged in the transgression of disciplinary boundaries.

Abstract

The conceptual revolution associated with the “cultural turn” deeply affected some social sciences, particularly history, historical sociology, and anthropology, but has had very little impact on political science. Ron Suny explores the shift among social historians from a loose affiliation with the neo-Marxism of the 1960s to an engagement with culture and experience, under the influence of the British Marxist historian, Edward P. Thomson, and the appropriation at about the same time of the ethnographic methods of Clifford Geertz. The “cultural turn,” with its emphasis on a more fluid, less bounded notion of culture, its Foucauldian concepts of power, and its self-reflexive attention to the role of the investigator, found little resonance among political scientists, many of whom moved from interest in political culture and behavioralism to rational choice and game theory. Suny suggests that political science may find added value in trying to understand politics by incorporating some of the approaches of the cultural interpretivists.