把时间带回政治学研究的中心

Time in Political Science Research

时间与政治学的研究密不可分。二十世纪五十年代开始的行为主义革命与多元结构功能主义运动,把时间降格成为一个纯粹的技术问题。而从二十世纪七十年代兴起的历史制度主义与国家回归运动,从认识论的高度看待时间问题,提出了一系列关于时间的分析手段与策略。这其中,长历史周期分析和时序分析尤其令人瞩目。自二十世纪八十年代以来,诸多研究者则从本体论视角思考时间问题,把时间作为一个对象来进行研究,解释了时间的社会性、主观性与可塑性等特质,推动了政治学对人类政治生活复杂性和多样性研究的纵深发展。但这依然远远不够,本文认为,政治学研究只有重视时间概念的研究,把时间带回中心位置并作为政治学理论建构的一个核心问题来看待,才能实现高质量发展。

Time is closely related to the study of politics.The movement of behaviorism and structuralfunctionalism in the 1950s reduced time to a pure technical problem.The historical institutionalism and the return of the state movement,which rose in the 1970s,reexaminedthe concept of time from the epistemological perspective and put forward a series of analytical methods and strategies with regard to time.Among them,the long-term historical analysis and time sequential analysis are spectacular.However,this change is not enough.Since the 1980s,more scholars began to reconsider the concept of time from the ontological perspective,and treated the concept of time as a researchsubject.They explained the sociality,subjectivity and malleabilityof time,and propped up the sophisticated understanding of the complexity and diversity of political life.Therefore,we should bring time back to the central stage of political science research and treat the concept of time as the core theme in the political science theory-building.