Louder than words? Why ethnographic sensibility cannot fix the flaws of normative behaviorism

This paper engages with Jonathan Floyd’s normative behaviorism. Its objectives are two: First, it adds to Simon Stevens’ recent criticism of this view. While Stevens argues that normative behaviorism ignores the discontent of vulnerable groups and hence produces overly optimistic judgments of the legitimacy of political orders, I argue that its focus on crime and insurrection as measures of political discontent will result in both overly optimistic and overly pessimistic verdicts. Second, it rebuts Stevens’ own proposal for how to remedy this flaw. I argue that supplementing normative behaviorism with an ethnographic sensibility will deprive it of the very features that rendered it attractive in the first place. If fixing the flaws of normative behaviorism requires us to transform it beyond recognition, we should rather reject it in the first place.