[Note: This post is almost entirely “inside baseball” for IR academics.]
For this year’s ISA conference I was supposed to write a paper called “The Constructivism That Wasn’t: On the Non-Inevitability of Sociological Liberalism.” The idea was that I would go back and carefully reconstruct those moments of historical contingency in which an alternative IR constructivism — one which did not so neatly track with sociological liberalism, roughly defined as the notion that individuals’ thoughts and beliefs shape their behavior an thus the social world that they inhabit — might have emerged. The alternative history is simple: accentuate Morgenthau’s debt to Nietzsche and Weber and play up his sense of the tragic, reclaim Waltz as an analytical systems theorist instead of the prophet of the inevitable consequences of systemic anarchy for state behavior, push Jervis’ work on the manipulation of images and symbols into a more semiotic direction by rooting things in social/discursive instead of cognitive psychology, and then place Nick Onuf’s 1989 book (about to be released in a new edition, so people can actually read and assign it!) at the center of an alternate way of worlding, and knowledge-producing, in the field as a whole. Presto, a constructivism that would be just as anti-utopian as the field’s founders would have liked: rules, Onuf reminds us, produce rule, and domination (whether legitimate in the Weberian sense, or just naked force) is an omnipresent factor in political life. And then you can fill in the blanks for yourself: insert a whole variety of social and political theorists at appropriate points in the lineage, produce a mashed-up remix of The Culture of National Security and Cultures of Insecurity, and so on.
But as we all know, this didn’t happen, and constructivism came to mean “ideational variables matter,” where matter = systematic cross-case co-variation, best captured in statistical studies whether large-n “quantitative” or small-n “qualitative” — and that’s not a methodological distinction, that’s a lifestyle choice. All of this to the point where I usually don’t feel comfortable self-identifying as a “constructivist” without a great deal of qualification. So the more I have thought about it, the more I have become less and convinced that this really could have happened differently in mainstream Anglophone IR, because mainstream Anglophone IR is dominated by US IR, which is constituted as a subfield of US Political Science — and both US Political Science and US IR bear the traces of the way in which they were legitimated and justified within the US social and political context. In global IR, there may be space for a plurality of voices and visions, and a robust debate about important theoretical and methodological issues like the nature of scientific explanation, the fundamental structure of the world system, and the legacies of imperialism and colonialism (particularly the issue of whether what we have nowadays is any significantly different than what we had during the period of formal colonial empires). But in US IR, as a subfield of US Political Science, the organization of intellectual life forces virtually every interesting question into the liberal cookie-cutter with its twin blades of neopositivism and actor-centric reductionism, and thus neuters anything like a radical critique or even the envisioning of a significantly different alternative future by assuming virtually all of the interesting things away at the outset. If there is actual contingency here, it is the contingency of IR as a separate field of study having been nurtured in the United States.
I should be clear that the kind of liberalism I have in mind is neither left-leaning politics nor a simple translation of the classical liberal tradition of political philosophy and its confidence in free markets. What I mean instead is a specific triumvirate of value-commitments: individual liberty, equality, and reason, with the third usually being cashed out in intellectual/academic circles as “science.” Grant for a moment that the US is a constitutively liberal society (and if you doubt this, may I refer you to the aforementioned Alexis de Tocqueville, and to Louis Hartz’s diagnosis of the “irrational Lockeianism” of US society and political culture?).* It therefore follows that social and political science, in such a society, would have to — if it wanted to be taken seriously — concern itself with individuals and their decisions, lest it be accused of ignoring individual liberty. It would have to be impersonally abstract, lest it be accused of ignoring equality. And “scientific” in such a society would have to mean something like “objective and nonpartisan, accessible to all who have the proper training” — disenchanted knowledge, to make a Weberian gesture. Putting this together we have two basic implications for political science in a liberal society: a kind of explanatory individualist reductionism (in technical language we now call this “microfoundations”), and the kind of advisory role that — as Jack Gunnell so brilliantly sketched in The Descent of Political Theory — comes from a withdrawal of science from politics so as to subsequently correct and improve political activity. (Call this “the Enlightenment legacy/hangover,” and insert all the E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau-inspired comments about the limitations of reason in politics you want at this point.)
The dominance of neopositivism is and has to be understood sociologically. Although I have argued elsewhere — I think pretty conclusively — that there is no generally compelling philosophical warrant for neopositivism as a philosophy of science, because there are alternative approaches to science that do as good if not a better job accounting for science and clarifying the foundations of scientific knowledge, it unfortunately does not follow that all philosophies of science are created sociologically equal. Indeed there is something of an elective affinity between the situation in which US IR finds itself, and neopositivism as a methodological stance. For two reasons: neopositivism appears to offer a firm demarcation criterion for the boundaries of science (“falsifiability”; leave aside for the moment that it doesn’t actually work philosophically, it works pretty well rhetorically because it figures prominently in the self-narratives of many self-identified “scientists” especially when they argue against religion in public settings); and neopositivism holds out the promise of a general notion of truth that can be used to discipline policy makers (leave aside for the moment that fact that this doesn’t work, that policymakers generally take from social scientists only those findings that support their already-existing goals).
As for the other implication of liberalism, actor-centric explanations seek to relate social outcomes of any sort to the motives and interests of individual actors, and regard any explanation as incomplete until it has specified the various internal commitments that compel individuals to act in certain ways rather than others. Sometimes we call these “microfoundations,” and it makes absolutely no difference whether we are talking about calculations of expected utility, ideas about appropriateness or moral rectitude, or emotional attachments to one or another option. In all of these cases, and more like them, the important causal factors inhabit the subjective space within actors, and more or less compel their choices and decisions. Whether those factors are interests or beliefs or desires or whatever does not effect the form of the explanation one bit, since in all cases it remains an explanation of external behavior by means of an internal state of mind.
One might object that states don’t have minds, so that state-centric mainstream US IR can’t be actor-reductionist in this sense. But the objection has no value, because regardless of the ontological issue of whether states do or do not have minds, the dominant theoretical frameworks with which US IR scholars seek to explain state behavior (and thus “international relations,” which in an actor-centric reductionist approach is nothing but a bunch of states and their behavior) treat states as if they were big people, and routinely refer to the state’s interests, beliefs, and desires. The form of explanation remains firmly actor-centric and reductionist, inasmuch as an explanation that does not specify the motives and interests of the relevant states is routinely taken to be incomplete.
Another way to say this is that mainstream US IR, like mainstream US Political Science, is largely if not quite exclusively about specifying actor interests and motives, by way of explaining the choices that individuals make — choices that result in particular social arrangements and outcomes. It is not that there are not structures and interactions and processes in US IR theory; it is rather than all such factors have to be related to individual states of mind in order to explain anything. Norms work by penetrating the heads of relevant decision-makers; the threat of force works by affecting the decision-calculus of the target of the influence attempt; and rhetoric works by altering the preferences or values of those at whom it is aimed. The relevant action takes place inside the individual, which is precisely what a liberal view of society and social action would suggest: autonomous individuals are the fundamental reality, and if other things are taken to exist (not all liberals are Thatcherites or libertarians; liberalism in the sense I am using it here is not a fundamental ontology, but a value-laden ordering of a class of ontologies, some of which contain things like social structures and some of which do not) then they have to be related to individuals in order to have any role to play in a valid explanation.
I’m not going to tell the old, old story of the change between Wendt 1987 and Wendt 1992 [these articles are behind paywalls at JSTOR so I am not going to link to them, and besides, if you have gotten to this point in the post then you have read these articles already] in terms of the pre-social ontology of the state, except to say that I do not believe that this transformation of constructivism is Wendt’s fault, but the fault of what we might call the structural selectivity (borrowing a term, but not necessarily the whole analytical package, from Bob Jessop’s state theory) of mainstream Anglophone IR: actor-centric theory literally makes more sense to irrational Lockeians and their intellectual progeny, so that’s the version that catches on. (There’s a parallel story here about realism, which declined from tragic realpolitik to “material factors matter.” but that’s material for another essay.) And subsequently we have Keohane and Goldstein 1993, “ideas matter,” various statistical studies of norms and ideas, etc. The only way for US IR to have been different would have been for it not to be a subfield of US Political Science. And even then I am skeptical, since I can more easily envision a free-standing US IR adopting neopositivism and actor-centrism (just as Political Science did) in order to justify itself to the wider public, then I can imagine an alternate US IR that went in a completely different direction.
But there is cause for cautious optimism, as long as IR graduate students can avoid the kind of hyperprofessionalization that Dan points to and remain focused on the breadth of IR beyond the “top” US academic institutions. For one thing, since we are talking about domination and not hegemony, there is both active resistance and strategic accommodation on the part of the subordinate. The position of mainstream US IR might be thoroughly actor-centric and neopositivist, but it is not (or at least not yet!) the case that every US IR scholar is similarly inclined. (It is possible that in the future the hiring market will be so thoroughly overrun by neopositivist actor-centrists that no one else will be able to get a job at all; that hasn’t happened yet, and despite the fact that many of the “top” US IR programs are pretty thoroughly dominated by this kind of IR, the overall market is still, I think, big enough for other entrants. And at some level I am still convinced that a good story goes further than the most sophisticated models and methods, so non-neopositivists interested in structures and processes still have a fighting chance, at least in some places.) The problem is, as it has always been, that the vast majority of academic IR scholars in the US work in Political Science departments, and those departments tend to be dominated not by the IR faculty, but by other subfields of Political Science which are much less methodologically and theoretically diverse (cough cough American Politics). But as long as departments need people to teach IR (in this respect, the invention of interdisciplinary undergraduate majors in things like Global Studies is a very welcome development), and as long as such people have publication outlets that are open to their kind of work, there is a fighting chance for an alternative to neopositivism and actor-centrism.
And this in turn points to what I would say is the most important change in the IR scholarly landscape in the past two decades or so: the consolidation of a vibrant English-language IR journal space that is not US-dominated. It is not that mainstream US-style IR doesn’t show up there, it that the overall space is not so heavily dominated by neopositivism and actor-centrism. This is an important point, so let me make it explicitly again: my problem is not with actor-centrism or neopositivism, but with the way that mainstream US IR equates those two commitments with social-scientific IR per se. I have argued that this is because US IR lives within and as a subfield of US Political Science, and both of these live within a liberal society where there is very little space to question the core values of individual autonomy, equality, and reason expressed through science; criticizing neopositivism and actor-centrism in such a context looks like an undermining of the basic rationale for the whole enterprise, which helps to explain why frontal assaults are met with such caustic and dismissive criticism (and the ever-popular misinterpretation-through-reinterpretation: “you can’t possibly have meant X, so I am going to treat you as having meant Y”). It is therefore nigh upon impossible for mainstream US IR to be as pluralist and ecumenical as global IR can potentially be, because the space for intellectual engagement is so narrow: we can argue about variables and hypotheses and specifications of actor motivations, but little else.
I think that the task of building and defending a pluralist space in IR would be immensely strengthened if we stopped having to deal with US Political Science, because that would help make US IR one voice among others in a much more global intellectual space. Global IR has already built some of the scholarly capacity in terms of journals and book publishers that it would need to be genuinely autonomous, and it seems to be the case that alternate centers of graduate training (i.e., not exclusively US institutions) are playing a more significant role in forming IR scholars worldwide. IR in many parts of the world does not have to deal with the legacy of US Political Science, which increases its capacity to foster a diverse scholarly dialogue. We don’t have a good and clear picture of what global IR looks like, exactly, but I hope to shortly launch a mapping project that will assemble a global directory of IR scholars and their career trajectories, and that will hopefully give us a better sense of things.
I am not at all optimistic about the discipline of US Political Science. Indeed, I think it is largely a lost cause, if one is interested in vibrant pluralism and an ecumenical approach to knowledge-production. That said, things emanating from US Political Science still have a disproportionate impact in US IR and hence in global IR, so it is incumbent on those of us interested in preserving pluralism to keep working to broaden those messages as much as possible — not to change US Political Science, which I think largely impossible, but to keep open the space for global IR, including those parts of global IR that live and work in the United States. Part of that is focusing on the right things; the culprit is not and never has been “statistics” or “quant” or “rationalism,” but neopositivism and actor-centrism. But an even larger part of it is building the practices and institutions that can sustain an IR beyond US Political Science: global studies programs, free-standing IR departments, interdisciplinary journals and book series, and conversations across theories and methodologies about world politics broadly understood.
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* at the panel Nick Onuf wisely pointed out to me that “irrational Lockeanism,” although dominant in the US, was perpetually locked in combat with a much weaker strain of (neo)classical republicanism of the sort that manifests as communitarianism etc. — and a lot of the bitterness of dissident social science in the US might be attributed to the ressentiment of frustrated republicans. It’s a good and intriguing point, and a fuller genealogy of US IR probably should take that into account.
“except to say that I do not believe that this transformation of constructivism is not Wendt’s fault”
Think this might ne a double negative Patrick.
Yes, typo — thanks for catching that, will edit.
Have edited.
PTJ; we live in parallel universes; I gave a paper entitled “The Unbearable Liberalism of the Practice Turn in IR Theory” We should compare notes
Indeed. E-mail me!
I buy a great deal of this argument, and I can’t wait to re-read hartz for this notion of Lockeianism as civic religion..
Alex Barder and I argue something similar (coming out w/Millennium, next issue): the ideologically transfixing quality of the events of the 1990s allowed scholars borrowing methods and sensibilities from the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ tradition to free themselves from the depth of reflexivity to which that tradition gestures. When history has ‘ended’ — and even Giddens and Beck said something like this — and the specter of radical evil is expunged from politics, then theoretical reification no longer needs account, potentially, for its possible contribution to world-ending violence. Why not be a “Lockeian”? The irrationality of that position no longer seems irrational; the world spirit on horseback has just come to town, confirming its essential truth.
In such circumstances, the burden of reflexivity would appear to be met merely by stating one’s a priori commitments and aims — no ‘double hermeneutic’ or ‘sustaianable critique’ or ‘transversal critique’ needed. This, we hold, is what ‘via media’ IR held true to — and credit is due for upholding that obligation (difficult in itself, when faced with “orthodox” neo-positivists) consistently.
It wasn’t until after 9/11 that a lot of these folks began to rethink this position: viz., Keohane’s essay in 2002 in ‘Governance in a Partially GLobalized World’ in which he reflects on Shklar’s notion of evil, contrasting it with his own. But even then, that reflection has been slow, and partial. (Recall, those who were there, the first of Colin W.’s linked panels, and Duncan Snidal’s defense of ‘middle range’ theory. But what of radical evil? Would not progress in theory contribute to any aims, evil as well as good? One could say the same of Lake’s “Isms are evil” argument.)
That panel was fascinating in a sociological / plane wreck sort of way.
epic
PTJ, absolutely brilliant. I love the alternative history angle, but I also in particular because the kind of liberalism you are talking about is precisely what shapes so much of what people sometimes carelessly call “modernity”… Love it…
Yeah, it seems like a new wrinkle in your thinking, PTJ. From the principled argument for pluralism in our different wagers to a discussion of the topography of the discipline, and what’s let through. From ‘agents’ as it were, to ‘structures.’ Which is a good move. There was an argument that the principled argument was naive (it’s been put to me as well). This goes some way toward meeting principles with institutions, practices, structures… Really good stuff.
I do think that we need both arguments, and I very deliberately focused on making the principled argument first. Now that it’s out there and I’m pretty happy with it, I feel more inclined to address the institutions/practices/relations part of the argument. Soon to follow, the “global IR directory” project…
I don’t disagree with your assessment of American Politics overall, but I’d say there are some sub-fields (or sub-sub-fields) that are more diverse. That said, I am biased because I think US Political Science needs more such intellectual diversity. In my area of (American) judicial politics, the problem is less that constructivism has become about “ideational variables matter” and more that there is a lack of clarity of just what people mean. There is a good deal of conflation of what goes on in people’s heads with what they claim. I’d prefer the focus shifted clearly to the latter.
Oh, I agree that US PoliSci *needs* more intellectual diversity. I am just very skeptical that it can actually contain, or survive, it.
Every time I come here I get the impression that there are dozen IR PhDs around the corner getting ready to yell in my face that what I am doing (social psychology/linguistics) is not science. Is it really that bad? I go to a Canadian institution, presented on an ISA panel populated by Europeans, and read EJIR, IPS, IT, and Security Dialogue. Am I just bubbled off from the masses of neopositivists?
Yes.
More seriously, and at greater length: yes, actually.
That said, as long as you stay out of the “mainstream” of US IR and aren’t looking for a job at a US institution where you’d likely be competing in a pool with Political Scientists for a PoliSci job, you should be just fine ;-)
ISA felt really Balkanized to me. The Europeans talked to themselves. THe Americans talked to themselves. I wondered about that . . .THe Europeans were much more interdisciplinary — linguistics, geography, etc.
Some of us Americans talk to Europeans…
I have a few questions here, but overall enjoyed this essay.
1) While agreeing that US IR is quite problematic for all the reasons you mention, I wonder how much of it is the US place in the world. In other words, US IR theorists are ostensibly (or at least this is how they sometimes justify themselves) developing a body of theory to be used by the hegemon (not necessarily for hegemony itself but also for the idea that the US can do good in the world and can ‘solve’ problems). Here, specific advice is needed, preferably with determinative evidence (this does not mean that such advice is used or even used correctly, it is just a justifying principle). Now here is where I begin smuggling irrational Lockeanism back in, but since in the US (modernity?) determinitive answers look like numbers with a yes/no kind of quality (the line being p<.05), projects that produce such answers are easier to justify.
We do see this not really being the case in Europe, where advice for the hegemon is not really a driving force. However, I am not sure of the link between American Politics and 'advice for the hegemon'. That said, the upshot may be that US IR is last so long as the US seems to hold a hegemonic state in the world or at least has realistic intentions of doing so. Separating it from US PoliSci would do no good because it would still have to provide advice to the hegemon and justify it this way. I guess this is a less optimistic viewpoint, but I wanted to get your view on this.
2) A smaller point: to what degree is rationalism really separated from neo-positivism? I know that formal theory done correctly is not neo-positivist but it seems that more and more, formal theory is being linked with EITM and being tested. I sense this in my own department. To me, rationalism is a variant of neo-positivism and rational choice is the formal theory version of this. Of course, this may just be semantics in which case, nothing to see here.
3) Might there be a reason to worry that a global IR might become just as closed as US IR? Especially as regards actor-centrism. Maybe this is bad logic, but I would be afraid of it doing so even though for personal reasons I would rather neo-positivism be on the outside instead of vice versa.
This actually bring me to a slightly different question. I have wondered since reading your book, the degree to which neo-positivism (or at least Cartesian Dualism) is partially to 'blame' for its own hegemony. If you believe that there is a 'truth' out there that we can find if we continue to work at it (and especially if you think you know the one way to get to that truth), then aren't you more likely to be dismissive of other attempts to produce knowledge? This may be wrong (I myself have some experience that might work against this theory), but I have a suspicion that there isn't something to it. At least in general, probabilistic terms.
Good questions. Three quick replies:
1) I would say that the issue is less “advice to the hegemon” and “advice to the country that regards itself as the harbinger of the millennium/”new order for the ages”/manifestation of the Divine on Earth.” Which has been going on since before the US was even an afterthought in most power-political calculations. So I personally am not at all optimistic that a diminishing of the US’s relative dominance in the world will lead to an opening of US IR; indeed, were I a betting man (which I am not) I would put my money on retrenchment, a.k.a. “now that we’re not as dominant, it’s even more important that we use our diminished capacity wisely to bring about The Rapture ™.”
2) on the point about rationalism ≠ neopositivism (and parenthetically, I think the issue is less rationalism than actor-centrism — one can vary the “rationality” assumption and be left with the exact same structure of explanation), and as a consequence the utter absurdity of EITM, I would recommend reading Jim Johnson, Kevin Clarke, and David Primo, all of whom have tenure at Rochester and therefore by definition know a crapload more about formal modeling and its limitations than any of the EITM people ;-)
3) sure, global IR could become closed. But I see less danger of that because of the sheer substantive and theoretical and methodological diversity already involved. It’s easier to preserve a space of contestation if one starts off with difference than if one starts off with approximate similarity.
Are dualism or neopositivism to blame for their own dominance? I doubt it. I am in fact highly skeptical that the content of any argument does much to explain its role in the academy or in society writ large. Now, the functional role that an argument plays, for example in legitimating an institution…that, I think, is the place to look for an explanation.
But, that said, a not insignificant part of our jobs as academics is to focus on argumentative content — theory and methodology matter — even though we know that most people most of the time don’t care about such things, and that the world we inhabit is actually, practically, structured by other considerations. That’s the beauty of the academy, and the source of our social obligation: we have been set aside to play with ideas, in the hopes of generating something someone else will find useful. The dominance of neopositivism and to a lesser extent dualism is, then, an unwarranted intrusion of the existing arrangement of society into our deliberately artificial space, because what ought to prevail is something more like unfettered contentious conversation across different and divergent ways of worlding. I for one am fed up, and I have tenure and will be promoted to Full Professor imminently, so I am perfectly positioned to say these things (I have paid all the goddamn dues I plan to pay, thank you very much). And so I shall.
Regarding point 2, above, I think Primo and Clarke have made a great contribution to an important conversation.
That said, I think a fair amount of their critique boils down to semantics. By their own argument, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with examining the empirical implications of theoretical models. It’s the empirical verification of theoretical models to which they object.
And they are correct. Deductive models are truth-conserving. Therefore, they are not in need of empirical “confirmation.” However, as P&C would readily admit, the internal consistency of a deductive model is a very poor guide to its usefulness. Since theoretical models are simplifications, there is effectively no limit to the number of ways that a deductive model might be specified.
Similarly, there is effectively no limit to the number of ways that an empirical model (of anything remotely interesting) can be specified.
Therefore, we’re rightly skeptical of inferring truth from empirical models alone. That sort of empirical-deductive approach went out of style decades ago, though. These days, empirical models are usually (though not always) developed in service of a theoretical model (formal or verbal), which serves to justify the particular empirical specification being presented.
So how do we judge the value of a theoretical model? According to P&C, we might judge it to be valuable if it makes counterintuitive predictions. We might judge it valuable because it serves as a foundation for further model building. [And more in this vein]. And one way to decide whether one particular theoretical model is useful (compared to any number of other possible models) is to demonstrate that, yes, it illustrates some substantively interesting relationship.
Short version, it’s possible to conceive of an EITM approach that (true to its name) examines empirical implications of theoretical models in a sort of “convergent validity” manner. And this describes an awful lot of quanty work these days. Researchers may use the language of Hypothetic-deductivism (or neopositivism), but they’re not actually *doing* either.
err, para 5 should read “that sort of empirical-inductive.” I guess my fingers got too used to typing “deductive,” leading them to disobey orders.
True, one could conceive of an EITM that worked this way. But that would be a very different EITM than the one that we have, in which people try to “test” models. That’s the absurdity, and I think that’s more than semantics.
My mistake. I wasn’t trying to downplay the importance of P&C’s distinction between testing theory and using theory.
My ‘boils down to semantics’ claim refers to what I see as an increasingly common trend in work combining formal and empirical models. Often, such work dutifully claims that the empirical model “tests” the theoretical model. However, despite that semantic nod to H-D, the subsequent presentation and interpretation of empirics is informal – belying the claim that the empirical model “tests” the theoretical one.
I don’t mean to suggest that P&C are tilting at windmills. However, in practice, a lot of EITM-style work falls closer to informal/pragmatic model I sketched above, rather than to the classic H-D model that P&C criticize.N.B. the big EITM folks surely view that trend as a *bad* thing. Maybe that’s what motivates P&C’s work. They’re not arguing against the combination of models, per se. They’re just arguing against the NSF method of / justification for doing it.
Good point. The same can be said of a good deal of small-n “qualitative” empirical work that nods at H-D neopositivism and then proceeds to basically discuss case-specific configurations, and arguably (well, as Andrew Abbott argued in his seminal 1988 piece “Transcending General Linear Reality”) most large-n “quantitative” statistical work actually works in practice by narratively discussing how values of variables play out in specific cases, turning the overall model into something like an ideal-typical baseline. Most social science isn’t all that methodologically consistent even internally, and actually looking at research/scholarly practice yields a world much wider than the methodological manuals/jeremiads would have us believe exists or should exist. That said, there is rhetorical force to such proclamations, and coercive effects of such proclamations uttered by key people occupying key positions — so like P&C I think it’s well worth arguing with those symbolic and programmatic statements even if they don’t capture actual practice all that well.
Even if it isn’t about ‘advice to the hegemon’ so much as ‘bringing about the rapture’ (which gave me a bit of a chuckle), doesn’t this still possibly challenge your thesis? If ‘bringing about the rapture’ is the point of IR in the US, would that change if it is separated from US PoliSci? Wouldn’t part of the justification of any Global Studies program be, in part, that its professors would be doing work that could help bring about the new world order and/or that they would be teaching students who would one day bring this order to be? I guess I wonder how non-positivist those in Global Studies programs are and, even more important, how long they will remain. I will say that I hope I am wrong and you are right.
Of course, lockeanism is a part of this still as it is necessary to explain why a certain type of research is believed to be more determinitive and helpful to policymakers.
My hope is for *global* IR, not *US* IR. Arguably, as you suggest, any US-centered IR would indeed fall into the same traps. But if IR were a global field of study that just happened to be in the US as well as in other places, and if it had its own autonomous infrastructure for sustaining critical scholarly discussions…I would like to think that we could avoid those traps.
And just to be clear, I don’t think that there’s much of a problem saying that part of why we profess IR is to help expand the horizons of the next generation of people who will concretely work on building a global political/economic/whatever order. My objection is and always has been to the silly conceit that our research can provide clear and unambiguous lessons for such people to follow, whether they are students or whether they are working in government/for NGOs/etc. Our job as academics is not to correct practice, or even to directly improve it; our job is to expand horizons, raise critical objections, force contemplation of alternatives, and ensure that no one gets too comfortable with their own imperial arrogance or too content with their anti-imperial rage. “Uncomfortable facts,” as Weber termed them, are our primary contribution. It’s just very, very difficult to raise such uncomfortable facts in a discipline like US Political Science where the emphasis is on rational answers, not the thorny insolubles of actual political and social life.
Oh, I agree that US PoliSci *needs* more intellectual diversity. I am just very skeptical that it can actually contain, or survive, it.
Supposed to be a reply to David Kaib, above.
I found myself wondering if American IR will inevitably become more globalized as a result of rising US university tuitions. Several of my son’s friends are actually doing PPE at Oxford next year for undergrad — even though they’re Americans. EVen a degree from a Canadian university would give someone a different perspective, wouldn’t it?
Yes.
More seriously, and at greater length: yes, actually.
That said, as long as you stay out of the “mainstream” of US IR and aren’t looking for a job at a US institution where you’d likely be competing in a pool with Political Scientists for a PoliSci job, you should be just fine ;-)
This was supposed to be a reply to Eavanr above, and it does show up there; not sure why it also shows up here. These, I suppose, are the mysteries.
This is a brilliant piece, PTJ, and it hits exactly on the major reason why I’m doing my doctorate in the History department and not in the Political Science department of my current US school. Doing an interdisciplinary MA at an American research university was a sobering experience, and made it very clear exactly which type of work was expected from graduate students doing “proper” IR.
As sad as it is, I’m inclined to agree with your negative reading of the future of American Political Science. That said, I think that there are a lot of interesting things going on in certain Sociology and History departments across the country, which combined with the “global” undercurrents of IR might at some point make it feasible to create a more pluralistic and independent field of international relations.
This reminds me of Der Derian’s discussion of classical and postclassical international theory, circa early 90s. Constructivism missed an opportunity to draw on a rich tradition of classical international theory, and became obsessed with responding to Keohane’s “What’s your research program” question. Rather than push back against a problematic mainstream definition of “reflectivism,” constructivism went wobbly [/thatcher]. The discipline has been conflating epistemology and theory ever since.
Cheers to whichever press is rereleasing Onuf’s book. Now that Conventional Constructivism is the new mainstream, It’s important, as well as interesting, to consider alternatives.
Routledge is re-releasing Nick’s book, along with a volume of his collected essays.
Firstly, in reply to Mshirk. On your first point, way back in the late 1990’s / early 2k’s Steve Smith (of Hollis and Smith, ‘Explaining and Understanding IR’ fame) wrote a few articles and gave one great paper at (I think!) an Australian conference arguing that the dominance of positivism was little more than a way of mainstream US I.R. supporting the actions of the United States and delegitimising critics. Unfortunately he didn’t really go very far with this, 9/11 changing the atmosphere and he himself becoming president of Universities UK. But, I always felt with the professionalisation of US ‘elite’ institutions he was on to something. Sometimes I wonder if it is possible to suggest something similar about institutions such as the LSE.
PJT, overall outstanding and brilliant post, but I use your book on my unit so it’s expected. Your pessimism about US PolSci is deserved and having been involved in a UK based US PolSci conference I saw this recently.
Another factor (maybe linking to the above a little) is the pressure from government to justify the funding of Humanities / Social Science. I just feel that in an effort to defend the utility of Political Science then it must become more positivist for no other reason than looking more ‘science like’ and still receive funding. Here in the UK with a push for Higher Ed to concentrate on ’employability’ there is a real atmosphere that ‘quail’ subjects are less ‘useful’. So, from this year the British govt. will no longer fund at HE level subjects that include Politics, Philosophy, History, English, Sociology, Psychology etc. Fine departments have been closed, or threatened with closure because of this (see: Middlesex and Philosophy).
And, of course, over in the US some legislators argued for cutting national funding for PoliSci as you could get all the politics info you want from CNN!
So, faced with those pressures, it is unfortunate (and wrong-headed) but it seems natural to me to try and emphasise the whizz-bang numbers and the models.
JonnyR78, I think you’re quite right about the “pressure to justify funding.” The only caveat I would add is that the pressure has always been there, but in a time of economic plenty if not surplus we could (literally) afford to be a little more lenient and tolerant of subjects that didn’t quite measure up to the standard of neopositivist science and even actor-centrism (this is what one would expect in a very big setting like US academia — some leakage around the edges). And US PoliSci always had that core mission of using reason to correct social practice, so the justification didn’t have to be invented, just made more explicit. See, in that respect, everything Robert Keohane has written since the end of the Cold War, particularly his essay “Political Science as a Vocation” that I hope to use as the central foil of an essay I am writing for e-IR with the tentative title “The Chimera of Relativism.”
I read this interesting post quickly (I’m going to come back later for a slower reading), then I started to write a long comment, then my computer crashed (which seems to happen with some frequency at Duck of Minerva for some reason).
Anyway, here is a short version: isn’t it possible to be a ‘sociological liberal’ (read methodological individualist) without being a political liberal or even influenced much by liberal ideology (Tocqueville, Hartz, Lockeanism rational or otherwise,etc.)? What about, for example, the body of work known as ‘analytical Marxism’ (with which I won’t pretend to be intimately familiar but have a rough idea of what it’s about). Doesn’t that complicate your argument in the post?
It’s not you. I don’t know what the culprit is; for some reason the Duck is a really cumbersome website.
Not sure what this “crashing” is of which you speak. Maybe you need to switch to Mac ;-)
No intention of switching to Mac. I’d rather be tortured on the rack. ;-)
It loads too much stuff. Another reason we need to go to wordpress. At least current blogger functionality means that it isn’t, like the older version, hacked to high h**l.
It works better if you use a browser other than Chrome. It’s too big for Chrome.
It works fine for me in Chrome. The issue is usually the computer, not the browser (at Keats for current versions). But it is “bad design” for us to not have a more streamlined site. Of course, we are much better than ad-saturated blogger blogs :-).
No, it actually makes my argument stronger: US Political Scientists had to liberal-ify Marxism by making it into an actor-centric theory in order to make it more legitimate. In fact, there’s an argument that US Marxism of the Ralph Milliband variety was always pretty darn individualist to begin with, making US Marxism always relatively liberal. (And I don’t at all mean anything like contemporary political liberalism; I mean, as I say in the post, a faith in the basic troika of the individual, equality, and reason/science.)
In defence of Analytical Marxism, it’s worth noting that not all of them were methodological individualists. In any case, they were motivated as a group by a shared opposition to bad ‘unclarifiably unclear’ social science, particularly the functionalism of Althusserian and Parsonian approaches in sociology, rather than structural explanation as such. Cohen’s defence of traditional Marxian notions such as the mode and relations of production as theoretically cogent demonstrates that they weren’t always committed to micro-reductionism.
N. Lees: point noted.
Also another question (sorry): if the key thing is the value-commitments of individual liberty, equality, and reason, then why doesn’t poli sci in the entire ‘Western’ world look like US poli sci? Why doesn’t French poli sci look like US poli sci? (Or British for that matter?) The Glorious Revolution and the storming of the Bastille are just as important as Paine’s Common Sense. I know that Tocqueville and Hartz are on about US exceptionalism, but the three countries I just mentioned are all basically ‘liberal’ societies, no? (Maybe not. I’m just asking. And it’s past 11 pm. That’s a good excuse for what may be a bad question.)
“Irrational Lockeianism” is not characteristic of France or Britain, in part — if we buy the Hartz account, which I largely do — because those countries had nobles and nobility. Other kinds of approaches can flourish there more easily. Indeed, if pressed, and because it’s very late and I’m tired, I might even venture that a class-divided society can think about social structure in ways that a presumptively egalitarian society can’t, and that has effects on one’s social science. But I wouldn’t want to push that kind of claim too far, lest it become determinist.
And, of course the way to stop that from being a deterministic claim is to treat it as an ideal-type, and then examine how in practice the presence or absence of meaningful class divisions are translated into the countours of social science in a given place, in conjunction with other ideal-typical factors. Here I would flag at least patterns of state funding and support, and the historical relationship between foreign policy and the other elements of the state, as important complementary mechanisms/processes that would have to be taken into account in order to disclose the relevant configuration for a given country’s social science.
Thanks for the replies.
While you can find strands of Lockeanism in British national identity, the US national myth (or civil religion) is practically based on it. And I’d argue that both the Glorious and the French Revolutions were quite different events than the American Revolution (despite some obvious historical similarities), in part because they were based on very different intellectual and political foundations.
I’m somewhat unsure about the nobility / class division argument in Hartz, mainly because the Early Republic seems to have had a level of aristocracy (and something akin to monarchical thought) that came close to most contemporary Western European monarchies. But regardless of historical facts, aristocracy has been written out of US national mythology beginning sometime in the mid-nineteenth century (as has notions of empire, which were otherwise very much part of the Early Republic’s political discourse), and that might ultimately be more significant for the formation of national identity.
On your first point, yes they were quite different events. My comment was too broad-brush. But rather than just drawing a straight line from national identity/mythology to the shape of a country’s social science, I suspect, as PTJ suggests in his replies below, that other factors have to be taken into account as well. (This is not to deny that one can make strong or at least plausible arguments about different ‘national’ traditions of thought, as, e.g., Donald Levine did in a somewhat different context in ‘Visions of the Sociological Tradition’.)
While the blog remains entirely the preserve of its contributors, here’s one vote for more posts at at least an undergraduate reading level, like this one.
For what it’s worth, this is also some of PTJ’s best meta-commentary on IR as well.