Chapter 9 is a tribute to James Rosenau. I presented it on a panel honouring Rosenau at a conference in San Francisco in 1996, which I had helped to organize and which eventuated in a richly deserved Festschrift. In this essay, I review what Rosenau had to say about theorizing and report on the echoes of David Hume's sceptical voice in Rosenau's defence of Enlightenment values and commitment to the methods of modern science. I turn then to an influential book he wrote in the wake of dramatic changes in the political arrangements of the modern world. Called Turbulence in World Politics (1990), this book documents a significant shift in Rosenau's theoretical concerns.

Turbulence defeats easy claims about causation and undercuts generalization. The cumulative impact of turbulence is transformative— an epochal change in the contours of modernity. ‘Writ large’, an aggregate of small, local changes indicates a global contest between mindless habit and adaptive behaviour— one that would likely displace the modern world's political arrangements. This is a striking and potentially illuminating claim. There are, however, two problems with the way Rosenau developed it.

In pursuit of science, Rosenau consistently underrated the normative sphere in social life. As a result, he underestimated the durability of the modern system of states— the mighty frame, as I have called it elsewhere. Second, Rosenau mistook the surge in some people's analytic skills as a novel development. Instead, it is an integral feature of the modernist epoch, gaining momentum for a century and fully implicated in late modernity's functional arrangements supporting the system of states. In the end, Rosenau could not see what lies beyond politics at different scales because he failed to free himself from the habitual language of Enlightened politics— a universalizing language inadequate to the contest between never-squelched tradition and overweening modernity. In that contest, incivility, calumny and wilful ignorance have since become the norm, violence valorized, and the centre's absence conclusively demonstrated.

In 2009, the editors of a modest Danish journal (no longer published) asked me to write a brief essay for a project imaginatively called ‘The Nines’. They had noticed that major statements of international theory appeared in the ninth year of most decades in the last century.