This article develops ideas from a draft paper, “The Hegemony of Hegemony,” and “Realist Dialectics” (Presented at the September 1982 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Denver, Colo.). My thinking on this topic has benefited enormously from comments and criticisms generously provided by Gordon Adams, Hayward R. Alker Jr., Albert Bergesen, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Richard Dagger, Felicia Harmer, Robert O. Keohane, Stephen D. Krasner, Ivy Lang, Dickinson McGaw, George Modelski, Craig Murphy, Robert C. North, Mark Reader, John G. Ruggie, Kenneth N. Waltz, and David Winters, and the editors of 10. The argument here is controversial. It is therefore all the more noteworthy that, despite deep differences, communications with diverse audiences representing allegedly incommensurable points of view have been so intelligent and, for me at least, rewarding. To all concerned I offer thanks–and my exoneration

1. Thompson, E. P., The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Anderson's, Perry rejoinder, Arguments within English Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1980)Google Scholar.

2. Also called a “planetarium,” an orrery is a mechanical device used to illustrate with balls of various sizes the relative motions and positions of the bodies in a solar system. It takes its name from Charles Boyle, the Earl of Orrery, for whom one was made.

3. In speaking of a “neorealism movement,” it is necessary to confront several issues. First, the name “neorealism” is not universally recognized by those I am calling neorealists. Some no doubt assume that their work reflects no larger movement or trend they themselves did not consciously set into motion; they thus reject the application of general labels to their own work. Second, I recognize that the scholars here regarded as neorealist have many serious differences and quarrels among themselves. Third, I stress that my treatment here is with respect to the structure of an overall movement in its context and not the expressed pronouncements or conscious intentions of individual scholars whose work sometimes may, and sometimes may not, contribute to that movement.

4. As discussed here, neorealism is not just an amalgam of individual scholars' traits or opinions, nor is it the lowest common denominator among them. Rather, my contentions are with respect to neorealism as a collective movement or project emerging in a shared context, having shared principles of practice, and observing certain background understandings and norms that participants mutually accept as unproblematic and that limit and orient the questions raised, the answers warranted, and the conduct of discourse among neorealists-this regardless of the fact that the participants may not be conscious of (may merely take for granted the universal truth of) the norms and understandings integrating them as one movement. In Waltz's now well-known terminology, mine is a systemic, not a reductionist, account of the neorealist system.

5. The term “totalitarian” is, to say the least, provocative. As seen below, my usage is consistent with that of Hans Morgenthau.

6. This is John O'Neill's terminology. The distinction will be elaborated below.

7. Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans, by Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. and trans, by Gordon, Colin et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980)Google Scholar; Foucault, , Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977)Google Scholar; Foucault, , The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972)Google Scholar; and Foucault, , The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970)Google Scholar.

8. Habermas, Jürgen, Towards a Rational Society, trans, by Shapiro, Jeremy J. (London: Heinemann, 1971)Google Scholar; Habermas, , Theory and Practice, trans, by Viertel, John (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Habermas, , Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans, by McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

9. Habermas, Jürgen, Legitimation Crisis, trans, by McCarthy, Thomas (London: Heinemann, 1976)Google Scholar. Of course, the figures cited can hardly be said to occupy one school; in fact, there are very sharp differences among them. Thompson, for instance, would be among the last to align happily with Foucault, “Althusser's former student”; Habermas's rationalism would set him apart from Bourdieu. On the theme of the “economization” of politics, see also Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

10. Popper, Karl, “On the Theory of Objective Mind,” and “Epistemology without a Knowing Subject,” in Objective Knowledge (London: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. As Morgenthau says again and again, the application of every universalizing formulation “must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place.” Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 8Google Scholar.

11. See Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 62–64Google Scholar.

12. Gilpin, Robert, “Political Change and International Theory” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 3–6 09 1981), p. 3Google Scholar.

13. As I shall indicate below, neorealism holds to a very definite, highly restrictive model of social science.

14. A few neorealists are extremely hostile to the use of the word anarchy (e.g., as used in Waltz's work), even though they accept the absence of central rule (Waltz's definition of anarchy) as a hard-core assumption. George Modelski takes “world leadership” as his “central concept.” Thus, he writes, “we make it clear that we do not regard the modern world as some sort of anarchical society. To the contrary, our analysis clarifies the principles of order and authority that have governed that world for the past half millennium and that, while familiar to historians in each particular instance, have not been previously put together in quite this manner and have been generally unfamiliar to students of international relations. Anarchy could be in the eye of the beholder.” Modelski, , “Long Cycles and the Strategy of U.S. International Economic Policy,” in Avery, William P. and Rapkin, David P., eds., America in a Changing World Political Economy (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 99Google Scholar.

15. Again, neorealists differ, and the words they choose to use is one of the differences. One might speak of order, another of stability, and still another of leadership. The word “hegemony” itself is certainly in some dispute, even though all agree that hegemony (whatever one chooses to call it) follows from power or the distribution of the attributes of power.

16. Ruggie, John G., “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis,” World Politics 35 (01 1983), especially pp. 261–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. See Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)Google Scholar; Kurzweil, Edith, The Age of Structuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Giddens, Anthony, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chap. 1; Ricoeur, Paul, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” and “Structure, Word, Event,” in Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and Glucksman, Miriam, Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)Google Scholar.

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19. Bourdieu, , Outline, p. 3Google Scholar.

20. Ricoeur, , “Structure and Hermeneutics,” p. 79Google Scholar.

21. Bourdieu, , Outline, pp. 23–24Google Scholar.

22. Ollman, Bertell, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 266Google Scholar.

23. Quoted in Giddens, , Central Problems, p. 12Google Scholar.

24. Ibid., p. 46.

25. Gilpin, Robert, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Modelski, George, “The Long-Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (04 1978), pp. 214–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Ricoeur, as quoted in Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M., eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

27. Giddens, , Central Problems, p. 38Google Scholar.

28. See Krasner, Stephen D., Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

29. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 91Google Scholar.

30. Gilpin, , War and Change, p. 18Google Scholar.

31. Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), especially chap. 2Google Scholar.

32. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 91Google Scholar.

33. Gilpin, , War and Change, p. 19Google Scholar.

34. Popper understands methodological individualism as the principle that “all social phenomena, and especially the functioning of all social institutions, should always be understood as resulting from the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc. of human individuals.… [W]e should never be satisfied by an explanation in terms of so-called ‘collectives.’” Popper, Karl, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 98Google Scholar. Taking states as the living individuals of international life, neorealist statism is understandable in analogous terms.

35. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 91Google Scholar.

36. Mundell, Robert A. and Swoboda, Alexander K., eds., Monetary Problems in the International Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 343Google Scholar; Gilpin, , War and Change, p. 26Google Scholar.

37. Gilpin, , War and Change, p. 25Google Scholar.

38. Ruggie, , “Continuity and Transformation,” pp. 273–74Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

39. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 93Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., p. 96; Gilpin, , War and Change, p. 17Google Scholar.

41. O'Neill, John, “The Hobbesian Problem in Marx and Parsons,” in O'Neill, , Sociology as a Skin Trade (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 195–96Google Scholar.

42. See Barry, Brian, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937)Google Scholar; Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (1944; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957)Google Scholar, and The Livelihood of Man (New York: Academic Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Camic, Charles, “The Utilitarians Revisited,” American Journal of Sociology 85, 3 (1979), pp. 516–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hechter, Michael, “Karl Polanyi's Social Theory: A Critique,” Politics & Society 10, 4 (1981), pp. 399–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Camic, “Utilitarians Revisited.”

44. Hechter, , “Karl Polanyi's Social Theory,” p. 399Google Scholar.

45. What are we to make of a structuralism, for example, that deploys both Adam Smith and Emile Durkheim for its authorities without once stopping to consider the contrarieties between the two?

46. Lakatos, Imre, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Lakatos, and, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 192Google Scholar.

48. Gilpin, , War and Change, pp. 13–14Google Scholar.

49. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence, chap. 3. See also Keohane, Robert O., “The Theory of Hegemonic Stability and Changes in International Regimes, 1967–1977,” in Holsti, Ole R., Siverson, Randolph M., and George, Alexander, eds., Change in the International System (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Keohane, “Hegemonic Leadership and U.S. Foreign Economic Policy in the ‘Long Decade’ of the 1950s,” in Avery and Rapkin, America in a Changing World.

50. Krasner, Stephen D., “Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 499CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Krasner in this paper demonstrates that he is among the most open-minded and criticism-conscious of neorealists. He explores the limits of neorealism; in fact, he goes right to the brink of undermining its statist props altogether. Exploring various relationships between regimes, state interests, political capabilities, and state practices, he comes close to raising the possibility that regimes (principles, norms, and procedures that have some autonomy from the vectoring of state behaviors) might be constitutive of states and their interests.

51. I am careful in my wording here, because neorealists, like most utilitarian thinkers, are slippery about the position they in fact take regarding rational action and the production of order. In a recent review of Olson's, MancurThe Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, Brian Barry makes a similar point. He notes that Olson could be offering a “monocausal explanation,” a primus inter pares explanation, or an explanation in terms of a factor that is not always the most important but that will always emerge on top when other factors are not too strong (which is not saying much). Barry says that he is “not at all clear what position Mancur Olson himself wants to take.” Barry, , “Some Questions About Explanation,” International Studies Quarterly 27 (03 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Considering the same three possibilities in neorealist explanations of order, I am not at all sure what position neorealists mean to take.

52. See Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

53. Hechter, , “Karl Polanyi's Social Theory,” p. 403, note 6Google Scholar.

54. O'Neill, “The Hobbesian Problem.”

55. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, pp. 131–32Google Scholar.

56. I hold that all social science aspiring to theory has a positivist aspect in the sense given below. This is true of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Bourdieu, Foucault, Morgenthau, Alker, and me. Following Bourdieu, even dialectical knowledge contains the objectivistic, the positivistic. As I use the term here, however, a movement is “positivist” if it appears to be a one-dimensional positivism. The issue is not the purging of positivism – the positivist moment is an inescapable moment of all inquiry – but the realization of a more adequate “two-dimensional” or dialectical perspective by bringing the positivist moment into unceasing critical tension with the practical moment such that each side ever problematizes the other. Valuable readings on the subject of positivism and its limits include Radnitzky, Gerard, Contemporary Schools of Metascience, 3d enl. ed. (Chicago: Regnery, 1973)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Richard, The Restructuring of Political and Social Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)Google Scholar; the first chapter of Shapiro, Michael J., Language and Political Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Alker, Hayward R. Jr, “Logic, Dialectics, Politics: Some Recent Controversies,” in Alker, , ed., Dialectical Logics for the Political Sciences, vol. 7 of the Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982)Google Scholar; and Adomo, Theodore W. et al. , The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, trans, by Adey, G. and Frisby, D. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976)Google Scholar.

In my present discussion, I am especially concerned with that strain, still predominant in Anglo-American sociology, anchored in Weberian solutions to the problem of human subjectivity and meaning in a naturalistic social science.

57. Giddens, , Central Problems, p. 257Google Scholar.

58. Foucault, The Order of Things.

59. Giddens, Anthony, ed., Positivism and Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1974), chap. 1Google Scholar. Compare with the list in Alker, “Logic, Dialectics, Politics.”

60. Giddens, , Positivism and Sociology, p. 4Google Scholar.

61. See Weber, Max, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans, by Gerth, H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 44–45Google Scholar. See also Marcuse, Herbert, “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Towards a Rational Society, and Giddens, Anthony, Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (London: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar.

62. Giddens, , Positivism and Sociology, p. 5Google Scholar.

63. Weber, Max, “Roscher und Knies und das Irrationalitätsproblem,” in Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr), pp. 127–37Google Scholar, and translated as “Subjectivism and Determinism,” in Giddens, , Positivism and Sociology, pp. 23–31Google Scholar.

64. See ibid.

65. I am saying not that the predisposition toward actor models reflects conscious conformity to a norm, but that social scientists do not conceive of the principle because it is so faithfully observed that, in general, social scientists cannot conceive of thinking about the world in any other ways. The principle at once exhausts and limits the span of active social reasoning. My thinking regarding the irresistible tug of “actor models” is largely sparked by a conversation with Robert North, although I do not know that he would agree with my characterization of this predisposition as methodologically rooted.

66. See Shapiro, , Language and Political Understanding, pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

67. See Ollman, Alienation, Appendix 2.

68. Thompson, , Poverty of Theory, p. 77Google Scholar.

69. Ibid., pp. 77, 73.

70. Popper, , The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)Google Scholar.

71. So dangerous is the term that I must once again hasten to stress that I am addressing the logic of the neorealist movement as expressed in its theories and not the consciously held values, intentions, or ideals of individual neorealists. I readily stipulate that Krasner, Gilpin, Keohane, Waltz, and other neorealists are not champions of totalitarianism in their consciously held personal values. I readily stipulate, too, that some neorealists, like Gilpin in his War and Change, can moralize at length in their professional writings and do express pluralistic values in their moralizing. The problem is–and this is my charge–that neorealist discourse grants absolutely no scientific standing to moral norms. At best, the moralizing of neorealist scholars is recognized as a proclamation of personal commitments, belief, or faith on the part of individuals, and not as an argument whose truth content is decidable within scientific discourse or groundable within theory. The result is a scientific theory that says no to neorealists' expressed values and yes to totalitarian expectations–hence the aura of quiet despairing (but not theoretically describable irony) surrounding some neorealist arguments. Sadly, many neorealists interpret their own resignation to such a situation as a kind of scientific tough-mindedness, a form of “realism,” when in fact their situation is largely attributable to unquestioning acceptance of a moral system: the moral norms of economic reason and positivist science.

72. Morgenthau, Hans J., “The Escape from Power,” in Morgenthau's, Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 244–45Google Scholar.

73. Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World (London: Vanguard, 1952), p. 14Google Scholar. The foreword was authored in 1946.

74. Thompson, , Poverty of Theory, pp. 83–84Google Scholar.

75. See especially Bourdieu, Outline, chap. 4, “Structure, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power.”

76. Some good examples of the agenda-limiting effect of neorealist structuralism are pointed up by Craig Murphy in his discussions of Krasner's, Stephen “Transforming International Regimes: What the Third World Wants and Why,” International Studies Quarterly 25 (03 1981), pp. 119–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tucker's, Robert W.The Inequality of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar. See Murphy, , “What the Third World Wants: An Interpretation of the Development and Meaning of the New International Economic Order Ideology,” International Studies Quarterly 27 (03 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. As Wallerstein, Hopkins, and others frequently urge, the modern world system presents itself as only one unit of analysis, an N of 1.

78. Le Carré, , The Little Drummer Girl (New York: Knopf, 1983)Google Scholar.

79. Marx, Karl, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 438–39Google Scholar.

80. l develop this interpretation at greater length in Ashley, Richard K., “Three Modes of Economism,” International Studies Quarterly 27 (12 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81. Gilpin, , War and Change, p. 226Google Scholar.

82. Ibid.

83. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 63Google Scholar. In the quoted words, Waltz refers specifically to Morgenthau and Kissinger.

84. The quoted words, are all Waltz's. He includes nonrealists as well as classical realists among his targets.

85. Krasner, , Defending the National Interest, p. 37Google Scholar.

86. Morgenthau, , Politics among Nations, pp. 12–14Google Scholar.

87. Waltz, , Theory of International Politics, p. 62Google Scholar. Waltz refers specifically to “Aron and other traditionalists” in this connection.

88. See Ashley, Richard K., “Political Realism and Human Interests,” International Studies Quarterly 25 (06 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. See Kuhn's concluding contribution to Lakatos and Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth. All social scientists who work with graduate students in their research programs are “familiar” with such schemes. The generative scheme of a research program is what our “brightest” students–the ones who are really competent–seem to grasp through a kind of “fuzzy abstraction” from our own research practices. It is what allows them to do, with minimal direction, the kind of independent research we instantly recognize as exactly the kind of work we would have wanted to do but, for some reason, never thought to do. The generative scheme is also that which our “second-rate” graduate students never quite grasp when, in trying to learn from our own practices, they embarrass us by mimicking our practices too exactly under inappropriate circumstances or by following our instructions too much by rote. It is that which we spend hours trying patiently to explain to graduate students but which, we know, always loses its life once it is translated into a rule.

90. See Bourdieu's chapter, “Generative Schemes and Practical Logic: Invention within Limits,” in Outline.

91. Morgenthau, Hans J., “The Commitment of Political Science,” in his Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 39Google Scholar.

92. Bourdieu, , Outline, p. 24Google Scholar.

93. Ibid., p. 8.

94. I will not defend this choice of labels at this point; my reasoning will soon become evident. Recalling Haas's, Ernst important 1953 paper, “The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept, or Propaganda?” World Politics 5, 4Google Scholar, it may be an interesting exercise to explore whether the balance-of-power scheme discussed here could (under various circumstances) generate all eight of the meanings Haas abstracted from the relevant literatures.

95. Morgenthau, , Politics among Nations, p. 6Google Scholar.

96. Foucault, , Power/Knowledge, pp. 73–74Google Scholar. In the specific quotation, Foucault refers to the individual as an “effect of power,” but his overall argument is applicable to the empowering or constitution of all subjective agents, including the state. His “Two Lectures” address the relation between the two.

97. Wight, Martin, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Butterfield, Herbert and Wight, , eds., Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967)Google Scholar.

98. Morgenthau, Hans, “The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory,” in Morgenthau, , Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade 1960–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 254Google Scholar.

99. See Gallie, W. B., “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–1956)Google Scholar; Hampshire, Stuart, Thought and Action (New York: Viking, 1959)Google Scholar; Lukes, Stephen, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macdonald, K. I., “Is ‘Power’ Essentially Contested?” British Journal of Political Science 6 (11 1976), pp. 380–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lukes, “Reply to K. I. Macdonald,” ibid. 7 (1977), pp. 418–19; John Gray, “On the Contestability of Social and Political Concepts,” ibid. (August 1977); and Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding.

100. However, before one leaps to the conclusion that there is some fixed set of operations by which one translates certain objective requisites into “attributes of statehood,” it must be stressed that the requisites of statehood themselves depend upon collective recognition, are essentially reinterpretable, are subject to dispute, and have historically evolved.

101. This is one of the points where Ruggie and I part ways–or, perhaps, it is on this point that Ruggie needs to make more explicit what remains unclear, at least to me. In his review of Waltz, Ruggie draws interesting parallels between private property rights, as conceptualized by Locke, and sovereignty, as conceptualized by Vattel. I agree that Vattel exhibits strong parallels to Locke's atomistic and contractarian views; as Quincy Wright notes of Vattel, he “adhered to the atomistic theory which holds that international law is merely a series of contracts between wholly independent states” (Wright, , A Study of War [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964], p. 230Google Scholar). I think, too, that the parallels are provocative: Ruggie's analysis causes me to wonder if there might be more than an analogy at work here, if perhaps there is more than a coincidence between the emergence of new relations of labor and property, as justified by Locke, and the new mode of sovereignty, as justified by Vattel.

It occurs to me, however, that Ruggie may have been drawn into a scholastic argument which causes him to exaggerate the surface parallels between intellectual rationalizations at the expense of an understanding of a real difference between private property rights and sovereignty as active principles of practice. I would like to offer the view that the modern concept of sovereignty designates the collectively recognized competence of entities subject to international law and superior to municipal law. It thus involves not only the possession of self and the exclusion of others but also the limitation of self in the respect of others, for its authority presupposes the recognition of others who, per force of their recognition, agree to be so excluded. In effect, sovereignty is a practical category whose empirical contents are not fixed but evolve in a way reflecting the active practical consensus among coreflective statesmen who are ever struggling to negotiate internal and external pressures and constraints and who, if competent, orient their practices in respect of the balance-of-power scheme. Thus, one cannot say flatly that sovereign states exhibit a “form of sociality characteristic of ‘possessive individualists,’ for whom the social collectivity is merely a conventional contrivance calculated to maintain the basic mode of differentiation and to compensate for the defects of a system so organized by facilitating orderly exchange relations among the separate parts” (Ruggie, p. 278). One has to say that practice so normalized may be associated with a particular form of sovereignty under specific historical circumstances yet to be explained.

102. See especially the last chapter of Bourdieu's Outline.

103. Wight, Martin, “The Balance of Power and International Order,” in James, Alan, ed., The Bases of International Order (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

104. Morgenthau, , Politics among Nations, p. 5Google Scholar.

105. This interest in silence, it must be stressed, is not an instrumental interest, not a relation that competent statesmen consciously conceptualize in logical or means-ends terms. It is, instead, one that statesmen do not necessarily conceptualize, one best served when it is universally internalized without conceptualization.

106. The term “organic intellectual” is due to Antonio Gramsci in his path-breaking studies of hegemony. SeeHoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), especially pp. 5–14Google Scholar.

107. See Ashley, Richard K., The Political Economy of War and Peace: The Sino-Soviet American Triangle and the Modern Security Problematique (London: Frances Pinter, 1980), pp. 38 and 279–86Google Scholar.

108. Bull, Hedley, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations: The Second Martin Wight Memorial Lecture,” British Journal of International Studies 2 (1976), pp. 101–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109. Bourdieu, Outline, chap. 4.

110. A number of tendencies are relevant in this connection. Most can be associated with late capitalist development: “post-industrial” forms of state legitimation according to which the state legitimates itself, not on traditional grounds, but increasingly as an economic dysfunction manager; the fiscal crises of modern states struggling to justify themselves in these terms; the internationalization of capital and the emergence of newly industrialized countries, resulting in a malalignment of world industrial capacity with political-coercive means and traditional symbols of political power, the globalization of the world polity such that hegemonic “responsibility” is ostensibly universal, with no “external areas” remaining for the externalization of costs; the contradictions exposed through encountering “limits to growth”; the emergence of socialist movements aiming to institutionalize the public political determination of production and exchange but which are also under pressure to rationalize their politics; the Cold War, which institutionalizes the totalization of political competition; and nuclear weapons, which institutionalize the possibility of totalized warfare.

111. Ashley, , Political Economy of War and Peace, pp. 294–98Google Scholar; Hayward R. Alker Jr., “Can the End of Power Politics Possibly Be Part of the Concepts with Which Its Story Is Told?” in Alker's “Essential Contradictions, Hidden Unities” (in progress).

112. See Alker, Hayward R. Jr, “Dialectical Foundations of Global Disparities,” International Studies Quarterly 25 (03 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113. As might be inferred from this description, the capitalist power-balancing order addressed in this dialectical competence model is not understood to exhaust the totality of international political reality worthy of theoretical examination. On the contrary, while it is arguably the dominant mode of order, it is but one point of entry into the theoretical analysis of an international reality that consists of the dialectical interplay and interpenetration of multiple world orders.

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115. Morgenthau, , “Common Sense and Theories,” in Truth and Power, p. 244Google Scholar; “The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory,” p. 248; “The Commitments of Political Science,” p. 48; Scientific Man versus Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 6–7Google Scholar.

116. Morgenthau, , Politics among Nations, p. 10Google Scholar.

117. Marx, , “Eighteenth Brumaire,” p. 436Google Scholar.

118. Bourdieu describes three modes of knowledge–phenomenological, objectivist, and dialectical. For a discussion of these three modes of knowledge in the study of international politics, see Ashley, “Realist Dialectics.”

119. One major project under way is the “Dialectics of World Order” work of Hayward R. Alker Jr., Thomas Biersteker, Ijaz Gilani, and Takashi Inoguchi. See, for example, Alker, “Dialectical Foundations of Global Disparities”; Alker, and Biersteker, Thomas, “The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archaeologist of International Savoir Faire” (Delivered at the September 1982 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Denver, Colo.)Google Scholar; and Alker, , Biersteker, , and Inoguchi, , “From Imperial Power Balancing to People's Wars: Searching for Order in the Twentieth Century” (Presented at the April 1983 meeting of the International Studies Association, Mexico City)Google Scholar. The World Order Models Project, under the direction of Richard Falk and Saul Mendlovitz, can be said to exemplify a dialectical methodology of normative clarification by which competing world order developmental constructs, representing various social and cultural points of view, are exposed, confronted, and elaborated. See for example, Falk, Richard, A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Macmillan, 1975)Google Scholar. Papers by Terence Hopkins indicate an important effort toward the development of dialectical perspectives within neo-Marxist world systems analysis. See Hopkins, , “World Systems Analysis: Methodological Issues,” in Kaplan, Barbara, ed., Social Change in the Capitalist World Economy (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978)Google Scholar; and Hopkins, and Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Cyclical Rhythms and Secular Trends of the Capitalist World Economy,” Review 2, 4 (1979)Google Scholar. Johan Galtung's The True Worlds as well as his most recent methods text, Methodology and Ideology, outline and richly illustrate a dialectical approach.

120. The mention of Wallerstein reminds me to amend my earlier remarks on the commitment to “actor models” implicit in Weberian solutions to the problem of subjectivity and meaning. There is a partial exception to the claim that social scientists rooted in this tradition will generally reject as “meaningless” social analyses which do not come to rest in an “actor model.” That exception is social analyses which come to rest in “the market”; I term it a “partial” exception because market and exchange relations are generally taken to be individualist in origin within bourgeois ideology, and hence all analyses in terms of market relations can themselves be thought ultimately to come to rest in an actor model. Despite his radical intentions, Wallerstein's analysis seems now stuck in this box. His model of the capitalist world system seems to amalgamate a market-based model of production and exchange relations (one which refuses to close its eyes to the reproductive hierarchy of the global division of labor) with an actor model of state practice, a joining that has some sorry consequences. Wallerstein is left to oscillate between–without ever transcending–the poles of market force and state purpose. Worse, when called upon to account for creative moments in the system's evolution (moments that cannot be reduced to market “dynamics” within the center-periphery hierarchy) he is left only two avenues: either (a) that instrumentalist form of economism according to which the state conspires with (or is totally enslaved to) a dominant power bloc or segments of capital who themselves are close to omniscient, or (b) that idealist form of statism which credits the state with an all-seeing awareness of its situation in history, and the will and ability to change the system while perpetuating its essential structures. As this suggests, Wallersteinians offer us the choice between economistic accounts and what turn out to be, on close inspection, neorealist accounts (which, we have seen, are themselves economistic in an important sense). I do not think, by the way, that this trap is escapable via a Parsonian move in the treatment of the states system, such as the one promoted by John Meyer. It seems to me that escaping this trap will require reexamining the position that locks Wallerstein into it, namely, the Weberian position on subjectivity and meaning in social reality. Having said that, let me distance myself from a fashion current among neorealists: the ritual slaying of Immanuel Wallerstein (usually coupled with the celebration of the totemic figure of Otto Hintze). I want to state plainly my own intellectual debt to Wallerstein's pioneering work: like many American international relations theorists trained in the 1970s, I owe much to Wallerstein, not just for his theory but for the exemplary boldness of his enterprise, and his willingness (so threatening to neorealism) to punch holes in the convention-made walls of our minds.

On Wallerstein's error of anchoring his analysis in market-based explanations, see Brenner, Robert, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review no. 104 (1977)Google Scholar. See also Meyer, John W., “The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State,” in Bergesen, Albert, ed., Studies of the Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Boli-Bennett, John, “The Ideology of Expanding State Authority in National Constitutions, 1870–1970,” in Meyer, and Hannan, Michael T., eds., National Development and the World System: Educational, Economic, and Political Change, 1950–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

121. This treatment of the opposition between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the context of crisis is due to Bourdieu, , Outline, pp. 159–71Google Scholar.

122. Ibid., p. 165.

123. Ibid., p. 169.

124. Sartre, Jean-Paul, L'idiot de la famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 1Google Scholar: 783, and quoted in Bourdieu, , Outline, p. 170Google Scholar.