The ‘End of IR’ and the stagnation of the critical project

In a 2007 Millennium article, Christine Sylvester observes that IR narrowed into numerous theoretical ‘camps’ following the fourth debate, centring around particularistic notions of the international and its key relations, with minimal agreement between them as to what the field is about.Footnote ²² This led her to suggest that IR theory as a shared endeavour had come to an end, prompting a bout of introspection and stocktaking across the discipline. This has come to be known as the ‘End of IR’ debate, which has yet to reach a conclusive denouement. The journal’s 2025 annual symposium addresses the topic ‘After International Relations,’ asking inter alia ‘what is now our object of study?’ and ‘for what purpose?’.Footnote ²³ Dunne et al. argue in their intervention that IR’s comparative advantage over other social sciences is that it is theory-led, theory-literate, and theory-concerned, but express concern that theory development has been in decline since the early 2000s.Footnote ²⁴ For Chris Brown, this has been most pronounced among critical/late modern approaches relative to liberal, realist, and constructivist ones due to their limited success advancing distinctive research programmes since the fourth debate and thereby developing an integrated body of knowledge about the international on the basis of their ‘hard core’ central propositions. He attributes this to their rejection of neo-positivist social science, claiming they tend to develop theories that are more ‘world-revealing’ than ‘action-guiding.’Footnote ²⁵

Similarly, glum conclusions have been drawn by exponents of Frankfurt School critical IR. Shortly after a 2007 special issue of the Review of International Studies took stock of its achievements, a collection of interviews and reflections by leading contributors was published, motivated by a sense that the critical project had reached an impasse.Footnote ²⁶ This view has since become a common refrain. Sympathetic critics have identified a litany of shortcomings, including a loss of focus,Footnote ²⁷ Eurocentric gaze,Footnote ²⁸ detachment from contemporary world historical conditions,Footnote ²⁹ and failure to engage with political practice and inform emancipatory praxis.Footnote ³⁰ Several have concluded that critical IR has stagnated,Footnote ³¹ with some going so far as to claim the epithet ‘critical’ has become meaningless and should be dropped from scholarly parlance entirely.Footnote ³² Linklater’s work has been a frequent target of criticism, particularly its Habermasian and then Eliasian bent, often used as a point of departure by a new generation of scholars who have sought inspiration from other critical theorists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Honneth, Gramsci, Lenin, and/or Marx in their attempts to reground and revive the critical project.Footnote ³³

Whether we are convinced by Brown’s assessment or not is of less significance for the argument here than the criteria by which he comes to it. Specifically, a loosely Lakatosian conception of a research programme, defined as a collection of theories and techniques clustered around ‘hard core’ central propositions, supported by auxiliary hypotheses that help generate new knowledge, new ways of looking at, understanding, and acting in the world, considered expendable or amendable when their validity is contested by new empirical discoveries.Footnote ³⁴ This encourages us to embrace theoretical pluralism as a hallmark of IR as a mature discipline while retaining the ability to evaluate the contribution of respective approaches on their own terms, according to the extent to which they successfully advance their own research programmes by progressively generating empirical bodies of knowledge about the world. The object of appraisal is a set of theories rather than a single theory, and the aim is to develop their heuristic power based on a sophisticated methodological falsificationalism that blends an empiricist determination to learn primarily from experience with a Kantian activist approach to the theory of knowledge.Footnote ³⁵ Competing research programmes are considered successful to the extent that they lead to progressive problem shifts, characterised by the adjustment or replacement of auxiliary hypotheses that defend the hard core, contributing in turn to the generation of greater empirical content, discovery of new facts, and corroboration of theoretical advances through empirical validation.Footnote ³⁶

What follows is an attempt to frame the critical project in IR in such terms. My aim is not to offer a catalogue of the tradition, or to gatekeep, but rather to trace in outline a collective endeavour while identifying key points of internal differentiation. A secondary objective is to assess Linklater’s project, showing how it advanced first principles and can be distinguished by two further hypotheses not commonly shared by other critical IR theorists. I acknowledge that certain traditions of theory will object to being evaluated according to Lakatosian standards for not doing justice to their epistemological and methodological approaches, and/or the progressive temporality of research that it implies – in contrast to Khun’s cyclical revolutionary temporality, or Feyerabend’s anarchistic temporal pluralism, for instance.Footnote ³⁷ Nevertheless, I propose that a Lakatosian lens offers a compelling meta-theoretical framework for understanding divergent post-positivist approaches to international theory, especially those taking orientation from Hegel and Marx. It is more accepting of theoretical pluralism than Khun’s paradigmatic structure and more consistent with Hegelian–Marxian approaches to time, scientific progress, and truth than Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism. Lakatos’s sophisticated fallibilistic realism – with its convergent commitment to approximating truth more closely over time through progressive theoretical development and empirical testing – is particularly valuable for Frankfurt School IR theory, which shares Lakatos’s philosophical assumptions and has faced sustained criticism for failing to translate its anti-positivist epistemological position into a sustained research programme.Footnote ³⁸

First principles and auxiliary hypotheses

Conjecturing as to what hard-core first principles characterise critical IR could begin by stating that it deploys scholarly critique that integrates normative commitments and empirically informed social and political analysis of social conflicts, contradictions, and tendencies within and across the international for purposes of social transformation.Footnote ³⁹ We could then further delineate specific approaches branching off according to auxiliary hypotheses such as an explicit commitment to the emancipatory aims of critique, like those drawing on and extending contributions made by theorists associated with the Frankfurt School. This broad formulation has the benefit of including not only the latter but also those like Robert Cox who avoided the term ‘emancipation’ because the concept is loaded, essentially contested, and/or different intellectual influences, but who are nevertheless recognised as important contributors to critical IR.Footnote ⁴⁰ Another benefit is that it encompasses approaches influenced by other strands of critical theory and social movements such as feminism,Footnote ⁴¹ poststructuralism,Footnote ⁴² postcolonial/decolonial theory,Footnote ⁴³ and/or psychoanalysisFootnote ⁴⁴ that sometimes but not always explicitly cite freedom, liberation, and/or emancipation as orienting normative commitments.

The next step would be to identify distinctive theories or approaches and their auxiliary hypotheses. For instance, Andrew Linklater’s project follows first principles by integrating a normative commitment to moral cosmopolitanismFootnote ⁴⁵ with empirically informed analyses of citizenship,Footnote ⁴⁶ community,Footnote ⁴⁷ and harm,Footnote ⁴⁸ with the aim of contributing to the progressive realisation of increasingly solidaristic forms of international and world society.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition to his commitment to the emancipatory aims of critique, his trajectory was distinguished by at least two further auxiliary hypotheses: (i) the necessarily tripartite structure of critical theory, a position outlined and defended below; and (ii) his view that the Marxian historical materialist problematic needed to be ‘reconstructed.’ This was shared with other neo-Kantian and post-Marxist critical theorists such as Jurgen Habermas, but is rejected here and by several other contributors to critical IR.Footnote ⁵⁰

In contrast, Robert Cox’s contribution adheres to first principles by being guided by the pursuit of goals broadly related to an emancipatory politics. It is underpinned by historical/empirical analysis of social structures of hegemony and imperialism within and across the international, aiming to identify conflicts and contradictions in and between social forces, states, and world order in which possibilities exist for world politics to be changed through the strategic exercise of human agency.Footnote ⁵¹ In terms of auxiliary hypotheses, Cox’s project relied on an essentially Marxian (i.e., Gramscian) historical materialist sociology concerned with relations of hierarchy, domination, class, and exploitation in social relations of production, focused on those disadvantaged by capitalist globalisation and restructuring of the international.Footnote ⁵² Although he did not elucidate his normative commitments and rejected characterisations of his work as ‘emancipatory,’ the politics of his project nevertheless includes emancipatory themes such as freedom from slavery, recovering control over public life, and subordinating the world economy to a regime of social equity.Footnote ⁵³

The tripartite structure of critical theory

The scope and ambition of Linklater’s project mean he has justifiably been credited with being the ‘foremost critical theorist of IR’Footnote ⁵⁴ and (perhaps too flatteringly) ‘one of the leading social and political theorists working in the world today.’Footnote ⁵⁵ This stature owes much to his commitment to what he called the necessarily tripartite structure of critical theory, which shaped his thinking from the beginning of his career to the end. Notably, this was inspired by Kant and Marx, not the Frankfurt School.

According to his lifelong friend, colleague, and collaborator Hidemi Suganami, Linklater was probably first influenced by Raymond Aron’s Peace and War, which he read in preparation for his final exams as an undergraduate in 1970/71 and which comprises of four parts: Theory, Sociology, History, and Praxeology.Footnote ⁵⁶ Linklater’s first three books – Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations,Footnote ⁵⁷ Beyond Realism and Marxism,Footnote ⁵⁸ and Transformation of Political Community Footnote ⁵⁹ – were all framed by this idea, which received sustained attention and detailed development in articles published in the early 1990s in Alternatives and Millennium. Footnote ⁶⁰ It ultimately led to his trilogy of work on harm, violence, and civilisation,Footnote ⁶¹ and he reiterated his commitment to it in an interview in 2012. Asked about the future tasks of critical theory, he responded:

As Linklater explained, his tripartite project recalls the three-layered approaches to IR found in Kant and Marx. In Kant, a normative defence of perpetual peace is found in the categorical imperative, tied in turn to a sociological account of the prospects for its realisation through logics of development (i.e., the transformative rise of republicanism and the evolution of commercial relations), and an adherence to an ethical foreign policy that would not undermine the extension of cosmopolitan obligations beyond the nation-state.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, the Marxian project of historical materialism entails a normative vision of free and equal producers, tied to an explanatory sociological framework according to which the internationalisation of capitalist social relations would erode constraints on the development of an increasingly cosmopolitan community, along with a praxeological commitment to proletarian internationalism that could realise higher possibilities of human freedom immanent within capitalist society.Footnote ⁶⁴

The lesson that Linklater drew from Kant and Marx is that the normative, sociological, and praxeological are interdependent areas of inquiry, with a posture in one affecting positions taken in the others. He noted that it is usually that taken at the sociological level that holds the key to other levels of discussion, offering the example of the sociological emphasis in realism on the inescapable logic of geopolitical competition and war which, he argues, carries ‘the implication that normative analyses of alternative world orders are redundant and inquiries into the character of “reformist” policy are otiose.’ On the other hand, the competing claim that patterns of social and economic change have widened the sense of obligation and community beyond the nation-state conversely entails the implication that an ‘analysis of the normative purpose of foreign policy and of alternative global economic and political structures immediately acquires greater significance.’Footnote ⁶⁵

Of the two, Kant was a far stronger influence than Marx. His 1978 PhD thesis Obligations Beyond the State was an essentially Kantian contribution to international political theory, later published as Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations in 1982.Footnote ⁶⁶ The second edition, published in 1990, included a postscript on Habermas and Foucault, reflecting his ‘turn’ to Frankfurt School critical theory. Linklater’s second book Beyond Realism and Marxism Footnote ⁶⁷ was published in the same year and is commonly overshadowed by the ‘mature’ statement of his critical international political theory in The Transformation of Political Community,Footnote ⁶⁸ but alongside the two aforementioned journal articlesFootnote ⁶⁹ remains pivotal in the development of his project and self-positioning as regards the field of international theory. It is here that he draws an important analogy between the dialectical development of the ‘three sociologies’ – positivism, hermeneutics, and critical sociology – and Martin Wight’s ‘three traditions’ of international theory: realism, rationalism, and revolutionism. He argued that just as a critical theory of society ought to incorporate the achievements of positivism and hermeneutics, a critical theory of IR should aim to incorporate the achievements of realism and rationalism.Footnote ⁷⁰

Linklater reminds us that the primary concerns of those three traditions are power, order, and emancipation, each accompanied by distinctive sociological, normative, and praxeological positions. Realism is grounded in a sociology that regards the struggle for power and security as paramount in any system of states, linked to a normative critique of cosmopolitan designs and panaceas, and a praxeology concerned with the prudential conduct of foreign policy aimed at controlling or outmanoeuvring adversaries under conditions of conflict, managing the balance of power, and pursuing national interests. For its part, rationalism is grounded in a sociological vision of an anarchical society in which multiple communities interact, including the sovereign state, the society of states, and a potential world society. It is concerned with processes through which systems of states have been transformed into societies of states regulated by principles of coexistence through socialisation and a pragmatic shared interest in restraining the use of force. This is accompanied by an interest in the normative grounds and scope of the principles and patterns of their mutual relations, such as state autonomy, human rights, and humanitarianism, and the praxis of maintaining order and civility while managing primary goals of international and world society through institutions, including diplomacy, law, and war. Meanwhile, revolutionism rejects the view that empirical divisions between states are anything more than transitory, emphasising instead a deeper sociological reality of a universal community of humankind that exists at least as a potentiality. Accordingly, the principal lines of conflict across the international are not between nation-states, but trustees of this immanent community and those preventing its emergence. Both transcendent (e.g., Kantian) and immanent (e.g., Marxian) normative grounds are offered for this cosmopolitical sociological position, linked to praxeologies, including reform of existing international institutions by ‘duty-bound moral politicians’ (e.g., Kant) and international proletarian revolution (e.g., Marx). The gulf between these two poles led Wight to distinguish ‘soft’ revolutionists like Kant and Nehru from ‘hard’ revolutionists like the Jacobins and Marxists, and concede that a quadruple classification might be more apt.Footnote ⁷¹

Linklater’s own project can best be understood as a contribution to the ‘soft’ revolutionist tradition and an extension of the solidaristic approach to the English School. He sought to mediate and transcend insights of realism, rationalism, and Marxism according to a dialectical logic of sublation, underwritten by a Kantian progressivist concern with the development of increasingly decent forms of world political organisation. A central contention was that the tripartite framework could serve as a tool to facilitate a back-and-forth between different theoretical perspectives that may be valid but nonetheless remain limited and one-sided from the perspective of critical theory. For example, he endorsed Marx’s commitment to universal emancipation but thought that Marxism underestimated logics of power, order, strategic competition, and war. Consequently, we must appreciate the need for classical realist methods of protecting the state and rationalist defences of order and legitimacy in the context of anarchy at this stage in history, because emancipation would not progress if international order was in decline.Footnote ⁷² Nevertheless, from the perspective of critical theory, realism can only be true if the species is unfree: it offers an account of historical circumstances that humans have yet to bring under our collective control, and lacks an account of how this could be achieved. Linklater thought that the theoretical resources to pursue this task could be found in the English School. For instance, by extending Wight’s sociology of state systems while focusing on prospects for the transformation of international society into more solidaristic forms of association by foregrounding developments that might strengthen the bonds of the international community, while nevertheless acknowledging that the struggle for power and security constrains progress in IR and recognising that States commonly prioritise order over justice.Footnote ⁷³

During a bout of introspection in the early 1990s about what IR is and ought to be about, not dissimilar to that of the 2010s, Linklater combined his hypothesis about the tripartite structure of critical theory with his reading of Habermas to propose that critical IR was uniquely positioned to map a way forward for the discipline by assembling powerful strands of argument from competing perspectives ‘into a more systematic and comprehensive whole.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Premised on the view that an emancipatory approach ought to be more central to the field, ‘the next stage’ of international theory would be to recover the project begun in different ways by Kant and Marx, giving the field renewed direction and coherence by reunifying IR under the guidance of critical theory.

This is an appeal for ambitious, nuanced, intellectually engaged, and epistemologically reflexive inquiry, encouraging us to draw from and augment a diverse array of scholarship, including different theoretical approaches, seen as potentially complementary sources of internal dynamism and vitality. Paralleling his own ‘soft’ revolutionist rationalism, Linklater approvingly cites Ken Booth’s Security and Anarchy as an example of how an emancipatory approach might be incorporated into realism and strategic studies.Footnote ⁷⁵ Both scholars shed light on central issues of world politics from the perspective of human liberation, anticipating contemporary introspection about IR’s object and purpose of study.Footnote ⁷⁶ If heeded, Linklater’s proposal would actively counter the kind of fragmentation and self-referentiality that has concerned contributors to the End of IR theory debate, or retreats into scholasticism or metatheory that others have identified as a weakness of contemporary critical IR,Footnote ⁷⁷ while remaining transparent about its normative commitments: a notable shortcoming of other critical theories, including Cox’s.Footnote ⁷⁸ To an extent, it was. Booth deserves more credit than Linklater for the so-called ‘Aberystwyth School(s)’ of critical security and terrorism studies, but the theoretically consonant approaches the pair developed as luminaries of critical IR left an indelible mark on research trajectories of generations of scholars, not least hundreds of them (this author included) who passed through Aberystwyth’s Department of International Politics since 1999 when they were appointed as EH Carr and Woodrow Wilson chairs, respectively. Yet this is not an indication of the scholarly purchase of Linklater’s metatheoretical proposition, which has largely been neglected in the literature.Footnote ⁷⁹

Although Linklater cites Kant, Marx, and Habermas as influences, his epistemological warrant is provided by Hegel.Footnote ⁸⁰ This is well explained by Richard J. Bernstein, who provides a more comprehensive account of the ‘three sociologies’ as mirroring the movement of self-reflection that reason takes through forms of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit to achieve a fuller understanding of their respective contributions and limitations on the way to freedom. The crux is that an adequate social and political theory must be empirical, interpretive, and critical, because these are mutually implicated and internally related moments of theoretical consciousness. This is why Jahn’s criticism that Linklater equates realism with positivism and rationalism with hermeneutics is somewhat unfair.Footnote ⁸¹ Linklater’s analogy is not that all realists are positivists and all rationalists are interpretivists, but that an adequate international theory needs to be realist, rationalist, and revolutionary, because these are all necessary and complementary perspectives on the whole (i.e., social totality/the international). As Habermas argues, it is the emancipatory interest of the critical social sciences to provide us with insights into relations of power. Realism and rationalism both do this, but they remain insufficient from the perspective of critical theory until their insights are oriented towards emancipatory praxis.Footnote ⁸² As we will see, the problem with Linklater’s project is that he commits the same mistake as Habermas: smuggling in his normative biases about what emancipation actually means in the guise of an objective analysis of reason.Footnote ⁸³ This structures and informs his approach, and became a lightning rod for critical engagement with it, overshadowing what I suggest remains his most important contribution: the necessarily tripartite structure of critical theory. It can also be avoided – by pivoting from Hegel rather than Kant.

The ‘reconstruction’ of historical materialism

Linklater’s project was weakened by several crucial shortcomings. Prime among them was that it remained detached from real-world struggles, leading the question of emancipation to become increasingly alienated from the experiences of the dominated themselves, located instead in civilising processes taking place above them.Footnote ⁸⁴ Consequently, his normative commitments and sociological outlook grew increasingly out of step with empirical realities, and his praxeological analysis remained underdeveloped and unconvincing. This is because, rather than grounding his normative and praxeological claims in critical sociological analysis of relations of power, it was his normative position that ultimately grounded his sociology and praxeology. Despite emphasising the importance of historical sociology, Linklater never really engaged in empirical sociology, nor indeed political practice. Instead, he developed an empirical philosophy of history that focused on the evolution of moral norms by drawing on the sociological work of Elias and Wight.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although he made the convincing argument that normative arguments ‘are incomplete without a parallel sociological account of how they can be realised in practice, and normative and sociological advances are incomplete without some reflection on practical possibilities,’Footnote ⁸⁶ his sociological analysis played a subordinate and functional role: helping to realise the normative claims of critical theory.Footnote ⁸⁷

Linklater’s central premise was a foundational commitment to a particular kind of moral universalism. This led him to explore philosophical, sociological, and practical questions of moral inclusion and exclusion across the related problem areas of community, citizenship, and harm. His defence of moral universalism in Men and Citizens drew on Kant to reconcile ethical obligations to fellow citizens with those that we owe to the rest of humanity, restated in Transformation where Habermas’s discourse ethics was deployed to argue that all human beings have a prima facie right to be included in universal communities of discourse to decide the legitimacy of global arrangements.Footnote ⁸⁸ His procedural universalism was reconfigured once again in later work, which drew on Norbert Elias and others to theorise harm, violence, and civilisation. His order of priority is clearly demonstrated in the introduction to The Problem of Harm, wherein he wrote: ‘the case for a sociology of states-systems is constructed in light of the moral belief, which moved to the forefront of social inquiry during the Enlightenment, that human beings can reorganise the social world to end cruelty and misery.’Footnote ⁸⁹

This normative commitment fundamentally shaped Linklater’s sociology. He extended Habermas’s emphasis on social learning, the capacity to engage all others in inclusive and universal discourse, and moral-practical learning, according to which human beings create increasingly consensual social relations over time, to his consideration of the international. This initially took the form of an exploration of how globalisation was contributing to the development of post-Westphalian forms of community governed more by dialogue and consent than by power and force, such as in Western Europe in the late twentieth century,Footnote ⁹⁰ before later work extended Martin Wight’s sociology of state systems combined with Norbert Elias’s process sociology of moral-practical learning to explore how moral communities have expanded and contracted over the course of history, and independent political communities have established shared principles of coexistence.Footnote ⁹¹ Linklater’s final works focused on the development of a sociology of symbols in world politics and how they might promote wider solidarities between peoples and non-human species and ecosystems.Footnote ⁹² The common thread was to try to identify socio-political indicators of cosmopolitan commitments that might presage a move beyond the particularism of nation-states to a potentially universal society of free beings and achieve progress in organising societies’ external relations in accordance with universalistic principles such as harm conventions, international human rights norms, and laws of war.Footnote ⁹³

Having demonstrated that structures and practices of modern IR have changed in the past and might be changed in the future leads to questions of practice and transition.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet Linklater’s understanding of praxeology is more moralistic than realistic, defined as: ‘reflecting on the moral resources within existing social arrangements which political actors can harness for radical purposes.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Consequently, his neo-Kantian constitutionalist approach to international society was more reformist than radical, principally concerned with the construction of a humanistic world order, prevention of unnecessary suffering, and advancing a politics of universal inclusion through human rights, cosmopolitan conventions, and a global ethic of responsibility for nature.Footnote ⁹⁶ Somewhat naively, the agents of emancipation are presumed to be state officials because, again following Kant rather than Marx, Linklater equates praxis to the exercise of an ethical foreign policy, whereby ‘the potential for internationalism which exists in most modern states can be realised in international conventions which enshrine the moral principles of an alternative world order.’Footnote ⁹⁷

These shortcomings can ultimately be attributed to Linklater’s second auxiliary hypothesis: that Marx’s historical materialist problematic needs to be ‘reconstructed.’Footnote ⁹⁸ This is premised on his neo-Kantian understanding of freedom, which underwrote his ‘post-Marxist’ sociology that eschewed traditional Marxist concerns with capitalism, class, crisis, and the collective self-emancipation of the proletariat. The regrettable result is that the political economic dimensions of contemporary capitalism are not a primary concern, emancipatory possibilities are foreshortened, and radicalism is abandoned in the foremost strand of critical IR.

Linklater thought that ‘genuine emancipation’ depended on our historically and socially conditioned capacity to adopt a universalistic point of view as members of the human race, and he considered Marx too ‘partisan’ for failing to ‘penetrate beyond the level of particular class interests to disclose the fundamental interests of mankind as such.’Footnote ⁹⁹ Here, Linklater found common ground with Habermas, somewhat tendentiously reading Frankfurt School critical theory as a critique of historical materialism.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He shared Habermas and Giddens’ assessments that sociological analysis must move beyond a Marxian focus on the paradigm of production to the paradigm of communication and develop a more sophisticated historical sociology than that found in Marxism. This would recognise class and production as one of several axes of exclusion (N.B. exclusion rather than alienation, domination, or exploitation) and offer an improved normative standpoint according to which universal emancipation is not confined to the self-emancipation of the proletariat, but is aimed instead at overcoming class inequalities and democratising all dimensions of social, economic, and political life.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Linklater thought that Marx overestimated the importance of the proletariat for social structure and historical change and underestimated the role of interaction and language in the creation of orderly societies. He also criticised Marx for underestimating the impact of strategic competition and war on human history and thought it necessary to provide ‘a more sophisticated analysis of the anchorage of the state than the Marxist tradition has provided,’ particularly given the unprecedented development of instruments of physical violence, which Marx could not foresee. In terms of his normative orientation, Linklater endorsed Habermas’s neo-Kantian voluntaristic position that good societies should express the will of their members, which he believed provided a more adequate account of social evolution and an improved normative standpoint to evaluate social relations than could be found in the Marxist tradition.Footnote ¹⁰²

Linklater’s second hypothesis was a misstep for the critical project in IR and has largely been recognised as such by a new generation of scholars.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is predicated on untenable normative and sociological assumptions, including liberal norms of consent, the power of dialogue, an ultimate harmony of interests, and a functionalist understanding of capitalism, as opposed to one that assumes an antagonistic social totality based on the exploitative accumulation of capital and class struggle.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ His distinction between his own normative commitment to the species as a whole as the object of universal emancipation from a classical Marxian focus on the international proletariat is philosophically questionable,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and he overestimates the historical agency and emancipatory potential of white male metropolitan elites.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Empirical and theoretical realities have also changed since the anti- and post-Marxist 1980s and 1990s. Although Linklater insisted that capitalism was not the dominant social logic of the times,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ it is undermining the material basis of a habitable planet and is central to overlapping crises transforming world order. The threat that it poses is no longer primarily to the international proletariat but increasingly also to humanity at large, non-human species, and ecosystems. It is internally contradictory, constitutively imperialist, and cannot be universalised as a form of life within the earth’s biophysical limits.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ His suggestion that states pursue ethical foreign policies and promote principles of social justice by acting as ‘good international citizens’ and local agents of a world common goodFootnote ¹⁰⁹ may reflect the ‘zeitgeist of 1990s globalisation theory’Footnote ¹¹⁰ but appears almost quaint today. As Samir Amin put it: ‘at this stage the [world] system deserves to be called senile and therefore its only future is to cede its place to ‘another world’ that may be better or worse,’ and the struggle over which of these two eventualities will be brought about will be determined by the active intervention of all social forces, not just the proletariat.Footnote ¹¹¹ Meanwhile, advances in Marxist sociological, normative, and critical theory on the state, geopolitics, war, revolution, imperialism, world order, ecology, gender, and race undermine Linklater’s criticisms that these shortcomings warrant a post-Marxist critical theory.Footnote ¹¹²

(Re)vitalising the emancipatory project

It has been argued so far that Linklater’s tripartite framework was a compelling way to frame the critical theoretical approach to IR, but that shortcomings attributed to his ‘post-Marxist’ hypothesis weakened his project. One benefit of conceptualising critical IR in Lakatosian terms is that it encourages us to periodically reconsider its ‘hard core’ and auxiliary hypotheses, accounting for changes in empirical realities and advances in theory development. This may lead to a progressive problem shift if altering or replacing principles and/or methods increases the programme’s explanatory power, allowing it to grow in significance, generate new facts, new techniques, and new theories consistent with the hard core.Footnote ¹¹³ This section suggests that reconsidering Linklater’s first principles derived from Kant and Marx, shorn of his secondary hypothesis, while following a different path through classical sources of the tradition, could lead to such a shift.

First, we must rectify the order of priority in the tripartite structure so that any critical approach is grounded in concrete historical and political analysis rather than normative bias.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As Jahn notes, a substantial part of the writings of first-generation Frankfurt School critical IR is taken up with rejecting Marx and Horkheimer’s insistence that critical theory must rest on a substantive analysis of society. This is generally considered to be the task of a social science, but their epistemological critique of the positivist distinction between facts and values was not used as a basis to develop a more rigorous, reflexivist, post-positivist methodology that incorporated both empirical and normative analysis, leading to a kind of speculative idealism that impedes what Marx calls ‘real humanism.’Footnote ¹¹⁵ A detailed explication of what this might entail is beyond the scope of this article, but from a left-Hegelian perspective of detranscendentalised reason, rationality is simultaneously context-dependent and context-transcendent. Following this immanent-transcendent and inter-subjective conception of reason, the substantive content of general concepts such as freedom, equality, and emancipation is mediated by changing experiences and concrete relations of society, but the concepts themselves remain sufficiently autonomous to act as normative anchors that generate a basis of critique and permit consideration of counter-factuals: not just what is the case, but what could be.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The critical theorist’s role is to mediate between the immanent and the transcendent, navigating gaps between ideas, their practical actualisation, and potential to overcome them through social transformation. The validity of concepts and proposals remains subject to critique, extension, and transformation, allowing them to reach beyond their initial context depending on further social and political validation.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The ontological correlate is an understanding of freedom and emancipation that is more immanent, historical, and worldly than can be found in Kant. Although Linklater incorporates Hegel and Marx into his international theory, he ultimately treads a path from Kant to Hegel and Marx and back to Kant again.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Kant, Hegel, and Marx all understood emancipation as an ongoing process of negating the conditions that negate human freedom. For Kant, this was achieved by removing barriers to the subject’s critical use of reason in pursuit of enlightenment as a condition of exercising individual autonomy (i.e., ethical subjectivity). Hegel and Marx advanced Kant’s critical philosophy by collapsing the distinction between subject and object, overcoming Kant’s abstract formalism and detranscendentalising reason to emphasise the deeply relational, socially, and historically conditioned nature of subjectivity, freedom, and emancipation. The result is a conception of the subject that is fundamentally interpenetrated by the objects that it confronts; that is, the totality of social relations. The problem is that Linklater never adequately grasped this deep social relationalism, or its epistemological and ontological repercussions.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Instead, he reads Hegel through ‘the kaleidoscope of a Kantian conception of the subject’ via his normative foundationalism and conception of emancipation as the historical self-actualisation of the constitutive ethical subject, a conception to which Hegel was profoundly opposed.Footnote ¹²⁰

For Hegel, emancipation is the historical realisation of the overriding normative value of autonomy, its universalisation, and institutionalisation in an emancipated form of life. It begins with the negation of external authority (such as God, Nature, the monarch) but ends with recognition that this negation must itself be given positive form in social and political institutions that articulate and ground substantive forms of freedom and equality.Footnote ¹²¹ Principles of individual freedom and collective self-determination become increasingly universalised as standards of social emancipation as we learn from historical experience to recognise each other as free agents through institutions that we feel increasingly ‘at home’ with (bei sich) when they constitute us as such.Footnote ¹²² The French and Haitian revolutions represent the apotheosis of this process because they announced the end of traditional authority, whereby the will accepts no authority that is not created out of the will itself, laying the foundation for potentially non-alienated modern political forms in which universal values of freedom, equality, and solidarity might be realised and upheld.Footnote ¹²³

For his part, Marx was notoriously inexplicit about what he thought emancipation actually meant, beyond contrasting human emancipation from merely ‘political’ emancipation.Footnote ¹²⁴ Needless to say, ‘genuine’ emancipation involved the labouring masses liberating themselves from economic exploitation. However, as Bromberg has argued, it is better understood as a ‘vague and distant’ vision aimed at overcoming all forms of exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles, to realise a different kind of social freedom through a (second) revolutionary transformation of society that would actualise the immanent potential of the one-sided and limited civic-political freedoms secured in bourgeois revolutions such as those of England and France.Footnote ¹²⁵ Marx thereby extends Hegel’s logic of emancipation as a social and historical process of overcoming alienation, generalising it from the ‘ethical state’ to the products of our labour and humanity at large, aimed not only at overcoming capitalism and class society, but also the full development of consciousness and human relations through a continuous transformation of society (a ‘revolution in permanence’).Footnote ¹²⁶ The central difference between them is that whereas Hegel thought the task of philosophy was essentially retrospective and passive, aimed at understanding contradictions and reconciling with the irreducibility of contradiction, Marx emphasised the active side of thought and hence the importance of practical activity, thinking-in-practice, or simply praxis, aimed at overcoming contradictions through proletarian self-emancipation. For both, a commitment to the actual universality of freedom and equality is a historical achievement, only realised and sustained by us.Footnote ¹²⁷

Antonio Gramsci’s oeuvre represents one development of this tradition.Footnote ¹²⁸ As Peter Thomas argues, Gramsci considered the process of subalternisation to be an essential logic of political modernity, advanced through passive revolutionary transitions of the late nineteenth century and the establishment of the bourgeois integral state. He extends Marx’s revolutionary project into a praxis of subaltern self-emancipation, through which subaltern classes rediscover and develop their capacity for social and political autonomy and remove themselves from servitude through the practice of desubalternisation. Here, emancipatory politics can be understood as an open-ended constituent process aimed at constructing a future autonomous sociopolitical order within and by means of forms of struggle in the present, and the art of trying to produce progress by resolving immanent contradictions of existing sociopolitical orders in enabling ways. As such, historical progress is understood not in terms of an abstract empirical philosophical anthropology of universal moral sentiments, but rather that which is at stake in concrete socio-political struggles. Importantly, emancipation must be actively produced by subaltern political subjects contesting and resolving the contradictions of political modernity, forcing bourgeois society beyond itself through the immanent sublation of its own constitutive limits. For instance, if popular sovereignty is affirmed in theory but not in practice, as it commonly is in IR, what changes are necessary to better ground social institutions in the active consent of those from whom power and authority is ultimately derived?Footnote ¹²⁹ This represents one way of developing a more persuasive and praxeologically attuned approach to emancipation, conceived not in terms of the capacity to adopt a universalistic moral point of view over the long durée, as Linklater’s Kantian reading of Hegel and Marx concludes,Footnote ¹³⁰ but rather upholding ‘the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, and contemptible being’Footnote ¹³¹ by continually ‘translat[ing] the challenges of a given conjuncture into the organisational forms and practices that represent their real critique and resolution.’Footnote ¹³²

This should not be read simply as a call for a return to Hegel, Marx, and/or Gramsci; or indeed a rejection of Kant. Instead, the aim is to show how critical IR might advance based on Hegel’s completion of Kant’s critical philosophy and Marx’s radicalisation of it. Of several profound ontological and epistemological implications that follow includes a critical theory that is animated by a different kind of universalism and a different kind of subject: a universalism grounded in subaltern struggles and emancipatory praxis and a non-constitutive subject that is more thoroughly interpenetrated by the totality of social relations; a totality that, in turn, remains an object of critique and ongoing transformation. Placing greater emphasis on the actual praxis of emancipation would recognise what Linklater’s project apparently elides: that universal history is not written in the academy but is forged in transformative struggles from below.Footnote ¹³³ Drawing on Gramsci to illustrate the point is nonetheless deliberate: to foreground his revolutionary concern with self-emancipation that Cox and other neo-Gramscian approaches to IR have been rightly criticised for underemphasising,Footnote ¹³⁴ and to demonstrate that the creative problem shift called for here is not limited to those inspired by the Frankfurt School tradition, but all those taking inspiration from Kant, Hegel, and Marx. To an extent, other approaches are already consonant with this deeper social relationism, including poststructuralist ethico-political frameworks, relational international theory, and sociologies such as uneven and combined development or global historical sociology.Footnote ¹³⁵ These are potential sources of inspiration for Frankfurt School approaches, which would be distinguished by their emphasis on the necessity of totalising critique and a practical interest in human freedom. That is, critical reflection on questions of totality (e.g., world society) and structure (e.g., global capitalism) and normative commitment to their emancipatory transformation.Footnote ¹³⁶

Radical realism

This section demonstrates how we might combine Linklater’s tripartite structure with a more rigorous reflexive methodology while eschewing his neo-Kantian foundationalism to develop a more radical and realistic approach to critical international theory. The basic proposition is that what Wight calls the ‘hard’ revolutionary tradition deserves greater prominence in the discipline today.Footnote ¹³⁷ To overcome the shortcomings of first-generation Frankfurt School critical IR, this must be more praxeologically attuned and sociologically grounded in contemporary world historical conditions and emancipatory struggles, particularly those beyond the West.Footnote ¹³⁸ It would be more radical by analysing them through a holistic and totalising critique to shed light on their underlying causes and permissive conditions in world society and global capitalist relations of production, remaining open to the potential necessity of transformative change to resolve them.Footnote ¹³⁹ It would be more realistic by being empirically grounded in the realities of political life, recognising the centrality of power, the ineradicable nature of sociopolitical conflict, and the potential for theory to have practical force through praxis. Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Sociologically, normatively, and praxeologically, this radical realism would be of a more internationalist, rather than simply cosmopolitan (or even statist), disposition.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As Pal reminds us, Marxist scholarship challenges liberal, realist, and English School sociological assumptions about the emergence of the modern world as a European qua international order of nation-states, foregrounding instead relations of domination, exploitation, and power asymmetries at the heart of capitalist globalisation and state formation.Footnote ¹⁴² This undermines cosmopolitan assumptions underlying Linklater’s solidarist reformism and its sanitised account of the international in favour of an internationalist sociology recognising that the rise of global modernity, inter-state system, and spread of capitalist social relations is predicated on conflictual and contested inter-societal dynamics that include racism, colonialism, and imperialism.Footnote ¹⁴³ Just as Marx was not a political economist but a critic of political economy, and Gramsci was not a political scientist but a critic of political science,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ critical international theory might best be understood as a critique of IR, at least to the extent that the discipline still assumes ontological primacy of states over social relations rather than vice versa. This is not a novel assertion, or a controversial one. E. H. Carr (following V. I. Lenin) recognised that ‘politics begins where the masses are.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Yet as Heine and Teschke observe, with the notable exception of Fred Halliday and his work on revolutions, ‘no-empirically controlled theoretical account emerged in post-war IR which dealt systematically with the role of the masses or collective social action in the making and unmaking of regimes, states, or even entire states-systems.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Thirty years later, better grounding international historical sociology on the premise that history is ultimately made by ‘masses in motion’ remains a priority.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Renewed geopolitical conflict, nuclear escalation, and proliferation of deadly new means of warfare mean that the traditional ‘core’ of the discipline, as concerned with inter-state war, security dilemmas, and strategic challenges, cannot be left to the mainstream, underlining the continued importance of approaches such as Booth’s utopian realism as one strand of this project.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Nevertheless, sociopolitical and economic crises and breakdown of liberal order means that another must continue looking beyond a conception of the international qua inter-state relations, emphasising concerns of the Majority World, conflicts between champions of the existing order and challengers, feasible alternatives to it, and potential for emancipatory sociopolitical transformations; while accounting for the role of mass politics and ‘force and iron ruthlessness’ in world history.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This would recognise the need for new post-national political forms to address ‘dual imperatives of popular sovereignty (autonomy) and international solidarity (or interdependence)’Footnote ¹⁵⁰ but also shortcomings of the European Union as a possible blueprint for a post-Westphalian order.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Those with Hegelian–Marxian sympathies might extend the tradition of crisis critique to various contemporary and historical crises, the social contradictions giving rise to them, and the prospects for ‘realistic utopias’Footnote ¹⁵² that might be found within them. This includes the profusion of transformation crises worldwide wrought by pressures placed on social orders by configurations of global modernity and the transition towards a decentred globalist world order.Footnote ¹⁵³

A substantive normative anchor could be provided by the Hegelian–Marxian conception of emancipation as the historical actualisation of universal values of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As Çubukçu explains, citing Balibar, internationalism can be further distinguished as a value and a practice from the vague and abstract invocations of a universal human community or global society often found in the normative and English School traditions, their differences traceable to the divergent legacies of Kant and Marx.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ While cosmopolitanism tends to appeal to an ‘objective,’ a priori, and/or transcendental unity of a singular humanity, radical internationalism stresses instead its plurality, unevenness, differential, and uneven constitution. The former conjures an idea of humanity as a single race that shares ‘the world’ in common, whereas the latter emphasises the differences, conflicts, and work of diverse political agents involved in the formation and self-consciousness of an always partial and limited collective human ‘we.’ An internationalist approach demands not just rhetorical invocation of the human race as an abstract but ‘objective unity’ (such as of a biological or ontological kind) or claiming its contemporary ‘empirical unification’ (such as by processes of globalisation) but also acknowledging the crucial role of movements and social forces (e.g., feminist, socialist, indigenous, black, Third Worldist, peasant, and ecological) actively engaged in the ongoing construction of a humanity-to-come through collective struggles against injustice, oppression, exploitation, despoilation, degradation, and militarism.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Linklater’s criticism that Marx was too partisan is premised on a naïve and dated neo-Kantian ideal that fails to appreciate the fundamentally partisan nature of ‘real’ politics, primarily concerned with power and oriented towards action and practical interventions.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ It also betrays the fact that, from abolitionists in Haiti or the American Civil War, suffragettes and anti-fascist partisans in World War Two, to uprisings against oppressive regimes and direct action against profiteers in planetary destruction and/or genocidal military campaigns, it is often the partisan who advances the position of humanity as such. This is because, as Çubukçu continues, emancipation is always a necessarily collective and partisan task; it is always a partisan and partial ‘we’ who resolves to take sides to challenge and oppose the social, political, and economic faultlines that divide us, thereby negating that which negates the idea of ‘a world’ that we share in common.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ It is in collective struggles for a more humane world, against political and socioeconomic forces experienced as alienated, oppressive, or exploitative, that we might find subjective agents of human emancipation, not the halls of formally constituted political power.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Praxeologically, a more radical and realistic approach would generate scholarship that offers better insights for action, not simply hoping to inform elite-led reforms from above but also building knowledge and power from below, to make another world socially possible.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ For 50 years, activists and organisers have been encouraged to channel progressive demands through bourgeois frameworks, including human rights and democracy promotion while engaging in transnational activism centring on the United Nations and dominant liberal states. This has helped undermine popular power and stabilise a transnational elite agenda.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Yet increasingly even reformist liberal claims are met with indifference and multilateral institutions are outdated and riven by dysfunction. Not only must we cultivate greater self-reliance, but, as Celikates reminds us, the emancipation that critical theory aims for is self-emancipation and the transformation it aims for is self-transformation. In other words, we must reconsider the relation between critical theory and its addressees, look beyond the traditional intra-scientific context of justification, better engage with the needs and interests of the wider public, and be more concerned with having a practical effect.Footnote ¹⁶¹ This may entail emphasising the agency and political importance of progressive subaltern social groups challenging dominant forms of order, being more responsive and accountable to them and their aims, and producing work that is accessible and of interest to them. It could involve clarifying concrete possibilities for emancipatory political action, and ways to more fully actualise their capacities to act as autonomous political forces to exert greater influence in collective struggles over what Touraine called ‘historicity:’ the way that society produces and reproduces itself.Footnote ¹⁶² It might include an explicit concern with strategy,Footnote ¹⁶³ such as how to better engage in collective action, build movements and political parties, gain leverage against oppositional forces, strengthen internationalist bonds of solidarity, and engage effectively with states and multilateral institutions.

Methodologically, some might emulate Linklater’s grand synthetic approach, although a less daunting task would be to conceive of the critical project in more piecemeal terms as a collective endeavour undertaken by a community of inquiry (in the classical pragmatist sense) predicated on a shared adherence to its hard core central proposition(s). Various scholars could thereby contribute to the progressive development of critical IR as a pluralist, critical-theoretically driven research programme comprised of a set of theories, techniques, methods, and objects of analysis through an accumulation of case studies and associated theoretical refinements, thereby democratising the generation of emancipatory knowledge about the international. One benefit would be a synoptic approach to critical IR that does not necessarily entail a loss of nuance.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Another would be a more inclusive conception of the tradition that remains open to scholars who remain unconvinced by the substantive content of first-generation/Frankfurt School approaches and generate knowledge based on alternative auxiliary hypotheses and theoretical and practical influences.

Acknowledging that empirical research is theoretically driven, influencing case selection, data generation, and interpretation, is a hallmark of reflexive social science. Rather than becoming ‘meaningless,’Footnote ¹⁶⁵ the epithet ‘critical’ would hereby denote not only a normative commitment guiding scholarly inquiry and practical engagement, but also an explicit adherence to a more substantive conception of theory that integrates normative, sociological, and praxeological analysis. Reflexivity also commits us to recognising the contingency of all normative orientations, including the Hegelian–Marxian one offered herein. While this philosophical tradition provides my normative anchor, a more realistic (and less moralistic) approach will recognise that the substantive content of any such anchor will be socially and historically mediated and must therefore remain subject to methodological principles of reflexivity. Consequently, normative ideas and the analyses based on them remain open to critique, extension, or even replacement. Hence, the importance of elucidating our own biases and conducting research that clarifies the normative stakes and emancipatory ethos of specific struggles: How is emancipation understood by the theorist? What does freedom mean in specific contexts? This, in turn, will help better guide responses to them. Finally, and most importantly, our biases and analyses remain subject to intersubjective validation; and not just by other academics or critical theorists, but the wider public: Are the claims of an analysis valued by those concerned and affected by them? Can they be put to practical use? If not, they must be revised or extended to meet the reflexive standards of critical social theory.Footnote ¹⁶⁶