51 results
4 - Anarchy, Authority, Rule: Reconsidered
- from Part I - Theorizing Rule
- Edited by Christopher Daase, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and Goethe University Frankfurt, Nicole Deitelhoff, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and Goethe University Frankfurt, Antonia Witt, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt
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- Rule in International Politics
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- 15 June 2023
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- 29 June 2023, pp 87-112
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Summary
Over thirty years ago, Frank Klink and I wrote a paper on anarchy, authority, and rule—the first of its kind and a touchstone for subsequent theorizing about states and their relations. We sought to rebut prevailing claims about anarchy as the absence of authority and replace these concepts with a scheme centered on conditions of rule in every society. We identified three forms of rule: hegemony (inspired by Gramsci), hierarchy (drawing on Weber), and heteronomy (inspired by Kant, drawing on liberal theory). We argued that the relations of states exhibit elements of all three forms of rule to the abiding advantage of some few states. There is today a great deal of interest in rule in international relations but less interest in our three-part conceptual scheme. Looking back, I believe it holds up in its own terms but works even better when situated in an overarching framework linking three types of speech acts, derivative types of rules, and correlative forms of rule. I erected this framework in World of Our Making (1989) and reprise it here. I conclude by showing how modernity has reinvigorated status to support sovereign equality, thereby conjoining hegemony and hierarchy in a durably heteronomous world.
11 - World-making, State-building (2014)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- Bristol University Press
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- 17 January 2024
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- 18 January 2023, pp 193-212
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The state is a historical artifact whose existence can be reconstructed by observing semantic distinctions.
Oliver KesslerBlueprints
In the last 500 years, the state has emerged and then changed in significant ways, and so has the vast complex of social relations we call the modern world. Familiar periodizations of modernity assume that these parallel developments coincide but that their doing so is no coincidence. To simplify a superabundance of causal connections, we might say that states and the system of states, here called international society, have continuously reconstituted each other over the centuries, and that this process of co-constitution is an integral feature of modernity as a constitutive whole. State-building and world-making occur simultaneously on the basis of blueprints that are periodically but not systematically updated. Anyone building a state today must rely on incomplete, confusing, yet normatively controlling layers of blueprints setting standards and limits on the properties that states must have to function in the modern world— as societies and in international society.
Any effort to characterize social relations relies on metaphors, no matter how conceptually aware the effort is. Speaking metaphorically (and we always do), every concept— every representation of some state of affairs no matter how abstract— was born a metaphor. While I defend this claim later in this essay, it will be noticed that I have already placed great emphasis on a familiar metaphor, blueprint. In the first instance, a blueprint is a visual representation of the plan for a building or some other thought-out object of use. By metaphorical extension, a blueprint is any system of linked metaphors, or self-defining semantic field, representing what we (some metaphorically identified collectivity: we moderns) think we know about our social arrangements— how they are put together, and how they work, at any given moment. We revise small sections of these blueprints of ours frequently, not always deliberately, in response to practical concerns. Along the way, we even change the way we draw our blueprints— the way that we draw semantic distinctions to represent the particulars of our social arrangements.
This process looks continuous and its effects look like incremental social change. Nevertheless, when we stand back, we can see (a revealing metaphor) that social practices and their metaphorical representation are subject to abrupt changes, and that we can make sense of these changes only retrospectively.
1 - Comparative International Politics (1982)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- Bristol University Press
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- 17 January 2024
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- 18 January 2023, pp 27-42
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The era of systems thinking in political science dates from the mid-1950s. David Easton gave currency to the term political system in 1953, and major statements on how to study such systems appeared a short while thereafter. Input-output analysis, general systems theory, equilibrium models all competed for attention. Even though students of foreign governments and relations among states were especially stimulated to abandon exclusively institutional and historical studies for brave new ways to comprehend political reality, there were signs even before the end of the decade that emergent fields of comparative politics and international politics were to part company in their preferred systemic formulations.
In comparative politics the structural-functional orientation popularized by Gabriel Almond prevailed as the convenient tool for investigating not just governments but anything political. In principle all political systems were subject to comparison because they all, regardless of form, share certain distinctively political functions. In practice this meant comparison of diverse systems nonetheless sharing important features qualifying them to be called states. The result was an ample but bounded universe of items for comparison.
Structural-functionalism inspired what has come to be called the comparative movement, penetrating most areas of political inquiry except, peculiarly enough, international relations. The stated object of comparing systems is theory-building. While failing to create theories of any consequence, the effort was marked by a surge of conceptual clarification, taxonomic ordering and empirical enrichment. Substantial though these gains are over previous scholarship, they succeeded mostly in fuelling rising epistemological expectations that structural-functional comparison could never fulfil.
Opinion leaders in political science turned increasingly to neopositivist epistemology prevailing in philosophy of science, which provided damning critiques of anything functional and legitimated the quest for properly hypothetico-deductive theory. Whether the rise of neopositivism and the quest for formally stated theory as the basis of ‘real’ science are benighted misadventure or passage to enlightenment cannot as yet be told. It can only be said that theory development in any form, or by any name, must be preceded by a period of conceptual and taxonomic growth. This would indeed seem to have been the pattern with all major advances in human understanding.
References
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2 - Prometheus Prostrate (1984)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- 18 January 2023, pp 43-57
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The last decade has seen a fierce debate on the material prospects of industrial civilization. Spurred by the publication, in 1972, of Limits to Growth, controversial first report to the Club of Rome, this debate registers notes of anxiety and truculence not previously heard in discussions of the postindustrial future. Limits to Growth attempts to identify the consequences of exponential growth in population, production and pollution, were high rates of growth to continue as they have in Western life for the last two centuries. Before the report few would have argued that such growth was possible indefinitely, but almost everyone conveniently assumed that material abundance produced by prior growth would permit deceleration of future growth and the solution of growth-induced problems. Underlying this assumption was a faith in instrumental knowledge, which has grown along with everything else and enabled the conquest of the most intractable problems by reducing them to manageable elements and subjecting them to specialized expertise, backed by mammoth societal resources as needed.
Limits to Growth also values analytic procedures. It reduces the characteristic products (and by-products) of industrial civilization— material advantages, capital (both human and physical), depletion and contamination— into several categories, the relations among which are represented as a model, subject to computer-facilitated simulation into the future. Upon reaching the scale and complexity we find today, the full range of productive activities results in an impenetrable tangle of difficulties and dilemmas having no historical parallel. The Club of Rome promoted a new and quite useful term for this phenomenon: the global problematique.
Limits to Growth further presumes that instrumental knowledge, problemsolving skills and technological advances can and do overcome obstacles to growth as they arise in each category of productive activity. Nevertheless, the Limits argument will not assign to technological problem-solving a redemptive role: technological success, and continued growth, cannot occur indefinitely in all categories because success in one is an additional problem for the others. New problems pyramid, compounding their effects and outstripping the capabilities of the problem-solving enterprise, itself increasingly cobbled by problems of scale and complexity. Limits to Growth follows this logic to its drastic conclusion that a collapse of the whole system within decades is a distinct possibility. Technological wizardry may buy time, but, by driving growth all the more certainly beyond sustainable limits, it also increases the likelihood of disaster.
4 - On Power (2017)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 18 January 2023, pp 73-88
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Power is a central concept in social theory and political discourse. Yet we use this word metaphorically all of the time. To speak of ‘the power of metaphor’ is to invoke a powerful metaphor. The same goes for soft power. Joseph Nye introduced this terminology more than a quarter of a century ago. Since then we find it everywhere: in scholarly discussions of power, in policy pronouncements, in newspaper stories. Searching ‘soft power’ on Google yields half a million results. Even if power were not obviously a metaphor, the addition of an adjective like soft instantly metaphoricizes it.
After reading and writing about metaphors for many years, I have come to the conclusion that every concept reveals itself to be a metaphor, but not the converse. Not every metaphor is a concept. Rather, I hold that every concept has its origin as a metaphor. I should say more about this general, perhaps surprising claim. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary says that a metaphor is a ‘figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness’. We use figures of speech to represent some state of the world in such a way as to persuade others to adopt our representations.
Most people are empirical realists. They think that, by speaking, and thus through mutual persuasion, they succeed in representing the world more or less as it is. As a philosophical idealist (or if you prefer, anti-realist), I think otherwise. A metaphor represents some state of the world already constituted as such through the use of other, familiar metaphors. We collectively make the world what we individually say we see, what we take to be given. Merriam-Webster notwithstanding, no representation is ever ‘literal’.
Aristotle had important things to say about metaphors. To work effectively for persuasive purposes, they must be both fitting and fresh (Rhetoric III, 1410b13, 1410b32-33). An ill-fitting metaphor persuades no one, inspires no one to use it again for persuasive purposes, and changes nothing. A fitting metaphor oft repeated affirms and supports the world as given. A fresh metaphor gives something new to the world. Obviously, fit and freshness are closely related. In speaking persuasively, people pick up fresh metaphors and repeat them endlessly.
Index of Concepts
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 18 January 2023, pp 266-271
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8 - Ethical Systems (2016)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 17 January 2024
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- 18 January 2023, pp 147-164
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Many worlds, four worlds
There are many worlds. Continually experiencing a ‘world inside my head’, I charitably concede that there is another, somewhat different world in your head and, by extension, everyone else’s. If we abandon this subjective sense of many worlds, and the strict philosophical idealism that this way of thinking implies, there are still many worlds.
Seen from the inside, worlds have horizons. Visualized from the outside, worlds are wholes composed of many parts, including people who see the world (the world in their heads) more or less the same way. Society becomes the background condition for all the things or objects that members of society talk about. Broadly speaking, this is a phenomenological conception of world as worlds, and one that I subscribe to myself.
There is, of course, a contrary claim, to the effect that there is only one world— the real world consisting of all things. Most of us are philosophical realists, for whom this claim seems indisputably right. In such a world, no society (with the possible exception of some hunter-gatherer societies) is ever wholly self-contained; all things in the world are caught up in a web of (causal, functional, constitutive) relations. This is an Aristotelian formula— every whole is a part of some larger whole. We who live in what we call, somewhat paradoxically, the modern or Western world depart from this formula when we insist that the world we live in is the only world there is— the sum of all things.
Indeed, we have it both ways. There is our objectively discernible, subjectively valorized modern world. There is another objectively discernible world of many worlds, or, as we are inclined to say, the rest of the world. Taken together, these two worlds— the modern world and the rest of the world— constitute an ostensible objective reality (ostensibly objective, ostensibly real) we also call the earth, planet or globe.
Here I am concerned with the three worlds that members of the modern world think they see: our world, the rest of the world, and the world as the largest possible whole. I am also concerned with the possibility of a fourth world. This is not the world so many of us see at hand— one in which, thanks to globalization, all has become modern, or indeed, postmodern.
10 - Intertextual Relations (2009)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 18 January 2023, pp 183-192
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For reasons that need no explaining, 1989 is surely the most memorable of the last 50 years of international relations. 1989 was also a signal year for International Relations as a field of study, thanks to three books expressly written to challenge the way scholars think about their subject. Two of these books— Friedrich Kratochwil's Rules, Norms, and Decisions and my own World of Our Making— are now reckoned as founding texts for the contructivist movement in International Relations, along with two papers of Alexander Wendt’s. The third book is International/Intertextual Relations, which James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro edited, and to which they and a dozen other scholars contributed.
While all three books reflect philosophical and theoretical developments that had originated in Europe and already unsettled disciplines from literature to sociology, International/Intertextual Relations is the most open in its challenge to prevailing ways in International Relations. Its authors drew on a pantheon of variously provocative French thinkers— Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard— with extraordinary fluency and not just a little flamboyance. Although Nietzsche looms in the background, the conspicuous absence of such fashionable figures as C. S. Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn, not to mention a long century of post-Kantian philosophy, suggests an unusually tight focus for an edited volume, though hardly a uniform one. While the constructivist texts from 1989 ranged more widely, none of these three books give an adequate sense of the impact of feminist scholarship at the time. Had Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases appeared a year [or even a few weeks] earlier, it would have contributed even more to the sense that 1989 was a banner year for the field. I should also note that 1989 is the year Francis Fukuyama published ‘The end of history?’— a piece undoubtedly read by more students of international relations than any book published that year.
Of the contributors to International/Intertextual Relations, nearly half are political theorists (William Connolly, Jean Elshtain, Timothy Luke, Diane Rubenstein, Michael Shapiro, R. B. J. Walker), no doubt reflecting one source of contagion in the hermetic community of scholars identifying with International Relations as a field. Alfred Fortin seems to have studied with Shapiro but took his doctoral degree in health politics.
PART III - Semantics: Saying What We See
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 18 January 2023, pp 165-166
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Chapter 9 is a tribute to James Rosenau. I presented it on a panel honouring Rosenau at a conference in San Francisco in 1996, which I had helped to organize and which eventuated in a richly deserved Festschrift. In this essay, I review what Rosenau had to say about theorizing and report on the echoes of David Hume's sceptical voice in Rosenau's defence of Enlightenment values and commitment to the methods of modern science. I turn then to an influential book he wrote in the wake of dramatic changes in the political arrangements of the modern world. Called Turbulence in World Politics (1990), this book documents a significant shift in Rosenau's theoretical concerns.
Turbulence defeats easy claims about causation and undercuts generalization. The cumulative impact of turbulence is transformative— an epochal change in the contours of modernity. ‘Writ large’, an aggregate of small, local changes indicates a global contest between mindless habit and adaptive behaviour— one that would likely displace the modern world's political arrangements. This is a striking and potentially illuminating claim. There are, however, two problems with the way Rosenau developed it.
In pursuit of science, Rosenau consistently underrated the normative sphere in social life. As a result, he underestimated the durability of the modern system of states— the mighty frame, as I have called it elsewhere. Second, Rosenau mistook the surge in some people's analytic skills as a novel development. Instead, it is an integral feature of the modernist epoch, gaining momentum for a century and fully implicated in late modernity's functional arrangements supporting the system of states. In the end, Rosenau could not see what lies beyond politics at different scales because he failed to free himself from the habitual language of Enlightened politics— a universalizing language inadequate to the contest between never-squelched tradition and overweening modernity. In that contest, incivility, calumny and wilful ignorance have since become the norm, violence valorized, and the centre's absence conclusively demonstrated.
In 2009, the editors of a modest Danish journal (no longer published) asked me to write a brief essay for a project imaginatively called ‘The Nines’. They had noticed that major statements of international theory appeared in the ninth year of most decades in the last century.
5 - Rules for Torture? (2009)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 18 January 2023, pp 93-108
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Pandora's box
‘Whatever one might have to say about torture, there appear to be moral reasons for not saying it’. This striking claim introduces Henry Shue's influential essay, first published in 1978, on ‘Torture’. Just as bad press is better than no press at all, even to condemn torture is to draw attention to it, to dignify it, to imply that it falls within the bounds of moral discourse. This is, as Shue pointed out, a variation of the argument that one must never open Pandora's box of evil spirits. Nevertheless, ‘Pandora's box is open’— opened most conspicuously, and with unimpeachable moral authority, by Amnesty International with its Report on Torture (1975).
Here is Shue's unadorned summary of the report: ‘scores of governments are now using some torture— including governments that are widely viewed as fairly civilized— and a number of governments are heavily dependent upon torture for their very survival’. In the years since, many governments still use torture, which is to say, they deliberately inflict pain on individuals in their custody. Some governments have abandoned the practice, some did not survive, some have started the practice. That the government of the United States now engages in activities that seem like torture to many observers has attracted an enormous amount of attention. For the most part, observers condemn torture on moral and legal grounds. Governments rarely justify its practice or even admit to engaging in it, both because most government officials would prefer to avoid public condemnation and because international law, in the form of a widely ratified multilateral convention, requires that states treat torture as a criminal offence subject to extradition.
In short, torture is an institutionalized practice in today's world. There are rules against torture, yet the practice continues, apparently unabated. It seems then that public discussion of torture is entirely warranted because the rules do not work and they should be made to work. Furthermore, most observers believe that discussion reinforces the widely shared conviction that torture joins slavery and genocide as the most egregious violations of human rights that we know. To suggest, however, that there are rules for torture— rules that people involved with torture make, follow, ignore and change— at least some observers might regard as morally dubious because it cloaks an unmitigated evil in the legitimating language of rules.
3 - Centre–Periphery Relations (2017)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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One of the aims of All Azimuth [the Turkish journal in which this essay originally appeared] is to ‘publish pieces bridging the theory-practice gap; dealing with under-represented conceptual approaches in the field; and making scholarly engagements in the dialogue between the “center” and the “periphery” ‘. I cannot pretend to bridge the theory– practice gap in these pages. Instead I devote considerable attention to a legendary scholar who, early in his career, made a stunning contribution to peace research theory and has, since then, dedicated himself to bridging the gap between theory and conflict settlement. I do deal with an under-represented conceptual approach to the field of International Relations. In the field, this conceptual approach is a version of constructivism identified with me (hence underrepresented); it emphasizes the importance of rules and conditions of rule in social relations generally. Finally, I argue that rule always manifests itself as the domination by those whom we may style the ‘centre’ over those whom we may then style the ‘periphery’. I have elsewhere expressed my reservations about speaking this way. Nevertheless, I realize that many scholars see me in the centre and themselves in the periphery and that it is important (for me, at least) to engage them in dialogue.
The scholar in question is Johan Galtung. A Norwegian by birth, he was educated as a mathematician and sociologist. He was instrumental in founding the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in 1959, which he directed for a decade, and the Journal of Peace Research in 1964. A few years later, Galtung published two pieces in that journal, together constituting the core of his contribution to peace research theory, here emphasizing the term theory. Judging from the thousands of times that these two pieces have been cited, I am not alone in reaching this conclusion.
In the first, called ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Galtung argued for ‘an extended concept of violence’— one that included violence where there is no one actually engaged in violence, where violence is ‘structural or indirect’. Galtung's incisive description of violence in this form lends itself to empirical assessment and thus leads directly to practical improvement in the welfare of vast numbers of people. In my view, this alone accounts for the extraordinary reception accorded the notion of structural violence.
13 - The Dinosaur Speaks! (2018)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- International Theory at the Margins
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- 18 January 2023, pp 230-235
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When it comes to constructivism in International Relations, I am one of the dinosaurs. We dinosaurs are still in a reasonably good state of preservation, and still talking. When a dinosaur speaks, we generally expect the old fossil to talk like, well, a dinosaur. And so I shall.
There aren't very many of us— Alexander Wendt, Friedrich Kratochwil and I are usually put together in a museum display called ‘IR in the 80s’. John Ruggie should be added to this group, thanks chiefly to an early essay he wrote with Kratochwil (1986), as should Raymond (Bud) Duvall, mentor to Wendt and a number of other constructivists. Nearby are feminists and a variety of self-styled ‘posties’— postmodernists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers— who are occasionally grouped with us as constructivists, despite resistance on both sides. No doubt the familiar dynamic of ‘us’ versus a stigmatized ‘them’ or ‘other’ helps to account for this inappropriate simplification. So does the socio-cultural context of the 1980s.
I will talk as if nothing much has happened since the dinosaurs came on the scene. I will talk about metatheory— the philosophical rationale behind constructivism— although the dinosaurs were pushed aside by a bunch of furry little creatures with close-at-hand concerns. I will talk as if the issues animating philosophy (and especially the philosophy of science in the 1970s and ‘80s) have changed very little. And I could talk as if international theory lost its way once the dinosaurs had their say. But I won’t— at least, not here.
Instead let me say this about the time of the dinosaurs. The end of the Cold War had nothing to do with constructivism's arrival on the scene, despite what I hear younger museum visitors saying to each other. I suspect Wendt is at least partly responsible for this vagrant belief. All those young visitors, not to mention their parents, read the following passage from his great book, Social Theory of International Politics: ‘constructivist thinking about international politics was accelerated by the end of the Cold War, which caught scholars on all sides off guard but left orthodoxies particular exposed’.
Wendt had already muddied the waters by claiming that ‘a constructivist worldview underlies the classical international theories of Grotius, Kant and Hegel’ and that many post-World War II writers advanced ‘important constructivist approaches to international politics’.
Acknowledgements
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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12 - What We Do (2018)
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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Summary
In 1959, C. P. Snow announced that ‘the whole of intellectual life in Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups’. The members of the two groups have drifted so far apart that they can no longer understand each other. The context for Snow's lament was his own career as chemist, novelist, Cambridge Fellow and public servant; his targets were the ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘physical scientists’ of his acquaintance. Snow generalized. Each group constitutes a culture unto itself— the cultures of art and science.
Leading intellectuals in Snow's time overwhelmingly agreed that science and art are rival cultures. The two groups, so labelled, are centred in the arts and sciences in a few grand universities, the two cultures spreading out to the higher reaches of modern society. Snow neglected to point out that large universities and many specialized institutions of higher education devote a great deal of attention to the practical arts and applied science— law, medicine, pastoral service, business management, advertising, public administration, engineering, training in warfare. While he might have argued that these vocational activities are also subject to a cultural split, he simply ignored this possibility. In short, the art– science binary discounts a great deal of what goes on in ‘the whole of intellectual life’, and does so in a way that reeks of elitism and snobbery.
The field of International Relations offers a conspicuous instance of the cultural phenomenon to which Snow gave a name. The so-called great debate taking place in the 1960s effectively pitted art against science in terms that recall Snow's thesis and all its resonances. Theory stands in for high culture, practice is shown off the stage. Would-be scholars (like me) immediately understood the status implications of choosing theory over practice, and science over art. No one talked about art, science or scholarship in any form as craft, or gave much attention to craft in any vocational practice— then or since.
Granting the term culture such affective and normative resonances is only possible because it has been emptied of content. When we do talk about culture, we make it residual, ephemeral, unaccountable, as such rarely applied to ourselves as scholars and to the field. Craft is more specific. It is skill in making, building, using, maintaining, adjusting, taking apart; it is about work, purpose, standards, tools.
Frontmatter
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PART II - Ethics: Doing What We Should
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Without rules, there would be no society. Rules establishing what is valued in any given society, rules telling members of that society how they should generally conduct themselves to protect or advance values: these rules constitute a system of ethics for that society. We members of modern societies are disposed to call such rules principles in order to emphasize their significance, their margin-defining properties for society at large. We also tend to look askance at local rules at odds with ethical principles and condemn people who devise and follow such rules for their unprincipled conduct.
Chapter 5 got its start at a workshop, held at St Andrews in 2006, on rules in the use of force. The essay considers a hard case: the conduct of people who authorize and engage in torture. I suggest that even they are responsive to an elaborate set of rules: rules for selecting victims, rules for selecting torturers, rules on places for torture, rules on tools and techniques, rules on relations of victims and torturers, and rules on the presumptive value of torture in practice. While ethicists often treat any such rules as slippery slopes in the justification of torture, I further suggest that people are capable of drawing lines and imposing limits on their conduct and that this is central to the human disposition to make and use rules. There is, however, a noticeable tendency for what I call functional slippage in the institutionalized practice of torture. Such practices lose their observable structure as rules loosen and people rationalize their conduct in changing circumstances.
The next chapter also made its appearance in St Andrews, this time in 2008, at a conference on international political theory and for a plenary panel on Seyla Benhabib's work. In this essay, I show how this exceptionally influential political theorist could hope to derive universal principles of ethical conduct from a powerful critique of liberal modernity. I then suggest that Benhabib's struggle to save liberalism from itself falters because she fails to see that modernism in literature and the arts is an age-defining political project. Responding as it does to functional differentiation in modern society, rather than the rationalization of modern societies, modernist concerns subvert progressive liberal sentiments.
Dedication
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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9 - Writing Large (2000)
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[M]ost students in the international field have not treated their subject as local politics writ large.
James RosenauStudents in the international field see Turbulence in World Politics as a dramatic shift in James Rosenau's thinking about world politics, brought on by dramatic changes in the world of politics. Rosenau thinks about politics in dramatic terms. He has even written a publicly performed play. Despite decades of work in which he has developed and tested his ideas in the manner of normal science, Rosenau has proven himself better attuned to the dramas of the last few years than any other major figure in the field.
It does not do, however, to conclude that Rosenau has abandoned a magnificent body of work, or repudiated its conceptual underpinnings, in favour of a new ‘turbulence paradigm’. Even if Rosenau speaks in terms that suggest such a paradigm shift, we ought not to be fooled by his dramatic inclinations. Just before Turbulence in World Politics appeared, Rosenau claimed to be an unrepentant behaviouralist. So he remains [and did so until his death in 2011].
What then in Rosenau's thinking has changed so dramatically? I suggest that changes in the world forced him to formulate, for the first time systematically, the behavioural theory underlying all of his work. How can someone who counts thinking theoretically among his ‘longstanding habits’ not have done so long ago? After all, Rosenau's early study of ‘calculated control’ presents a tightly organized conceptual framework, elements of which occupy an important position in Turbulence in World Politics. Yet by Rosenau's own reckoning, this piece presents no theory: ‘it does not explain why international affairs unfold as they do’. Even with respect to foreign policy, Rosenau claimed to offer nothing more than a ‘pre-theory’. His modesty stems from the conventional positivist assumption that normal science conducted within the terms of an increasingly refined conceptual framework would eventuate in a general theory whose propositions had already passed the test of scientific scrutiny. When the world began to change far more dramatically than existing frameworks seemed to be able to account for, Rosenau was jarred from his theoretical slumber.
Afterword
- Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, Florida International University
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- Book:
- International Theory at the Margins
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 17 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 18 January 2023, pp 236-242
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- Chapter
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Summary
When this book was in draft, an enthusiastic reviewer for Bristol University Press wondered what its ‘through-line’ might be. Faced with the question, I too began to wonder. Theory is the obvious candidate. This term shows up in the book's title, four times in its first paragraph, in every chapter, hundreds of times altogether. As I remarked in the Introduction, I call myself a theorist and always have; I use to teach ‘theory courses’ regularly.
Yet I do not propose theories, much less test hypotheses. In the Introduction, I declare, perhaps too grandly, that ‘there is no theory to orient the study of international relations’ and proceed to say that there is ‘an abundance of theorizing at the margins. Theories are linked propositions about the world and its workings; theorizing is linguistically mediated activity falling somewhere, anywhere, between informed speculation and formal stipulation.’ If theory is this book's through-line, then it does so as an absent centre, thus warranting Charlotte Epstein's judgement, quoted in the Introduction, that I am searching for an ‘unconstructed universal posited beyond the social world that founds the possibility of theorizing it’.
In the Introduction, I dispute the charge of pursuing unconstructed universals even as I engage in a linguistically mediated activity that I call theorizing. I also argue that the social world itself makes it possible for us to theorize about that world, thereby making it what it is and us who we are. The social world is a self-constructed universal for each and every one of us, Derrida and Epstein not excepted; ‘our world’ is my world. In this light, the term theory functions in this volume as a periodic place marker and not as a through-line whose function is to assure thematic continuity.
If theory is a misleading term for what holds this collection of loosely related essays together, a looser term, such as theorizing, might be a better choice for the job. In the Introduction, after all, I say that theorizing is a vocation; the essays variously theorize ‘the international’ as modernity's absent centre. As linguistically mediated activity ranging from speculation to stipulation, the term is too loose. It offers insufficient guidance to function as a line, a red thread, running through a patchwork of essays attending to a number of themes.