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Truth and power, monks and technocrats: theory and practice in international relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Extract

‘The study of international relations is not an innocent profession.’1 It is not like the classics, or mathematics, an abstract logical training for the youthful mind. The justification for the place it has gained in the university curriculum rests upon utility, not on aesthetics. The growth of the social sciences in Western universities in the past century, and their remarkable expansion over the past thirty years, has been based upon their perceived contribution to better government, in the broadest sense. ‘The forever explosive relationship between social science and public policy’ has been embedded in the discipline of International Relations from the outset.2

Type
Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1996

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References

1 Cable, James, ‘The Useful Art of International Relations’, International Affairs, 61:2 (April 1985), p. 305Google Scholar.

2 Dahrendorf, Ralf, LSE: A History of the London School of Economics, 1895–1995 (Oxford, 1995), p. vCrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dahrendorf's account of the development of the social sciences in London also stresses the constant tension between empiricists like Webb and Beveridge—with their faith in ‘facts’—and theorists like Mannheim, von Hayek, Popper and Oakeshott.

3 Hill, and Beshoff, (eds.), Two Worlds, pp. 3, 223Google Scholar.

4 Martin Wight was, as a pacifist, an exception to the many who fought or worked in military intelligence in World War II. But his approach to international politics was nevertheless moulded by his attempts to understand and explain the crises which led to the Second World War. His chapter on ‘The Balance of Power’ in the Chatham House survey volume, The World in March 1939 (London, 1950)Google Scholar follows his chapters on Eastern Europe and Germany, with their detailed examinations of Nazi, Fascist and Leninist assumptions about international relations, and their critique of the liberal approach.

5 Dunne, Timothy, ‘International Relations Theory in Britain: The Invention of an International Society Tradition’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1993Google Scholar, describes the work and meetings of this ‘British Committee on the Theory of International Polities’.

6 Hedley Bull remarked that, when he arrived at the LSE as an assistant lecturer in 1956, ‘I had not done a course of any kind in International Relations, nor made any serious study of it, and as I arrived at Houghton Street I wondered how I was to go about teaching the subject and even whether it existed at all.’ Bull, , ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations’, British Journal of International Studies, 2:1 (1976), p. 101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Until the mid-1960s the LSE and Aberystwyth were the only two effective departments of International Relations in Britain. Some seminars and tutorials were given at Oxford, but the professor of International Relations was inactive.

8 See the exchange between Walker, David and Barrett, Michele(President of the British Sociological Association) in Times Higher Education Supplement, 17 March and 12 May 1995Google Scholar.

9 Webb, Keith, ‘Academics and Professionals in International Relations: A British Perception’, ch. 7 in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, pp. 90–1Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., p. 93.

11 ’Politics as a Vocation’, ‘Science as a Vocation’, lectures originally delivered in Munich University in the traumatic conditions of the winter of 1918; published in translation in the aftermath of World War I I in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (Oxford, 1946)Google Scholar.

12 The discussion in Maclean, Ian, Montefiore, Alan and Winch, Peter (eds.), The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar ranges from Plato and Seneca to the present day, while focussing primarily on the dilemmas faced by intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe under socialism over the past forty years. Ash, Timothy Garton, ‘Prague: Intellectuals and Politicians’, in The New York Review, 12 January 1995Google Scholar, provides a fascinating discussion of the dilemmas facing intellectuals who cross the divide without admitting the necessarily different discourses of the two worlds—with particular reference to Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Klaus. For an alternative and uncompromising view, see Chomsky, Noam, ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, reprinted in Vasquez, John (ed.), Classics of International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990)Google Scholar.

13 Morgenthau, Hans J., Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–70 (London, 1970), p. 14Google Scholar; quoted by Hill, Christopher as the departure point for Hill, and Beshoff, (eds.), Two WorldsGoogle Scholar.

14 Shils, Edward, ‘Intellectuals and Responsibility’, in The Political Responsibility of IntellectualsGoogle Scholar, notes the nineteenth-century development of an oppositional ‘free intellectual’ Bohemian class, members of which ‘slipped into … confederation with anarchists and revolutionary socialists’ (p. 292). A seminar series on careers for graduate students in political science at the University of Freiburg, in November 1994, was advertised as ‘Alternatives to taxi-driving’.

15 George, , Bridging the Gap, p. 7Google Scholar.

16 Hoffman, Mark, ‘Critical Theory and the Inter-paradigm Debate’, Millennium 16:2 (1987), p. 244CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in several of the volumes under review.

17 Chan, Stephen, ‘Critical Theory, Praxis and Postmodernism’, ch. 3 in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, pp. 32–3Google Scholar. Edward, Said, in Representations of the Intellectual (London, 1994)Google Scholar, is similarly ambivalent about the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. For him, the archetypical intellectual is an individual, a heroic, charismaticfigurewhose duty it is to choose to side with the oppressed against the corruption of power. But he also recognizes that the golden age of the heroic intellectual (he mentions Russell, Sartre, Debray and Chomsky) has passed; university expansion and the professionalization of the intellectual class has transformed his position. He identifies three possible positions for the intellectual to take towards power: t o justify and legitimize power, to stand ‘in metaphorical exile’ as a witness against power, or to act as a constructive critic. ‘The alternatives are not total quiescence or total rebelliousness’, he notes (p. 52). Yet he still wavers between preferring the role of the prophetic outsider and that of the critical insider—the prophet or the priest.

18 Nygren, Bertil, in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, p. 107Google Scholar, regrets the loss of ‘the academic virginity’ of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in its relations with the Swedish ministries of defence and foreign affairs.

19 Halliday, Fred, ‘The End of the Cold War and International Relations: Some Analytic and Theoretical Conclusions’, ch. 2 in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory, p. 39Google Scholar.

20 Martin, David, ‘The Dissolution of the Monasteries’, in Martin, (ed.), Anarchy and Culture; The Problem of the Contemporary University (London, 1969), p. 1Google Scholar; cited in Dahrendorf, , LSE, p. 417Google Scholar.

21 Mannheim, Karl, ‘The Sociological Problem of the “Intelligentsia” ’, in Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1936), pp. 156–64Google Scholar; Shils, Edward, The Intellectuals and the Powers (Chicago, 1972)Google Scholar. See also Said, Representations of the Intellectual, p. 27Google Scholar, citing Shils, Julien Benda and Antonio Gramsci; Benda's classic 1927 treatise, La trahison des clercs, took as its starting-point the assumption that intellectuals were a class apart with a sacred vocation.

22 Dahrendorf, , LSE, p. 421. St Antony's College, OxfordGoogle Scholar, takes as its patron not the hermit Egyptian saint but St Anthony of Padua, the most eloquent and scholarly preacher of the first generation of Franciscans. One recent biographer notes that St Anthony of Padua's intellectual reputation was however eclipsed ‘just a few years after his death’ by the rise of ‘the theological and philosophical movement of Scholasticism’. Gamboso, Vergilio, Life of St. Anthony (Padua, 1979), p. 143Google Scholar.

23 Girard, et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, p. 32Google Scholar.

24 Booth, Ken, ‘Dare not to Know: International Relations Theory versus the Future’, in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, pp. 328, 340, 344Google Scholar.

25 Almond, Gabriel, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, CA, 1990)Google Scholar.

26 Booth, , ‘Dare not to Know’, pp. 344, 348Google Scholar.

27 Chomsky, , Thiong'o, Ngugi wa and Edward, Said represent for Chan, Stephen‘the three staunchest and most eloquent statements … of the intellectual's role’ (Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, p. 32)Google Scholar. Dissidence and resistance are common self-referential terms in the writings of Ashley, Richard, Walker, R. B. J. and others; see for example the special issue of International Studies Quarterly, 34:3 (Sept. 1990)Google Scholar: ‘Speaking the language of exile: dissidence in international studies’.

28 Weber, , ‘Science as a Vocation’, p. 153Google Scholar.

29 Both James der Derian and Yuen Foong Khong made this point in Oxford seminars in 1994–5.

30 The origins of the Central European University lie in the ‘underground university’ through which academics from democratic countries came into 1980s Prague to lecture to dissident intellectuals, at some real personal risk. Those to whom they lectured were denied any links with the universities of their own country; most had been pushed into manual jobs (Vaclav Havel, for example, worked in a flour mill). Bill Newton Smith, of Oxford's Philosophy Faculty, was the first of several of these unofficial visiting teachers to be arrested in mid-lecture, interrogated through the night, and deported. The Czech philosopher Jan Patochka, one of the founders of Charter 77, collapsed and died after a 24-hour police interrogation in 1978; Jitka Silhanova tells me that on an earlier occasion she passed a long evening locked in a police cell with him and others, which he converted into a philosophical seminar.

31 Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School (Boston, 1973), p. 36Google Scholar; quoted in Dahrendorf, , LSE, p. 292Google Scholar.

32 Noam Chomsky appears unable to accept this. ‘Intellectuals’, he writes, ‘are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions in terms of their causes and motives and often hidden intentions… For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities and the training to seek the truth that lies hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation’ (Chomsky, , ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, in Vasquez, (ed.), Classics of International Relations, p. 59)Google Scholar. His unforgiving view is that the intellectual should remain mercilessly against those in power, regardless of what form of government he lives under. Ernest Gellner, with rather more direct (and bitter) experience of alternative forms of government than Chomsky, insists that the open civil societies which the ‘Western’ democratic tradition has evolved are qualitatively superior to their alternatives, and as such deserve a greater degree of intellectual critical support. ‘They appear capable of maintaining social order with less violence and oppression, with less deprivation and inequality, than any other large and complex society in history.’ Gellner, , Relativism and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1985), p. 64Google Scholar.

33 Booth, , ‘Dare not to Know’, p. 332Google Scholar.

34 Hans Bethe was then professor of nuclear physics at Cornell, and had earlier been one of the leading figures in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

35 Karl Deutsch for example, dismissed without qualification as a behaviouralist by John A. Vasquez in Booth and Smith (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, was a German-speaking student in Prague in 1938 who chose the Czechoslovak cause against the Sudeten Germans, and was then forced into exile. His lifelong preoccupation with nationalism, communication and the bases of political community stemmed from his own painful personal experiences.

36 The quotations are from Smith, Steve and Booth, Ken in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, pp. 2, 331Google Scholar. The vigour with which Ernest Gellner (himself Jewish, an exile in Britain most of his life first from the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and then from the Soviet regime which he found closing in on his return to Prague at the end of World War II) attacked Oxford linguistic philosophy, unthinking positivism, relativism and postmodernism in successive books reflected his ‘epistemological, sociological and moral commitment to empiricism’ (1 Agassi and I. C. Jarvie, editorial preface to Gellner's, Relativism, p. viiGoogle Scholar).

37 See for example Ashley's, essay, ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, in Keohane, Robert O. (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York, 1986), and chs. 3–5Google Scholar of Walker, R. B. J., Inside/outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar.

38 Booth, , ‘Dare not to Know’, p. 338Google Scholar; emphases added.

39 The motto of Oxford University— Dominus illuminatio mea—is wonderfully ambiguous in this respect: open t o translation either as ‘the Lord is my enlightenment’ or as ‘the tutor tells me what to think’.

40 Gellner, Ernest, in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London, 1992), pp. 2271CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides an account of the scholastic dispute s which enveloped sociology and social anthropolog y in the 1970s and 1980s.

41 In Carlsnaes, and Smith, (eds.), European Foreign Policy, p. 224Google Scholar; quoting Harding, Sandra, The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes, 1986), p. 164Google Scholar.

42 Waever, Ole, ‘Resisting the Temptation of Post FP analysis’, ch. 13 in Carlsnaes, and Smith, (eds.), European Foreign Policy, p. 238Google Scholar.

43 Strange, Susan, ‘Political Economy and International Relations’, ch. 7 in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, p. 165Google Scholar; citing in her support Holsti, K. J., The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory (Boston, MA, 1985)Google Scholar and Higgott, Richard, ‘Towards a Non-hegemonic IPE’, in Murphy, Craig and Tooze, Roger (eds.), The New International Political Economy (Boulder, CO, 1991)Google Scholar.

44 Trow, Martin, ‘American Higher Education : “Exceptional”, or just Different?’, ch. 6 in Shafer, Byron E. (ed.), Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

45 Lowi, Theodore, ‘The Politics of Higher Education: Political Science as a Case Study’, in Graham, George J. and Carey, George W. (eds.), The Poslbehavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (New York, 1972), pp. 1136Google Scholar; Seidelman, Raymond and Harpham, Edward (eds.), Discipline and History (East Lansing, MI, 1995)Google Scholar.

46 Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘A Retrospective on World Polities’, ch. 1 in Ideas and Ideals: Essays on Politics in Honor of Stanley Hoffmann, ed. Miller, Linda B. and Smith, Michael Joseph (Boulder, CO, 1993) pp. 1516Google Scholar.

47 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, ‘International Politics and Political Theory’, in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, p. 269Google Scholar: ‘Political and international relations theorists consistently understate the power of religious conviction and its role as a defining, shaping, and constitutive force in world affairs … The Church is the oldest continuing player in diplomatic life in the West but you would never know this from contemporary accounts of the sort taught to students of international politics.’ Interestingly enough, however, Rob Walker (in ‘International Relations and the Concept of the Political’, ibid. p. 312) uses religious terminology to describe the growth of social movements as a force in world politics. ‘To speak of a movement now, even a movement firmly rooted in the secular necessities of capitalist modernity, is to do so in language s and concepts that have not quite lost their theological resonance.’

48 Smith, Steve, ‘The Self-images of a Discipline’, in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, p. 27Google Scholar.

49 ‘It is not an accident that postmodernism has ha d its most profound impact on literary theory. Literary theorists, after all, deal with fiction, so for them empirical truth is never really a concern…’ Vasquez, John A., ‘The Post-Positivist Debate: Reconstructing Scientific Enquiry and International Relations Theory after Enlightenment' s Fall’, in Booth, and Smith, (eds.), International Relations Theory Today, p. 224Google Scholar.

50 Ibid., p. 235. The books under review suggest that post-positivists are at least as anecdotal in their use of evidence as the Realists they attack. The assertion by Zalewski, Marysia and Enloe, Cythia that ‘We can drink Coke, eat sushi and watch Neighbours and be in practically any country in the world’ (p. 302)Google Scholar suggests a very limited knowledge of conditions outside the democratic capitalist countries of the OECD.

51 Ibid., p. 234.

52 Behaviouralists at their most rigorous were almost as purist and exclusive in their approach to what could be studied. Many behaviouralists came to attach more importance to their methodology than to the significance of the questions they studied; the highly behavioural Political Science Department of the European University Institute in Florence refused to teach or research either on European integration or on international relations for most of its first decade, in defiance of the purposes for which it was established and of its dependence on the EC for its funding, as not compatible with a ‘scientific’ approach. IR scholars in their turn should avoid this professional deformation, of putting fascination with methodology before the significance of the issues to be addressed.

53 Webb, Keith, in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, p. 92Google Scholar.

54 One exceptional two-day seminar (in which I participated) was provided by the Harvard University Kennedy School to the newly independent government of the Ukraine, in late December 1991. It was attended by a dozen ministers, including the minister s of foreign affairs and economics, a number of military an d civilian officials, and members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Many had never been abroad; MPs from Rukh had never previously met anyone from outside the USSR. They knew almost nothing of the basic rules and assumptions of the international society of which they claimed membership; the foreign minister's opening statement declared the ‘basic aims’ of Ukrainian foreign policy to be full membership of NATO and the EC by the end of 1993.

55 The rationale for classics as a focus for higher education is that it trains students in linguistic precision, logic, and the careful interpretation of uncertain evidence: skills which can then be applied to a range of contemporary problems. The teaching of international relations to future practitioners should attempt to provide training in similar skills, related more directly to contemporary problems.

56 ‘Academics and Practitioners: Power, Knowledge an d Role’, in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, p. 13Google Scholar.

57 Ibid., pp. 13,22.

58 Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years' Crisis (1946, reprinted New York, 1964) p. 5.Google Scholar This comment by one of the founders of the Realist tradition illustrates how intrinsic to pre-positivist social sciences was awareness of the interaction between ideas and action, between conceptualization and ideological preference. ‘The first step to the understanding of men is the bringing to consciousness of the model or models that dominate and penetrate their thought and action. Like all attempts to make men aware of the categories in which they think, it is a difficult and sometimes painful activity, likely to produce deeply disquieting results.’ Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Does Political Theory still Exist?’, in Laslett, Peter and Runciman, W. G. (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society (2nd series, Oxford, 1962), p. 19Google Scholar. Berlin was of course another representative of that great Central European intellectual diaspora who devoted their lives to studying those questions of fact and value, perception and reality, which postmodernists imagine themselves to have newly discovered.

59 ‘The Two Worlds: Natural Partnership or Necessary Distance?’, in Hill, and Beshoff, (eds.), Two Worlds, p. 212Google Scholar.

60 John Vincent, ‘The Place of Theory in the Practice of Human Rights’, ibid., pp. 29–30.

61 Seneca, one of the earliest recorded intellectual advisers to government, was ‘allowed’ by the Emperor to commit suicide.

62 Webb, Keith, ‘Academics and Professionals: Britain’, in Girard et al., Theory and Practice, p. 90Google Scholar.

63 Ibid., pp. 89, 91.

64 Wallace, William, ‘Between Two Worlds: Think Tanks and Foreign Policy’, ch. 8 in Hill, and Beshoff, (eds.), Two WorldsGoogle Scholar.

65 This information was drawn from Civil Service College cours e outlines collected in October 1994.

66 Webb, , ‘Academics and Professionals’, p. 90Google Scholar.

67 Thatcher, Margaret, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 341–3Google Scholar.

68 I happily recall that I issued the invitation—knowin g something of John Vincent's qualities, but not expecting that he would develop the theme into two classic books.

69 Pedersen, Mogens, ‘Chairman's Note’, in ECPR Newsletter, June 1995Google Scholar.

70 The Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, it should be noted, successfully defended itself against hostile political scrutiny, in the earl y 1980s, by demonstrating the quality and rigour of the empirical research it was engaged in. For the comparable political controversy over peace research institutes in Germany in the earl y 1980s see Eberwein, Wolf-Dieter with Horsch, Barbara, ‘The Worlds of Science and Practice: the German Case’, in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policymaking, pp. 41–4Google Scholar.

71 George, , Bridging the Gap, p. 143Google Scholar.

72 Halliday, , Rethinking International Relations, p. 242Google Scholar.

73 George, , Bridging the Gap, pp. 137–8Google Scholar.

74 Eberwein, Wolf-Dieter, ‘Scholars an d Practitioners : Imagination, Conceptions and Misconceptions’, in Girard et al., Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy-making, p. 157Google Scholar.

75 Vincent, John, in Hill, and Beshoff, (eds.), Two Worlds, p. 38Google Scholar.

76 Christopher Hill, ‘Academic International Relations: The Siren Song of Policy Relevance’, ibid., p. 20.