Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Inanna Hamati-Ataya. It is the second installment in our “End of IR Theory” companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that issue. This post responds to the introduction (PDF), written by Tim Dunne, Lene Hansen and Colin Wight. Their own post is available here.
Other entries in the symposium–when available–may be reached via the “EJIR Special Issue Symposium” tag.
The EJIR Special Issue is not only a new opportunity to collectively reflect on the status and future of theory in International Relations (IR), but also to consider alternative ways of thinking about theory and its relation to reality. Although the editors acknowledge the diversity of approaches currently populating the field, their own framing of the discussion remains grounded in the philosophy-of-science narrative that our discipline too often puts forth as the only authoritative framework for discussing theoretical and metatheoretical issues.
Many — perhaps most — IR scholars find commonsensical the view that theory is ‘wholly conceptual and is not a concrete object’. They consider it an unproblematic starting-point for the present discussion. It is not. We should challenge this idealist-philosophical perspective. We should take seriously the ontological status and realism of theory/theorizing. Approaching theory as social construct and practice leads to a more productive discussion — one that entails a more sociological and reflexive engagement with theory.
Such a discussion begins by rejecting the editors’ tempting invitation to slip back into a comfortable Waltzian posture. This invitation threatens to exclude a wide range of IR theory by avoiding the critical issues raised by the ‘third debate’ (PDF) in the field. The field needs to preserve and re-assess the important gains of this debate and of the development of ‘post-positivist’ perspectives. To ignore the epistemic implications of Critical, Marxist, Feminist, Post-structuralist, and Post-colonial research is in effect to deny the historicity, social situatedness, and practical nature of theory.
We, and our students, have become more sensitive to the socio-economic, politico-ideological, and cultural determinants and functions of academic knowledge; the problématique of the knowledge-power nexus has raised our awareness of our intimate involvement in the (re)production of local and global power structures and relations, beyond the ideals/illusions of objectivity, neutrality, and value-freedom; research on the history of IR itself has also challenged our earlier naïve, objectivist view on the relation of theory to practice and their alleged antinomy. In fact, preserving and re-assessing the gains of the third debate requires us decide whether we take the social sciences seriously in the first place. If we adopt an abstract understanding of theory that treats the theorist as operating over and above the world that she studies, then we cannot produce genuine social science of the kind that influences the conduct and practice of world politics.
First, the standards we are asked again to uphold in constructing and evaluating theories are rarely discussed in relation to the actual history and achievements of social theories. It is unlikely that, if judged on the basis of ‘logic’, ‘systematicity’ and ‘generalizability’, either Foucault or Bourdieu – the most influential and productive social theorists of the contemporary era – or even Marx, Durkheim, or Weber, would qualify as role-models. And yet we probably have learned more about the world and ourselves from each of them than from all ‘explanatory theories’ in IR.
Second, we are very good at importing theories from the social sciences, but we would benefit more from a serious engagement with their empirical findings. For the purpose of the present discussion, it is enough to refer to social epistemology, the history and sociology of knowledge and science, and science and technology studies, which we can no longer afford to ignore when debating what ‘theory is and does’. We now have access to a wide range of socio-historical studies that clarify the social origins, nature, and functioning of social science, academic disciplines, and concepts, but also of the ‘isms’ and fundamental notions of the philosophy of science – including ‘logic’, ‘causality’, and even ‘abstraction’. These studies suggest that our sophisticated philosophic-epistemic discussions are scientifically and politically naïve; they are divorced from history and real social practice. Contemporary empirical research on the co-constitution of knowledge and society, and the co-production of science and politics, would help us better conceptualize the ‘relation’ of theory to reality, which terms like ‘derive’, ‘interplay’, ‘link’, or ‘bring together’ are too vague and too inadequate to account for.
But there are also practical reasons for engaging this sociological literature. The editors, like many of us, are concerned about IR’s ‘promise’ to ‘make a difference’ in the world. By showing empirically how specific philosophical-epistemic and political-theoretical positions are born out of socio-economic structures and socio-political ideologies, struggles, and projects of legitimation, a sociological approach can help us better understand how and why theory and scholarship fail to make a difference — or even actually contribute to the perpetuation of the social reality they aim to reform. The editors refer repeatedly to the current global financial crisis as an example of a problem that needs a solution, but they never mention the relation between this reality and dominant economic theories and paradigms. From a sociological perspective, if both the problem and the theories that are meant to address it are determined and produced by the same socio-economic and politico-ideological situation, then thinking within the assumptions of these theories and their associated epistemology is a self-defeating endeavour.
Social crises require a re-evaluation of our frames of seeing, and these need to be understood objectively, i.e., as real, ‘concrete objects’. In the case of IR, Critical/Marxist, Feminist, Post-structuralist, and Post-colonial scholars have already alerted us to theory’s own grounding in real international structures and political ideologies, such as the state-system and statist policy-rationales, patriarchy and androcentrism, Western hegemony and Eurocentrism/racism. These affect the content of IR theories as well as the very philosophical-epistemic frameworks we use to construct and assess them – including those that inform the editors’ preferences. If this is an accurate evaluation of at least some aspects of theory and theorizing, then IR cannot reasonably hope to make any significant difference to the world if it does not confront its own situatedness and function in that world. The constant return to allegedly universal categories of thought and theorizing does not solve or avoid the discipline’s disturbing ideological tendencies, but only exacerbates them.
From this alternative sociological standpoint, the return to the Waltzian framework is a move backwards, not forwards – back to an a-historical, a-social understanding and practice of theory. It seems that ‘Critical Theory’ has completely dropped from the conversation, and is now replaced with ‘critical theory’, defined as ‘that type of theory that begins with the avowed intent of criticizing particular social arrangements and/or outcomes’. A theory that ‘criticizes’ social reality but excludes the critique of thought, truth, theory, and science as components of that reality is only very minimally ‘critical’, and of no significant value to any serious reflexive project in IR.
If this loss of diversity and criticality is the price to pay to achieve an ‘integrative pluralism’, then it is worth considering whether intellectual antagonism and conflict are not a better, healthier option for IR. A pluralism from which significant segments of the community are either consciously or de facto excluded also loses its raison d’être, and might be viewed as yet another attempt to impose an artificial consensus and redefine the contours and standards of ‘legitimate’ scholarship. We often speak of the marginalisation of ‘dissident’ scholars and their traditions, but the effects of this marginalisation affect both sides of the divide. Many of our colleagues have already started looking beyond the discipline for more engaging interlocutors and more productive discussions, and the prospect of leaving IR altogether appears to be increasingly appealing and rewarding. But it is unlikely that the discipline would benefit from their defection, or can afford, on the long-run, to treat their contributions as marginally important to the discussion on IR theory. Fortunately, the EJIR Special Issue itself includes some such contributions, and will hopefully stimulate a discussion that is more inclusive than the Introduction seems to suggest.
Hey Inanna — thanks for this piece, which is very interesting. Here’s two questions. First, on the naivete regarding politics, theory and their co-constitution. I wonder what those studies would look like… Is it Randall Collins? Or is it semi-popular books like “the gods that failed” or “the wordly philosophers” or “wizards of armageddon”? Or is it something Piki Ish-Shalom’s a close political biography of democratic peace theory, Srdjan Vucetic on Security Communities, or Ido Oren on Realism? Ie, help me envision this genre/mode of thinking, so I can better imagine the work it does; and then better sense/intuit how its absence is to be felt…
Another question: could the ‘how seriously do we take social science’ question be read backwards: That it’s _not_ very serious, at least measured in the post-Kantian philosophical position of making concepts ever closer to things in themselves… and _that’s_ why reflexivity is needed? That’s the line I’ve taken: it’s not that we need reflexivity to take ourselves seriously; it’s rather (to borrow Adorno’s line) that we’re clowns; that ‘we lose every argument by convicting our interlocutor of untruth’, and the reflexivity is the ‘tonic’ that reminds us of the unseriousness of our conclusions — even if we pursue them (as we should) with absolute earnestness and all the seriousness of purpose we can muster? (In the English-language western marxist tradition, this is part of why the ‘Frankfurters’ get tarred with the brush of being ‘dilettantes’ or descending into self-indulgent cultural pursuits. I wonder what you think, though.)
Hi Daniel. Many thanks for this, and apologies for the late reply (moved to a new city+house yesterday with no internet connection yet – a bit disoriented, too, so I hope the following makes sense).
I’m not familiar with all the books you mentioned, but Ido, Collins, and Ish-Shalom are certainly relevant to this discussion. And we need more of this kind of research.
I think your two questions are related, and I’m tempted to answer the first one in relation to the second. To take social science seriously is to take ‘the social’ seriously (ontologically speaking), and this has been the challenge for sociology ever since its inception, because ‘forgetting’ (as you might say) the social is a core effect of social life. We’ve gone a long way since Durkheim’s demonstration that a phenomenon like suicide is a social fact. It required a mental revolution to be able to see the social pervading the realm of individual behaviour, the human psyche, human reasoning, values, lived experience, etc. Bourdieu’s Distinction puts Kant in his right place (in philosophical, idealist la-la-land) on the problem of aesthetics; a realist sociological theory of knowledge does the same for epistemology. But we’re still very far from having extended this mental revolution in this direction, to encompass academic thought itself (which is what reflexivity, from a sociological perspective, really entails), and theory. We’re still idealists when it comes to the so-called ‘categories of human understanding’, thought-processes, logic, modes of inference, conceptualizations, theorizing, despite the fact that these were actually the first objects to have been critiqued sociologically (with Marx and Engels’s materialist critique of idealism and ideology, and their analysis of
idealist and philosophical thought in relation to commodity fetishism and abstraction). And when such issues are brought up in IR, we typically adopt the social strategy of philosophers (who have always been threatened by the sociology of knowledge): we reassert the superiority of the philosophy of science – and philosophy tout court – against materialist and sociological analysis (and this reaction is typically Waltzian, too; cf. his response to Ashley).
So we perpetuate what you would call ‘reification’. We need to ‘de-reify’ theory – among other objects and products of thought – and
start looking at it as something that is social through and through. And this starts by meaning something else when we ask ‘what is theory?’ We never really mean to ask what it is as a real object; what we really mean is ‘what should it be?’ (i.e., as ‘valid/good’
theory), as something we control, consciously, through ‘reason’, by making decisions on its assumptions and internal rules of logic. If we really ask ‘what is this thing called theory?’ like you would ask of a new object you encounter in the real and even natural world, we’d have to acknowledge that we don’t know much about it, and that until we do, we can’t even articulate what a good or useful theory is and what a theory can practically do to the world around us. That’s what is naïve about this posture – and it often borders on the delusional and the pompous, a bit like Lafontaine’s fable of the Coach and the Fly.
We have – and inherit, and teach – a textbook understanding of theory and theories. And textbooks are any discipline’s core policing and
reifying institution – they mask our ignorance, and they prevent us from
socializing theories and thought: it’s rarely about what ‘Realism is’, as a socio-historical and praxical ‘ism’, but either how its authors define it, or how it is analytically distinct from other ‘isms’. Most of what textbooks say can be formulated in neatly organised analytical tables. Once you start looking at theory/theories from the knowledge produced sociologically (from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge as well as the socio-historical studies produced within IR, like those you mentioned), you can no longer take
traditional textbooks seriously as referential literature – they can only be used as a primary source (a disciplinary object) that has to be deconstructed and analysed as a disciplinary ‘trace’, not as a source of understanding. That changes completely how we teach theory to our students, how we ‘map’ IR theories and make sense of their similarities and differences, and their ‘relation to reality’. But theory is just one aspect of the broader question, which is academic knowledge and practice.
I don’t know if you and I can ever bridge that Adornian-Bourdieusian gap, but the Marxian critique can be a common anchoring
point for our discussion of reflexivity. If seeing ourselves as ‘clowns’ means dropping that illusion that our individual reason is a manifestation of a universal supra-temporal ego reaching out to the heavens instead of discovering its muddy roots deep in the soil of social life, then I’d agree with that description. My problem with the ‘Frankfurters’ is that they haven’t pursued Marx’s materialist efforts in the direction of an alternative theory of knowledge – although Adorno was supportive of Sohn-Rethel’s own continuation of
Marx’s analysis – and they rejected the sociology of knowledge Mannheim-style because it turned the critique of ideology into a theory of total ideology, while it actually converges with their own critique of epistemology. I think there’s something about ‘praxis’ and critique that got a bit lost in the process – what I’d like to articulate in our little project on ‘critical theory’.
Thanks for this reply. I do now see at least some of the gaps in our thinking, and some of the points of overlap.
I agree about the notion of ‘social facts’ and the ideal nature of categories. I’m pretty sure that would even extend to persistent structures of thought, or images of thought: concepts, for example. What I’m not sure I agree with is the move to ‘de-reify’ theory. I’m not convinced it’s possible. There is a mind-body problem, and it’s not clear to me what “bare thinking” would look like, stripped of all sociality. “Nobody knows what a body can do” is often read as Spinoza’s counsel of hope; but it can also be a counsel of despair. What a body can do could be a lot _less_ than we think; ie, the power of thinking could be less. And so it’s not clear what a ‘de-reified’ theory would look like…it seems more like there’d be more and less useful reifications; more and less important ones, more and less dangerous ones. That’s where the notion of ‘chastening’ happens for me. Reification becomes the fact-in-itself around which thinking must order itself. The dark mirror image of the thing-in-itself.
The question would then be: well, important in relation to what? This is where, I think, the notion of a sense of emergency in IR comes from. That’s what unites Ashley to Morgenthau…a sense of crisis. There is something bombastic to the notion that we’d swoop in and save the world; in that sense the Lafontaine parable is apt. But then, as you noted in your reply to Colin: well, there’s Marx. There’s Bourdieu. THere’s Foucault. We learned rather a lot from them, it turns out. Then there are the people who actually will inform the ruling class — the Dahrendorfs, the Maynard Keyneses, the Joe Nyes, the Sam Huntingtons.
Sometimes the self-important thinker is _actually_ important, and perhaps the pose of self-importance is the necessary act of self care — Foucault’s own neologism — needed to sustain that conceit against all that insists on our mediocrity or the vanity of our high pretensions. Edward Said writes quite candidly about this. Surely, no one was more of a prima donna in dress, manner; the ‘worldly, exhausted critic with the fire in his belly’; somewhere between Isaiah Berlin and Ghassan Kanafani (so to speak). But then, how else to gather up the strength to talk about Palestine day after day when no-one’s listening and you must win your conversions one at a time? Perhaps you have your own path to this; but I wouldn’t want to kick out the supports of others, and I don’t think you would either.
It’s in that vein, for me, that a certain degree of clowning comes into play. Keep two notes in your pocket, says (supposedly) a famous Hasidic Rabbi named Bunim of P’sheshk. One says: “the world was created only for me.” The other says, “I am but a speck of dust.” To believe both of those things in the same moment with equal force: that’s what it means to be a ‘clown’ in this context.
I’m a bit confused on the notion that all thinking is social. That category, as I think it through is usually contrasted to something more agonistic; the political. But for B. and I think for you the social sphere is an agonistic one. So I’m not sure what to make of that claim yet; I struggle to fully internalize its meaning. Is it, for example, when in something like “Homo Academicus” the bodily ‘hexis’ of a student is used to disclose her class consciousness; and thus, also, becomes a means to determine the value of her examination answer; so that the academy becomes a site for a quite sinister form of class warfare? If so, then all thinking is political; its origins are not in interaction, but in wounds, traumas.
The textbook point. I’ve heard this argument before, and I don’t disagree with it exactly, but it took me a long time to understand it. I did not encounter IR through textbooks, but through monographs. I had problems, and I wanted to try to solve them, and texts took me to other texts. I didn’t have privileged access to events the way my ‘deep insider’ friends did (“I heard what Arafat said last week, and my buddy in State tells me that Condie Rice is gonna do ABC…”) when I was a wanna-be wonk. I wanted to add value to the conversation some other way, and I looked to theory for that. So that sense of being subjected to a discipline which was ostensibly finished but had no answers to actually give, and then having to overcome that — well, that simply never happened to me; the theory was always ‘for something’ and so general theory was always unsatisfying, but could be thought-provoking at the same time. It seems to me that the story you’re telling finds as its archetype the story of the philosophy “aggrege” who is taken from his family at a tender age and brought to the philosophical equivalent of Hogwort’s — only to discover that the ‘temple’ of reason is empty. In biblical terms, this is the story of Samuel…taken from his family to serve the Lord, only to discover that the Kings of Israel are corrupt politicians and dealmakers. That ain’t me…and I think it ain’t a lot of people. That’s not to suggest my thinking is without its own flaws. Rather, I do think that the particular sociology of knowledge you set out isn’t the only possible one; and something pretty close to adorno’s critique of mannheim turns out to be true when you assume it to be.
PS – congrats on your move and new situation. May it bring you good fortune!
Thank you, Daniel. So far so good. I heard you were visiting soon?
Yes, definitely, the Adornian path is very interesting; I’m not there yet, so more discussions on this with you would be very useful. I’m getting there slowly while I’m trying to understand how the Adorno-Weber-Mannheim-Scheler-and-co generation addressed/reacted to the cultural and intellectual crisis they all witnessed and lived simultaneously in Europe. The German sociology of knowledge was a response to that crisis too, and it’s fascinating to see how they negotiated the situation in very different ways intellectually and professionally (cf, in particular, the whole debate about values, detachment and engagement, praxis, etc., and the associated public practices that followed from these different intellectual positions). It also seems to me that their ’emigration’ to different social settings affected them, their work, and our interpretation of it now. Mannheim didn’t produce anything significant when he moved to the UK, and more worrying is the fact that he adapted his English translation of Ideologie und Utopie to an Anglo-American audience, which seems to have significantly distorted the meaning and nature of his perspective and overall project (trying to refresh my German now to be able to read the texts in their original version). So I want to avoid superimposing our contemporary ‘condition’ before having a clear idea of how their projects were informed by, and expressive of, a very specific context – even though I’m convinced that what makes them appealing today is a sense that the contemporary Western context is partly a more advanced stage of what they sensed was a new and problematic cultural-mental configuration that started with the breakdown of the unifying religious worldview.
On the social nature of thought, I’m in a phase where I’d rather start from a ‘positive’ position à la Comte, i.e., fully endorse the assumption that it’s all social, follow the empirical traditions that have explored its social origins and character and pursue this type of empirical research as far as it can lead; then whatever is not or cannot be explained sociologically (and through neurophysiology, too) can be dealt with through philosophical or other forms of investigation. so the ‘positive’ posture requires that philosophy be put aside – and I guess temporarily viewed/treated as a more ‘residual’ domain. I wouldn’t want to say that this IS the case, but only that in order to fully explore this particular – sociological – line of inquiry, it is methodologically and intellectually beneficial to do so in the first stages at least (and at an individual level). The sociological analyses of the social origins of what Kant called the ‘fundamental categories of human understanding’ are quite persuasive in that respect; there’s still a lot to investigate here, and it’s interesting that even the more Marxist traditions have not pursued this problem given the original Marxian-Engelsian critique of idealism and ideology.
Not all sociological studies of science – not even the contemporary ‘materialist’ work in STS – are actually developing such research. Homo Academicus is interesting because there’s a whole theory of practice – and a praxeological understanding of thought, intellectual and psychological dispositions, etc. – that informs Bourdieu’s perspective, which is found in his other works mainly. But from a sociology of knowledge perspective, this is the other end of the spectrum of objects to investigate (the social origins of specific political or cognitive ideologies, concepts, ideas, values, arguments, etc.; the opposite end being the ‘categories of human understanding’, modes of reasoning/inference, logic, language, and abstraction itself). Depending on how (and how broadly) one defines ‘the political’, the sociology of knowledge will be a more or less important part of political ‘theory’ (in the European sense of the term, not the Anglo-American). Bourdieu considered it to be an integral and core component of it. And Marx did too, obviously. So there is an important space of mutual engagement between sociologists of knowledge and political philosophers – I’m inclined to say that philosophy should be ‘informed’ by sociology, and that sociology should be ‘inspired’ by philosophy, so not a symmetrical engagement, but that’s just me in my ‘positive’ phase :)
Thanks for taking part Innana: But I must have written and read a diff piece, the claim that we are advocating a return to Waltz or ignoring the implications (and why only epistemic?) of post-whateverisms is frankly bizarre. Also, I can’t see how anyone can think (post-Kuhn) that you could do the philosophy of science without the sociology of science. I’l only mention Merton, Whitely, , Bourdieu, Bhaskar (who insists on the fact that all knowledge is constructed in historical time and places), Foucault as a few a people that have shaped my thinking; I’d mention Bruno but I’m on the fence with him; although his recent realist turn is attractive. Also, I’m not sure you are making the claim but it’s implied, but where do we exclude anyone? We could talk for ages about whether ‘theory’ is wholly conceptual, But saying that doesn’t rule out the fact of its social construction (how can concepts be otherwise) and practice (since concepts are social things they are obviously practices. or at least involved in practices). And a realist vision of theory; for sure. In that context though it’s worth pointing out that Bourdieu identifies himself as a realist, and Foucault, however you look at it, is deeply empirical (which implies a realism of kinds) most of the time; in fact he’s on record as saying he’s an empiricist. Anyway, once again thanks for taking the time to do this, and let’s hope it generates debate; by everyone….no exclusions here, only differences of opinion; differences that is, that we don’t engage in this kind of thinking won’t be made clear. Which is why we did the Sp Issue in the first place. I won’t comment further because we had our say, I’ll leave it for others to chip in now.
Thanks Colin, and congratulations on the special issue.
I agree on Bourdieu, but his conception of a realist theory of knowledge is not compatible with Waltz or Popper, etc. This is related to our earlier discussion on epistemology – it seems that Latour is the only one to have explicitly noted (as an accusation, in his case) that Bourdieu’s approach replaces epistemology and the philosophy of science with the sociology of knowledge. So I’m not sure why you’d refer to Bourdieu in that context if you don’t want to follow him all the way. More generally, your acknowledgment of the social and practical aspects of theory, concepts, etc. doesn’t change the fact that this doesn’t really inform your framing of the different questions you address in the Introduction. It seems to me that there’s an unshakeable idealist core, and then the add-on realist extras – theory is ‘also’ social, ‘also’ practice, etc…, but they don’t affect the core – which is what a realist approach would do.
As for the issue of Waltz and post-positivisms, I’m honestly not sure how to respond. I’m as amazed that you don’t see it as you are that I do. But I’m interested in what scholars who work within these traditions have to say about the Introduction and how they read it. Have you received any feedback from those corners of IR yet? I too hope for some debate, or at least some discussion, even if it doesn’t serve pluralism (which might not be everyone’s main concern or objective).
LOL, I’m not sure why you are giving Latour’s reading of Bourdieu primacy, and I wonder how you’d know (the epistemological question), which is the most appropriate reading? But anyway here’s Bourdieu on Bourdieu ‘That is why it seemed to me particularly necessary to submit science to a historical and sociological analysis that in no way seeks to relativize scientific knowledge by relating and reducing it to its historical conditions…’ And, in explicitly rejecting the attempt to reduce epistemology to the sociolology of science, he says, ‘one can, in my view, combine a realistic vision of the scientific world with a realist theory of knowledge’. You wouldn’t combine something that you thought were one and the same. So much for the idea of replacing epistemology with the sociology of science then.
In which case if you want to follow Bourdieu all the way, I’d be happy to lend you some maps. Now, of course, doubtless you’ll disagree. but here’s the rub. Once you do, how will your sociology of science as epistemology approach help us – me, you, anyone – decide which is the better/valid reading?
And again, how do you know the social and practical aspects don’t ‘inform’ our framing? Something can be informing a claim without it being part of the claim surely; that’s a core reflectivist insight I would have thought. But actually, I’d say that those issues are explicitly raised, after all, what is the articulation of theory if it’s not a social practice; what is pluralism in the field if it’s not a social practice? I can site loads of instance in the intro (and it’s not really an ‘intro’ tbh; although I understand why people will see it that way) when it’s clear.
Are you saying Waltz is compatible with Popper? Weird. Popper’s critical rationalism depends on philosophical realism. And yes, more than happy to leave others to see if we are recommending a return to Waltz and excluding post positivisms. Anyway, that really is my last response. I need to go write some silent stuff on terrorism.
Ah yes, but aren’t you confusing the sociology of science with the sociology of knowledge (which is what I mentioned specifically) here? The quotes you cite are very important indeed, but what does a ‘realist theory of knowledge’ mean in Bourdieu’s work? It’s a sociological theory of sociological knowledge. This cannot be understood independently of his ‘sociologie de la connaissance’ (which is a sociology of ‘cognition/knowing’, hence the importance of Bachelardian ‘historical’ epistemology in its construction, and the importance of sociological reflexivity in producing a self-corrective practice of knowledge). Where does this leave ‘epistemology’ in the Anglo-American sense?
No, he’s talking very clearly about the sociology of scientific knowledge. Let me just quote it for you again, ‘That is why it seemed to me particularly necessary to submit science to a historical and sociological analysis’. It’s a sociological theory of science, and any coherent theory of science may would have to look at how science goes about producing knowledge. So the point still stand. Next?
{Edit} sorry I missed an ‘s’ of stands there, no other corrections.
{Edit} I also missed an ‘f’ of ‘off’ as well. See I’m happy to admit my mistakes.
LOL. You’re still mixing the sociology of scientific knowledge with the sociological theory of science. There are two different, if related, referents here. The answer is in the whole of Bourdieu’s work, not just a few sentences.
LOL, No i’m not missing it, I’m saying explicitly that for Bourdieu you couldn’t possibly do the sociology of science without including the sociology of knowledge. And since you want to invoke the whole of Bourdieu’s work lets just be clear, he was concerned to defend science as an autonomous realm of knowledge production in modern societies. So for him, the sociology of science was the sociology of knowledge, or at least the most important form of knowledge; and he’s explicit about that. I can supply the quotes if needed.
Yes, yes. The sociology of science of course includes the sociology of knowledge and of scientific knowledge, but it’s not equivalent to it. He didn’t just look at ‘science’ as knowledge, but also as a social institution. So the sociology of scientific knowledge is not all that a sociology of science is. And the latter informs the former.
Yes, and here’s the point, we (and Bourdieu) are discussing how knowledge is produced in science. So you can’t take it out of science and deal with it in the way you suggest. There are all sorts of knowledge, but our discussion (and Bourdieu’s) concern is how those historical conditions, condition scientific knowledge. So I’m not sure what the point of the distinction is since Bourdieu is dealing specifically with Science as a source of knowledge. So, I’ll continue to maintain that for Bourdieu that the sociology of science is the sociology of scientific knowledge. If you have quotes that indicate otherwise I’d be happy to look at them. But given that we are concerned with the production of scientific knowledge then I can’t se what’s at stake by distinguishing. On the other hand, if you want to talk about the knowledge we need to buy a drink, a newspaper, conduct a seminar then it’s a different matter; but even then that knowledge is historically conditioned, and I can’t see how it helps support your initial claim that I challenged that Bourdieu replaces epistemology with the sociology of knowledge. He clearly doesn’t. So to be clear, I’m saying your introduction of the distinction between a sociology of knowledge (which is not at stake here) and a sociology of science is a red herring.
{EDIT}. Unless of course, you are claiming that all knowledge production is the same; but that would be really weird in terms of invoking Bourdieu, who clearly sees science as a special and particular form of knowledge production.
The importance of the distinction is that science (in its socio-institutional character) is the mediating social order through/within which scientific knowledge is produced, and that it is socially itself inscribed in the broader social order (and this is politically important, given his analysis of how science is located within the ‘field of power’ and in relation to society and other social groups). Therefore there is a specificity to scientific knowledge that it doesn’t share with other forms of social or private knowledge. This is why Bourdieu identified, in addition to the ordinarily constituted habitus of any social agent, the specific scholarly habitus of academics/scientists as important to include in the study of the formation of scientific knowledge, especially because this habitus enables the reinforcement of socio-political processes, via its tendency to maintain the separation of theory and practice. This, for him, explained why theoretical and epistemic discussions help to mask and reinforce specific social struggles – hence the mediation role the academy plays institutionally and mentally.
Ok, so just how does this help support your claim that he replaced epistemology with the sociology of knowledge? In fact, this seems to be a denial of that claim and an acceptance of the ‘specificity of scientific knowledge’.
But one major thing. Bourdieu thought that the most important aspect of science was it’s autonomy from broader social influences; so you’d be seen by him as the enemy.
I’ll stop up there.
That’s part of the argument I’d like to develop – not based on Bourdieu exclusively, btw, as this idea is more or less explicit in many earlier works.
BTW, I should say that under a conventionalist epistemology (that what is ‘known’ is what most people agree is the case) then you are clearly right. However, I’m with Bourdieu in hanging out for a realist theory of knowledge (which incidentally isn’t a realist epistemology (a term I hate)). One day, you flat earthers will see the light, or the round….:)
See you in Warsaw…:)
Looking forward to it. We can stick to our deal of no-academia-no-politics discussions, and talk about electric guitars instead; or you can come to the semi-plenary session on the sociology of IR and I’ll bring my boxing gloves :)
Oh btw, what’s a historical epistemology?
We’ve been there before. We agreed to strongly disagree.
Fine, just tell me what it is? No pressure.
Since we already spent half a day on Facebook arguing about this (in vain, too), and since you’ve made your positions explicit in article- and book-length forms, I ask for a similar opportunity, if you can wait until I’ve formulated this in its full form. Deal?
Sure, but I won’t be holding my breath. And I (and Carlsberg) don’t normally do predictions. But here’s one: when you do it it will be an account that looks at how ‘knowledge is produced under historical conditions’ (a position no one denies today, and has been extensively covered already in IR), but that it won’t tell us how those historical conditions help us define what knowledge is, how to distinguish knowledge (episteme) from belief (doxa), or how we might know when we know something. In short, it won’t work as an epistemology, but an account of the condition under which knowledge is formed. But by all means, go for it; I can’t wait. Deal!
OK, let me understand your challenge clearly: are you saying that the questions ‘what is knowledge?’ and ‘what is the difference between knowledge and opinion?’ cannot be answered sociologically?
Do you mean, historically or sociologically? You referred to a historical epistemology.
Both. History provides the material for the sociological analysis.
Actually, don’t answer that question, because both questions are meaningless and have been so comprehensively covered I’m not sure they even stand as questions. Here’s the short version. generally accepted by all. Knowledge, of any kind, is produced in historical time. Knowledge, of any kind, is always produced in a social setting (it’s social – although I’m not convinced Wittgenstein is right about private language games, but that’s a different argument). But there are already well defined positions within epistemology that have dealt with how sociological conditions lead to certain knowledge claims. We don’t need another.
I’m confused now about what you think can or cannot be done: you wrote ‘it won’t tell us how those historical conditions help us define what knowledge is, how to distinguish knowledge (episteme) from belief (doxa), or how we might know when we know something.’ Now you’re saying this has already been done and the question is meaningless.
Another point is that the sociology of knowledge is not just about identifying IN WHAT ‘historical time’ or ‘social setting’ knowledge is produced, but about explaining the social origins of knowledge. It’s not about identifying a context, but the actual causes that operate within these historical times and social settings.
Looking at the social, or historical conditions (context is, the causes) under which knowledge claims are made won’t tell you what epistemology is, but only what certain communities have accepted as knowledge. We know the earth was once flat. Why did they know that at the time? what epistemology made that knowledge claim valid? It was a combination of an authoritarian approach to epistemology (the Church) and the lack of alternatives. But an account of how the conditions under which knowledge is produced is not itself an epistemology. I’m saying that there are accounts of epistemology (conventionalism) that say ‘we know what we know because we all agree’, or epistemological positions that say ‘we know X because Y has the authority to determine X (religion, Monarchy, Saudi rulers, the Bible, the Koran, and so on). These have been done to death. You may well come up with something new, but I’ll wait and see. Don’t understand the last point at all the historical and social conditions ARE the causes/context; what else would be? Really last post from me.
No, no. sociological studies of knowledge go way beyond conventionalism or social authority. It’s much more interesting and conclusive than that – but at least now I understand what you think the sociology of knowledge can produce (and hence why you think it’s limited).
On context, I find this term very vague. There are specific social processes and configurations, specific modes of social organisation that are studied as causes within that field of inquiry.
PS: have you been editing your posts after I’ve responded to them??!!
No, I always, as you’ll see, clearly indicate when I’ve edited (if it’s more than 2 mins). I’ll wait to see the more interesting and conclusive aspects.
Btw, a wager. Everything you come up with I’ll be able to show you how a deeper epistemology is at play.
I very much agree about the sociology of knowledge/science. There’s a vast array of very mature sociological work on these subjects that is far more useful and relevant to internal IR debates than the endless rehashing of Popper, Lakatos, etc. It’s infuriating that people endlessly go back to the philosophers of science who had little or no idea about how science actually worked besides their casual assumptions and ignore all those empiricists who have actually studied science first hand.
I am firmly of the opinion that empiricism, if well articulated, is not a dirty word – in fact it should be our guiding principle. As long as we understand that it doesn’t have to be the polar opposite of ‘rationalism’ (which is the lazy assumption that people always seem to make) then we can really start thinking about things.
However, I too am a little baffled by the comment on Waltz – the editors just seemed to be respectfully noting his passing and saying that, love him or loathe him, he remains an important interlocutor in these debates. I’m no fan of Waltz’s philosophy but there’s no doubt in my mind that they’re right. At the very least he expounded the positivist vision of science that dominates IR most clearly. His version is more sophisticated and interesting than the vast majority of his imitators and while I don’t agree with him on much he’s certainly an enduringly important voice – even if it’s just one to argue with.
Hi Philip. I have no problem with acknowledging Waltz’s influence on the discipline (although I think there is much exaggeration here and a lot of performative rhetorical effects, and this influence needs to be empirically understood/proven beyond US and US-framed discussions) or showing respect for his legacy. That’s not what I was referring to. It’s rather his influence on the way theory is understood and approached in the text, and how the whole discussion is framed by a disciplinary moment that starts with Waltz and extends only to the borders of Waltz’s own interests.
On a related note, I’m curious about how you would reconcile the Waltzian view with a sociology of knowledge/science perspective – if you think they can be reconciled, or am I misinterpreting you here?
Hi Inanna,
I wouldn’t say that they can be reconciled as such. Waltz derives his view of science from logical positivism – in many ways the antithesis of the sociology of science! There are certainly crossover points and we can compare and contrast them analytically but taken as a whole they’re very different.
Logical positivism is really as dead as the dodo in intellectual terms but it lives on in IR’s assumptions vis-a-vis what science is and how IR qua science must be constructed. In order to escape it we need to re-examine what we mean by ‘theory,’ which I think is really the issue here.
Waltz defines theory as a ‘picture of the world,’ a simplification or abstraction that differs from what it describes and that is valid to the extent that it is useful – a tool, a kind of intellectual prosthetic that allows for the testing of hypotheses. Of course, this places him in immediate tension with other philosophical traditions who understand ‘theory’ much more broadly as engrained, embodied assumptions, social and cognitive predispositions, interpretive frames, and so on.
I think it’s important for neither side to be chauvinistic with their definitions. Words mean different things to different people and this isn’t a problem so long as we are sophisticated enough that we can translate. However, there are real philosophical differences behind the vocabulary.
The idea that prior to constructing a ‘picture of the world’ (let’s call that a Theory), when one is merely collecting data, describing things, collating facts, testimony and so on, one is blissfully unencumbered by small-t ‘theoretical’ presumptions, presuppositions – that’s a dangerously unself-conscious fallacy that has been rigourously ripped apart by critical theorists again and again. So, there’s the question of whether defining ‘theory’ narrowly and exclusively as ‘a picture of the world’ detracts from the critical analysis of more abstract, general, engrained kinds of ‘theory.’ I think that it does and it’s a problem for IR scholars as it tends to lead to anti-intellectual, narrow minded group-think.
Suffice to say, I think that even those who work with Theory should take theory (in general) more seriously. I have no principled objection to the construction and interrogation of abstract, simplified pictures of the world that are to be tested in various ways to see how they stand up. We all do this in less formalised ways all the time in our daily lives and it’s a perfectly valid way of producing knowledge about the world. What I object to is the painfully misguided idea that there is a Royal Road to Science and that simply copying what other sciences have done vis-a-vis ‘Theory’ is enough to put us on the the right track.
Social scientists aren’t like natural scientists, nor should they necessarily aspire to be. Without putting too fine a point on it, IR scholars’ obsession with aping the natural sciences is infantile. The natural scientists are Daddy and we’re all trying to say ‘look, I’m a real scientist now!’ by dressing up in their clothes and imitating their movements. A cargo cult. When kids do this it’s adorable, less so for grown adults. It speaks deep seated insecurity – the need to bolster one’s self-esteem by latching onto reflected glory. If IR scholars were happy with their work they wouldn’t need to play these games. Why the paranoia? And what if this majestic Other doesn’t exist?
Every science is founded on a deep bed of pragmatism and improvisation. There’s no formula. Just because something worked for one set of questions is absolutely no indication that it’ll work in another. Scientists have to think hard about their questions – and they have to be careful not to rush headlong into Theory, in all it’s vaingloriousness.
Grand Theory is not the be all and end all. Science is about more than Big Ideas and ‘eureka!’ moments. What IR scholar worth her salt believes in the historiography of world politics that deals solely in kings, castles, great battles and so on? Wouldn’t such a dope get laughed out of the conference hall? So why do we swallow this historiography of ‘Great Men’ when it comes to science?
Science answers questions. For all its genius and all the mysticism surrounding it that’s really all it does. And how a science must proceed depends entirely upon the questions it’s asking – and what those questions are should be our very first point of call, long before we worry ourselves to death over what methodologies to use and whether our epistemologies are warranted. And this is where it gets really interesting because IR scholars ask a whole range of questions – some that lend themselves to Theory and some that don’t.
Nobody has any right to hierarchise questions on the basis of whether they involve Theory or not. The production and interrogation of Theories is one way to proceed but it needn’t be the best way. Just because that’s what other sciences sometimes do doesn’t mean that this is ‘science’ itself.
So, I suppose I should redress what I said above about Waltzian positivism and the sociology of science. Reconciling the two isn’t even really a worthwhile task. In fact it isn’t possible as a matter of principle. They do different things. What the sociology of science does *not* do is proscribe the actions of scientists. They study and observe scientists, they don’t tell them how to be scientific. By contrast, in IR the philosophy of science is often taken to be an authoritative ‘how-to’ guide on how science gets done. This is wrong on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin, so I won’t.
What I would take from the sociology is that there is no singular scientific method that we can simply appropriate and expect to achieve results. A science has to take its questions as its foundation. In order to address these questions we should draw upon whatever resources we see fit – natural sciences, other social sciences, wherever and whatever. That is not to say that ‘anything goes’ in the sense that every method is equally valid; it just means that no method, tactic or ruse should be easily discounted (which is what Feyerabend meant when he said ‘anything goes’).
A method’s validity is an open question that shouldn’t be settled by appeals to authority. Not all questions lend themselves to Theory (and such questions are not necessarily inferior). Theory is not one thing. There is much more to any science than Theory alone. Above all: look at other sciences as resources not as father figures. All I hear when some IR scholar quotes some natural scientist to justify their own methodological choices is ‘my daddy could beat up your daddy.’
Why do you see Waltz as “deriv[ing] his view of science from logical positivism”?
I agree!! would you be interested in writing about this within a broader collective (ongoing) project on the sociology of IR-knowledge? Please get in touch if you are (inh3@aber.ac.uk)
Actually Phil, both Popper and Lakatos, knew a lot about science, but you’d need to distinguish the kind of stuff that goes on in labs from pure science. More to the point, the philosophy of science didn’t stop with Popper and Kuhn and I’ll reiterate the point that you can’t do the philosophy of science without including the sociology of science, and the history; which is why Kuhn, long thought to be a philosopher of science, considered himself to be a historian of science, and his work has been of immense benefit, or harm depending on your take on him, in the sociology of science. On empiricism, absolutely agree, although I’d distinguish empiricism as an epistemology (which does pretty much claim that the only valid knowledge is that based on experience) from the empirical. All approaches rely on empirical evidence, and in that respect they are all soft empiricists of a kind. The only real debate is whether there are other ways to support knowledge claims; and of course there are; many, but not limitless, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. In my book, I deal at length with that issue of the relationship between rationalism and empiricism (although in IR that whole issue just gets messed up becos most people think all rationalists are empiricists) and come to defend a position pretty much the same as you are staking out (I think).
Thanks for this, Inanna.
Just one question: What do you think happens to the very practice of theorizing if theorists fully accept your point of seeing theory as a contextualized social practice? Your arguments are attractive in the diagnostic mode but does not the creative act of theorizing also require that dose of sociological ‘naivete’, or willful ignorance, about one’s very activity to distance oneself from the experienced and lived in order to seek the universal, the objective in the abstract mode of thinking? (This only to get dissatisfied with the abstract and go back to the concrete, on and on, as the dialectician in me would add.) Do you have space for this kind of blissful distancing in your idea of IR theory?
Now I should now read Dunne, Hansen and Wight to find out what exactly you are responding to.
PS. Thanks for the whole Symposium, really enjoying it.
Hi Thekla.
I think there’s no reason why creativity wouldn’t still be possible after a full contextualization, and it can certainly follow a dialectical mode as you mention.
There are many sociological traditions that combine this kind of reflexivity with an enabling theoretical/scholarly praxis. Feminist Standpoint theorists, for example, find the source of creativity, and objectivity (what they call ‘strong objectivity’) in an understanding of how knowledge is situated, and hence in an objective analysis of their own situatedness and intellectual practice. This applies to other ‘standpoint’ traditions. In this sense, the distancing enables a better engagement with the world and with knowledge: it’s both empowering cognitively because one becomes more aware of the social determinants of one’s thought, and politically because the process of demystifying scientific knowledge allows for a more responsible and meaningful social praxis for scholars qua scholars.
There is also the idea that creative knowledge emerges within specific social locations and conditions – hence the notion of a ‘standpoint’, which emerges once these locations and conditions are understood objectively and developed into social-scientific positions. So becoming aware of what one’s thought-processes and perspectives owe to one’s situatedness and to the general social processes one is inscribed in, is viewed as a first step towards the production of more interesting scholarship.
Answering your question should of course be a collective endeavour. If we spend as much time thinking about how such a sociological reflexivity can inform a conscious methodology as we spent on developing positivist/objectivist positions in the past decades, we’d get there – and fortunately we don’t need to start from scratch, we just have to start looking at the relevant literature.
Hi Inanna,
Thanks for your reply (and, please, excuse my delay in answering: I’m not cut for the world of instant communication, though I enjoy many of its products like this blog).
As you can imagine, I’m not fully convinced by your reply. Yes, the standpoint traditions seek to address the abstract out of the concrete, as do others, including Marx. Yet, there is a danger — and standpoint feminists as well as Marx illustrate this well — that our particular historical perspective gets ‘objectivized’ and turns into ideology, which other contextualized accounts of social life can then rather easily challenge. The idealists, as well as those critical scholars with a recourse to scientific rather than sociological understanding of theory, have an advantage here (as much as they lose elsewhere). While I’m with you on the need of ‘historicizing’ — as I would call it — what we do as IR theorists, I think it is important to bear in mind the problem of the universal in this approach.
I like your idea that if we spend as much time thinking about this as our predecessors did about positivist theory we might get somewhere really interesting!
Hi Inanna,
Thanks for your reply (and, please, excuse my delay in answering: I’m not cut for the world of instant communication, though I enjoy many of its products like this blog).
As you can imagine, I’m not fully convinced by your reply. Yes, the standpoint traditions seek to address the abstract out of the concrete, as do others, including Marx. Yet, there is a danger — and standpoint feminists as well as Marx illustrate this well — that our particular historical perspective gets ‘objectivized’ and turns into ideology, which other contextualized accounts of social life can then rather easily challenge. The idealists, as well as those critical scholars with a recourse to scientific rather than sociological understanding of theory, have an advantage here (as much as they lose elsewhere). While I’m with you on the need of ‘historicizing’ — as I would call it — what we do as IR theorists, I think it is important to bear in mind the problem of the universal in this approach.
I like your idea that if we spend as much time thinking about this as our predecessors did about positivist theory we might get somewhere really interesting!
Thekla: As you can see, I’m even less cut for instant communication than you are (or instant thinking, for that matter!) – so my apologies, too, for this late reply.
I would disagree with you on the consequences of ‘standpoint’ and the idea that once ‘objectivated’ (a term I prefer), and hence ‘relativized’ (or ‘relationized’, as Mannheim would say), these perspectives can be so easily dismissed or challenged. The early sociologists of knowledge were very much aware of this problem, and the project itself was/is meant to sustain the epistemic, and hence social, value of social-scientific knowledge ‘despite’ its historicity and social ‘boundedness’. More specifically, they would not say ‘despite’ but ‘on the basis of’: first, while it is possible, from an objectivist perspective, to think that the acknowledgment of historicity and social-boundedness collapses all knowledge into ‘opinion’, standpoint scholars have shown that the objectivist position itself is flawed and hence cannot provide a standard for the assessment of non-objectivist ones (and so the very problem of ‘knowledge vs. opinion’ needs to be redefined from a non-objectivist perspective); second, if ‘ideology’ is understood in a Mannheimian sense (as ‘total ideology’), then social-boundedness would be taken as a pre-requisite for knowledge (even ‘objective’ knowledge, which also needs to be redefined in non-objectivist terms) rather than an obstacle. In other words, positionality and situatedness are here viewed as conditions for knowledge and meaning.
I didn’t comment previously on the issue of ‘the universal’ because I’m not sure what you mean exactly by this: what is general (or can be generalized) but within specific conditions of validity, or what applies everywhere to everyone for all times? If you mean the latter, and you wish to preserve that, then I agree that the historical perspectives cannot answer that question, because they reject this possibility. But then neither can objectivists answer it without falling into idealism and a distortion of reality. If you mean the former, then there is no contradiction, quite the contrary – because validity is here defined in relation to specific and variable conditions. Understanding the social situation and factors that make specific statements or general worldviews valid ‘within specific social conditions’ is then also (reflexively) the means to locate one’s own validity, as well as one’s scholarly praxis as an active and meaningful engagement with the world.
Of course this would need a much more sophisticated elaboration than what I offer here; and it doesn’t solve all the problems we currently face, but it does, I believe, put us on the right track. And equally important is the fact that it shifts the formulation of ‘the problems of knowledge’ and ‘action’ (and the definition of the problem of ‘facts and values’, etc.) onto a different plane. I think it is worth pursuing because instead of saying ‘social situatedness is a problem, let’s just ignore it and pretend that objectivism works well’, it forces us to confront the real (and realist) problems we face, not imagined ones. It also makes the issue of our social responsibility both more problematic and more urgent to address: interestingly, the objectivist position, which operates on a separation of facts and values, knowledge and action, and equates objectivity with neutrality, has often, historically, allowed and justified a collusion with power rather than prevented it; whereas relativists/relationists are often more cautious with respect to the question of public engagement, and more likely to accept that their social praxis needs to be subjected to some kind of accountability.
It’s a difficult and complex problem, and I don’t have all the elements at this point, but I hope that this is relevant to your last comment.
Hi Inanna,
Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I find it embarrassing to be coming back to you only now… Therefore just briefly here: By universal I mean your first meaning, what can be generalized. And basically, I wish to be persuaded by you (and my other self) but I’m also skeptical about the sustainability of the argument. Unlike you, I don’t know the sociology of knowledge literature, what might be the reason for my skepticism. But am reaching similar direction of thinking about IR theory as you from my reading of IR itself and through political theory. Talk to you soon.