“In the Beginning” joins a growing literature – including my own Recovering International Relations – in which normative claims regarding the vocation of IR theory are tied to an historical account of its disciplinary emergence.* If these arguments vary in their details, they share a common logical-rhetorical tactic. An account of the discipline’s beginnings is mobilized to critique present-day scholarly practices: to spur “reflection on where one is, and where one is going.”
On Williams’ account, a basic confusion regarding IR-realism’s relationship to liberalism characterizes “where we are.” The traditional ‘dueling paradigms’ approach to IR theory in which “realism and liberalism…develop as parallel tracks that rarely intersect substantively,” overlooks their deeper historical co-emergence. IR-realism, he argues, emerged to guide liberal societies and protect their freedoms amidst the growing challenges of postwar political life. That co-emergence, Williams suggests, has been forgotten, with “significant implications for how we think about the past and future development of the field.”
What Williams wants is international theory that is not merely open to normative concerns, but which is deeply imbued with them. Accordingly, it is not a reflection so much as it is a proposed regrounding. Williams wants us to think about IR differently because he wants IR to speak to political life differently: in the voice of Ira Katznelson’s post-war “political studies enlightenment,” which “combined the deduction of politics from norms with its extrapolation from facts, affiliating engaged social criticism with disinterested social science[.]” (p. 3)
Nothing wrong with that; but what practices of reflection are to keep his understanding of the field from becoming as “final and defining” as those he is attempting to critique? [p. xxxx] Rationalist scholars, too, often evince a sense of grounded vocation. Where they differ is on the account of social and political life upon which their analyses rely, and onto which their notions of ‘good’ theory bolt. [inter alia, see here, here, here, and here]. Nor are ‘historical’ narratives any more objectively or self-evidently cohesive than are ‘rationalist’ ones. If indeed – as Williams quotes Adorno and Horkheimer in his 2005 book – “all reification is a forgetting,” then what risks being reified and forgotten in his counter-narrative? (p. 128)
Drawing on my own work – in particular, on engagements with Williams’ earlier writing (here and here) – I will attempt a bare-bones answer in four steps. First, I will suggest that Williams may have under-read the degree to which thinkers of the post-war “political enlightenment” felt themselves unequal to the crises they identified. Second, I will suggest that such an under-reading may skew Williams’ understanding of critique. Third, I will speak to the difficulty of operationalizing that post-war feeling of inadequacy while still meaningfully addressing problems in world politics, a challenge general to IR as a discipline. Finally, I will suggest a tentative path forward, using thinkers on whose idiom Williams himself draws.
1. Late modernity as intellectual crisis. While Williams correctly identifies an awareness of radical evil that permeated postwar thinking, he may not go far enough. I would venture that many of the thinkers on whom Williams draws understood themselves – or at least the intellectual traditions from which they worked – to be implicated in that evil; moreover, that they did not themselves entirely know what to do about this. The result was a pervasive sense of scholarly anxiety, one which played a crucial role in the reflexivity that permeated their thought.
Since the image of Hannah Arendt looms large in Williams’ writing – and in that of the ‘classical’ realists (Morgenthau) and disciplinary historians (Katznelson) on whom he draws – her work can be used to briefly sketch out a sense of that inadequacy. Consider how her Human Condition opens: the possibility of human beings entirely escaping the bounds of the earth, Arendt suggests, should move us to a profound rethinking of what it means to be human; to “think what we are doing.” (p. 5) Yet we are far from able to undertake such thinking. The concepts we have inherited from the past may be unequal to the present, but new ones have not yet emerged. Indeed, the superannuated philosophical tradition in which we do write may actually help perpetuate the kind of thoughtlessness which it ostensibly means to dispel, for our speculative perorations (and the ‘materialist’ analyses that follow from them) cannot, in fact, deliver the understandings which they promise. Eichmann in Jerusalem provided a signal example of this inability. Recall the passage in which, at the prompting of Judge Raveh, Eichmann proceeds to offer – to everyone’s surprise – “an approximately correct account of Kant’s categorical imperative.” (p. 136) Eichmann can thrive because a world that leaves the thoughtful tied up in knots also offers the thoughtless certain ‘easy outs’: for Kant’s ‘moral law’ substitute ‘the will of the Führer’, and go about your duty. However gloomy that assessment, it is hardly particular to her writing, and variants of it can be discerned in thinkers from Adorno (“philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed”) to Leo Strauss, to – as Williams notes in passing – Judith Shklar.
2. The breadth of that sense of crisis. Such thinking, as Williams notes, deeply affected Morgenthau and the classical realists. But it also affected at least some of the rationalists that Williams critiques. Consider Shklar’s influence on Robert Keohane, one of the deans of rationalist ‘neo-neo’ IR theory. The links are not hard to see. Keohane’s “tart” conception of liberalism was specifically anti-utopian: “an approach to the analysis of social reality” that eschewed (or at least claimed to eschew) “a doctrine of liberty.” (p. 174)** By dismissing this common sense of vocation, Williams risks re-inscribing precisely the same disciplinary fallacy which Katznelson – successfully or otherwise – seeks to undo. Namely, that the gap between “speculative, semi-philosophical, brooding texts,” and “doggedly empirical, social science treatises” is so vast “that they inhabit separate universes.” (p. 117) Rather than a spur to considering the general limitations, structures or mediations of thought – and then to proceed from those limitations – critique, as Bruno Latour persuasively documents (PDF), becomes a machete by which to hack away at others’ practical agendas.
3. The challenge of sustaining critique. Remaining within so anxious and deeply reflexive a thinking space – one which I have elsewhere called sustainable critique – is, to be sure, extremely difficult. Williams’ discussion of classical realism – both in “In the Beginning” and elsewhere – suggests agreement on this point. He is careful to confine his discussion to the normative/vocational thinking space that Morgenthau and his colleagues sought to sustain. But beyond what these theorists tried to do lies an assessment of what they actually succeeded in doing. Did Morgenthau, in fact, sustain the thinking space to which he aspired? If not, why not? Put differently, Williams might wish to do more than read normative and historical context back into international theory. If they have been eclipsed, he might wish to think about how and why they come to be so, and what that means for the kind of reflexivity to which he aspires.
4. Toward such a mode of sustainably critical thinking. If these bare bones arguments hold, what is to be done? Williams opens “In the Beginning” with considerations drawn from the early work of Edward Said: a discussion of both the fecundity, and the problems, that attend the narration of beginnings. Said’s last work – On Late Style – uses Adorno’s thinking to push those considerations to a careful form of reflective-analytical equipoise. He wants to move past a critique of beginnings, to a mode of thinking that neither reifies any particular account of beginnings or foundations, nor rejects them altogether as points of intellectual departure. To that end, he eschews enlightenment grandiloquence in favor of a peculiar kind of dilettantism: an “inspired if slightly sated amateurism,” in which “great works, great masters and great ideas” are to be viewed not reverentially, but as slightly self-indulgent swings of affect and mood, “practices indulged in by a frequent habitué at a club.” (p. 20) The aim of critique is, on this account, to reveal the hollowness inherent in every grandiose narrative of history, truth and time – our own, as well as everyone else’s. Such dilettantism might leave Williams with a robust space for critiquing present scholarly practices in IR, without laying down potentially exclusionary counter-narratives of his own.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Daniel J. Levine. It is the 24th 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 refers to Michael C. Williams’ article (PDF). His post appeared earlier today. tl;dr notice: ~1730 words.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Daniel J. Levine. It is the 24th 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 refers to Michael C. Williams’ article. His post appeared earlier today. tl;dr notice: ~1730 words.
*See recent and recent-ish studies by Campbell Craig, Duncan Bell, Nicolas Guilhot, Stefano Guzzini, Srdjan Vucetic, Hartmut Behr, Felix Rösch, Brian Schmidt, Robert Vitalis, Ido Oren, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, John M. Hobson, Torbjorn Knutsen, Ned Lebow, Alison McQueen, Christoph Frei, Piki Ish-Shalom, Christophe Frei, William Scheuerman, Vibeke Tjalve, Martti Koskenniemi, Oliver Jutersonke – and Williams’ 2005 book.[back]
** On Shklar’s influence see Keohane’s Keohane, Robert O.: Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. ch. 12 and his 2004 interview with Harry Kriesler. On “tart cooperation” see his 1984 After Hegemony. Compare to one of the closing passages from Shklar’s After Utopia: “Traditionally, political theory has turned around and around two poles, the notions of power and justice. Purely empirical studies of various power structures and of various conceptions of justice can and do exist in quantity, of course, but these do not add up to a theoretical picture. To speak of justice has become intellectually hazardous. The inhibitions bred by our historical experience and by analytical honesty are overpowering. Moreover, the notion of political justice implies a moral imperative – and as such an end beyond what is known to exist. Unless we admit that the very notion is senseless, it demands at least an ounce of utopianism even to consider justice, and this utopianism, as we have amply seen, is absent today. All that our lack of confidence permits is to say that it is better to believe in it than not – and that is hardly a theory of politics in the grand tradition.” (Princeton: 1957, pp. 271-2, emphasis mine).” [back]
Is dilettantism a luxury to be consumed at the end of history, with liberal regimes and a liberal world order relatively secure? Is it that the brutal ideological wars of the 20th century having been won, dilettantes can enjoy the peace?
Hi HJ, thanks for these questions.
That’s not quite what I mean, no. Perhaps dillettantism is a space from which to retain something like scholarly detachment in a world where brutal ideological wars continue to rage. Those wars demand our vigorous engagement; but if we, as scholars, do not want to be drawn into them as partisans, we need a ‘thinking space’ that preserves distance from them. Rationalist scholars idealize the ‘view from nowhere’ for that reason; it’s their way to study a fight but not ‘have a dog in it’. But if the view from nowhere is an impossible aspiration — and Williams and I both believe that it is, for generally similar reasons — then some mode of reflexivity is needed to replace it. That’s the backdrop for his piece, and my engagements with his work here and elsewhere.
What I am specifically suggesting here that the particular approach to reflexivity which MCW proposes, though interesting, might not be sufficiently ‘strong medicine’, given what his ends seem to be. I am proposing, accordingly, proposing that he reformulate his position: instead of an ‘IR enlightenment’ a la Katznelson he might consider a kind of militant, committed “dilettantism.” There is, of course, a tension in this notion, right? How can one be a ‘militant dilettante’? Well, the idea comes from Edward Said, who Williams cites as in his piece. That tension, we could say, characterized Said’s entire scholarly and public-intellectual career. GIven the aims Williams sets out, I mean to suggest, that thinking could prove instructive and helpful — if given deeper consideration than his present essay does.
Daniel,
I think that 1) Williams is closer to you than you admit and 2) you misunderstand his reasons to include Katznelson into this discussion and by extension some of his argument. Your comment on Keohane and Shklar illustrates this well. Keohane is indeed a ‘liberal of fear’ when thinking of himself as a (proto-)political theorist. But he is first and foremost a social scientist and as such someone who separates political theory from IR theory (and has good ethical as well as methodological reasons for this). Katznelson’s ‘political studies enlightenment’ seek to join the two — social science explanation/analysis with normative commitments — and have, again, good ethical and methodological reasons for it. (More on Katznelson: https://est.sagepub.com/content/7/1/105.full.pdf+html; and, I would argue, Shklar is more conducive to this unitarist effort than to Keohane’s separation, but this is irrelevant to this discussion.)
Williams seeks to do something similar — make a case that political theory and IR theory (as theory of social science) should not be separated, arguing inter alia that (IR) realists *can* be (political) liberals. And he is not only ‘regrounding’ IR this way but also pointing out that in not so distant past, this was the case in much of IR (classical realists). I’m sure he would agree with you that it is not only a sense of ‘desolation’ or angst that makes this unified position possible, but also other things: specific methodological choices and normative judgments. Hence, he is much closer to you, I mean you in Recovering International Relations. What worries me is that in this regard Katznelson’s political studies Aufklaerers made rather different methodological choices (institutionalism) from Williams’s classical realists (the statesman, role of IR scholars to balance out policy-makers).
In any case, thanks for your post; I enjoyed reading it.
ARRGH! OK, I’ve now tried to post a reply to this twice and I’ve lost the comments both time. Sigh. I’m not sure why I’m so internet-incapable tonight, but I’ll try again tomorrow.
In the meantime, thanks, Thekla, for these challenging comments.
Hi Thekla —
Thanks for these challenging comments.
First, I agree there is overlap between MCW’s position and mine, as I’ve noted. I think we agree on the basic normativity of International theory. Where I think we don’t agree is on what to do about it. I’ve made that argument fairly extensively elsewhere. I’d be glad for an account of our thinking that suggests we’re close than I have supposed; but that would mean reading his ‘relationality’ closely against my ‘sustainable critique’ differently than I have done. Not something we can do here.
As for the Katznelson issue, I’m not sure what you mean about separation and unification, nor about the social scientist point. Katznelson does indeed claim Arendt as a social scientist, and asserts interaction and learning between political scientists and political theorists; just as there was (for example) interaction between Adorno and Horkheimer and Lazarsfeld; or between Shklar and Keohane. But there all, for all that, different moments of thinking, and Katznelson never denies this; in some moments we are analytical (and our normative commitments lie about assumed and unsaid) and other times we are specfying our normative commitments — and our methodologies go unstated. Arendt in “Rachel Vernhagen” or the “origins of totalitarianism” is not arendt in “the life of the mind”. The question is how we keep the relationship between these moments of thought open and clear, so that we’re never too completely cut off from either one. Here, on my account, is where Keohane fails; but so too does Morgenthau. And so too, I’m afraid, could MCW. I don’t know he will of course, but I’m suggesting it is possible and offering a possible ‘way out’ if that matter is a concern to him.
It’s easier for Keohane to forget because his ontology elides radical evil in a way that Williams and Morgenthau do not, and because he at times seems to believe that politics can be routinized into social science. But Arendt herself acknowledges that such routinizations sometimes work in _Human Condition_; the real question is one of how we deal with radical evil and keeping our eyes on it. (In his own writing, Keohane admits his failure, and chalks this up to naiveté; he didn’t learn what Shklar was trying to teach him.) In that vein, it strikes me that talk of ‘enlightenments’ must be viewed with suspicion; and that’s why i put forward the ‘dilettante’ point.
Thanks, Daniel. This is, indeed, a long comment (which must have been annoying to lose twice). Thanks for it.
I agree with you, the two are different moments of thinking (in Arendt and others) but those like Morgenthau, and Williams (less so Arendt) make a point of never losing the sight of either, maintaining that one is not possible without the other. Their aims are identical with yours, I would still argue, but your sustainable critique is crucially nurtured by a particular philosophical position while M’s and W’s by an epistemological position forcing them to feed in knowledge from the social realm into the normative one (this is their ‘realism’) at the crucial moments. To social scientists like Keohane they are ‘dilettantes’ as they are to philosophers like you. But I still think that you might be disposed to embrace this ‘dilettantism’ as you do not want to be a philosopher only (at least that how I read you) and your normative roots are very similar. [If only I was able to express this better… I fear all I’m managing is to illustrate a point an American colleague made during a recent visit: if only you, Europeans, could write more succinctly and clearly.]
Just one small point on Arendt and Shklar. Arendt focuses on evil, even if banal evil. Shklar’s key concept is ordinary vices of the everyday kind. I find Shklar more persuasive here, as the focus on ordinary cruelty (as the greatest evil) forces her theory to engage social analysis and political judgment more readily or frequently, because cruelty is inscribed in most of human action. Thus, I think Mike Williams is better served by embracing Shklar (as he does in e.g. his 2011 Security Dialogue article) than by turning to evil, but maybe he’ll prove me wrong.
Hi Thekla, thanks for this reply. I’m sorry it took me some time to reply. Teaching and other issues ate up a chunk of time.
No problem with the comment’s length; but I think you’ve got me wrong on a couple of levels — or at least this characterization, as I read it, does. I agree — his aims are the same as mine; and I’ve now said so twice. And my position is informed by the same social or historical moments: we both proceed from the emergence of radical evil. THat’s an _historical_ appearance, not a philosophical one. We must deal with it not because it’s an ‘open rubric’ in a set of concepts that must be filled for a metaphysical system to be complete, but because radically evil things happened in particular places and times, and we can give little account of them. Arendt in her lectures on Kant points this out — Kant admits the possibility of radical evil as a philosophical possibilty. Only he thinks it’s “absurd” — ie, not worth thinking about; and he dismisses it on that basis.
Arendt feels that she doesn’t have that luxury. Why? Her reasons are historical/empirical — the war happened. The problem is thus no longer scholastic, it’s “actual” in the German sense of this word.
More to the point: I’m not criticizing MCW’s point for being dilettantish. I’m criticizing it for not being dilettantish _enough_.
I’m not sure what comes of calling me a philosopher; I study world politics, not wisdom or theories of knowledge; and I do so pretty seriously. I’m just deeply concerned with the ethics of that study, that’s all.
The comment on Shklar is very thought provoking. I wonder what comes of it. QUotidien cruelty is not quite radical evil, is it? I wonder how they connect. There is a weakness in my position on this score.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the reply; we both know how it is when teaching… I was intrigued by your emphasis on evil as historical not philosophical. MW does not have much on it in the article you commented on but I heard him giving a paper on evil in spring and am quite sure he was working with a Kantian, philosophical understanding of it. If you say you take it for a historical appearance, then, indeed, you are further from each other than I maintained.
Glad to hear you want him to be more dilettantish (this is what I thought you should embrace based on what you are saying in Recovering), sorry that I missed it from this piece of yours. Yes, being more ‘dilettantish’ in the eyes of social scientists as well as philosophers is the way to go. But then Morgenthau was for me dilettantish in the right way, yet you want him to be a better philosopher (as much as others want him to be a better social scientist), which he refuses to be.
On Shklar, and this is just my interpretation, others interpret her very differently. Turning to ordinary vices takes away the certainty of knowing, naming evil, which in this sense becomes a philosophical notion, while Shklar’s ‘cruelty as the worst evil’ is both a philosophical and a historical concept, never letting us be certain we are sufficiently grasping it when treating it as philosophical or historical notion only. Would this relate to your point on dilettantism? I think it could and perhaps better than Arendt.
I’ll e-mail you as I worry we might be taking up too much space here. Thanks again for all the interesting ideas.
I’d love that, Thekla. Most interesting.