Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by David Edelstein. It is the eighth 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 Chris Brown’s article (PDF). His post appeared earlier today.
Other entries in the symposium–when available–may be reached via the “EJIR Special Issue Symposium” tag.
Every other year, I teach a field survey seminar in international security for doctoral students in Georgetown’s Government Department. The students are invariably engaged and, like all good graduate students have forever been, eager to eviscerate the work of others. What interests these students, however, has changed from when I was a graduate student in the 1990’s. This current generation studies grand IR theory because they are told they have to do so or because they anticipate needing to know the literature for comprehensive exams. What interests them more is the work that has come to be called “mid-range” theory. That is, work that tackles a more modest and manageable question that is amenable not only to theoretical study but also to using the latest and greatest methodological techniques.
My students came to mind as I read Chris Brown’s commentary on the state of grand theory in international relations. Brown usefully surveys the literature over the past decade or so as seen through both the conventional “isms” that have defined the grand theoretical landscape—realism, liberalism, and constructivism—as well as alternative perspectives including feminism and “late modern” approaches. His conclusions are mixed. On the one hand, he lauds realism and liberalism, in particular, for continuing to push their research programs forward. He notes with approval what he sees as the demonstrated problem-solving capacity of these paradigms. Even though such research falls short a Skinnerian ideal-type for grand theory, Brown is able to find solace in much of this work.
On the other hand, he is less complimentary of those approaches that he sees as engaging in theoretical navel-gazing over the last decade, focusing on the development of theory for the sake of, well, developing theory. In particular, Brown laments that critical, “late modern” theory has perhaps made the least progress. If any school of international-relations theory ought to be prepared to offer theory that can help us solve “real world” problems, it should be those critical theorists who come at theory with an explicit problem-solving approach. Yet, to his chagrin, this has not happened.
This returns me to my graduate students with two observations. First, any optimistic conclusions that Brown reaches by looking retrospectively at international-relations theory work done over the last decade might be turned upside down if one were to look prospectively. That is, I fully expect that my graduate students will be doing more “problem-solving” work in their dissertations (in fact, the evidence is already crystal clear on this front), but they will not be making much effort to connect it to grand theoretical debates in the discipline. If grand theory must, as Brown defines it, “have implications beyond the immediate discourse within which it was created,” and grand theorists are “figures who have name recognition across the human sciences as a whole,” then I am not particularly optimistic about the future of grand theory in international relations.
Maybe this is not such a problem. Perhaps the field will, indeed, be better off with more mid-range theorizing. But one should not be sanguine that a retrospective look at the discipline a decade from now will reach similar conclusions about the state of grand international-relations theory. In fact, if one looks at the students currently being hired at the most prestigious departments or publishing at the most impressive rate, I can think of very few that have engaged in grand IR theory debates. I would go so far as to say that any effort to do so in a job talk would be viewed as anachronistic, a time warp back to the days of the paradigmatic warfare in the 1990’s.
Second, Brown’s call for a reinvigoration of critical theory with an emphasis on problem-solving is, for better or for worse, unlikely to resonate in the United States. Here, Brown’s essay usefully reminds me of the grand-theoretical chasm in this business known as the Atlantic Ocean (or perhaps chasms, defined by the two oceans that border the United States). I can think of very few top-tier graduate programs of political science in the United States that teach critical theory in any sustained way or have a critical mass of such theorists (and teachers) among their faculty. If there are no faculty producing critical theory at top departments, then it follows that there will likewise be few students to someday fill the faculty ranks. Thus, if the deficit in the grand-theoretical thinking is truly in the area of critical, problem-solving theory, then a solution will have to come from elsewhere, perhaps even from those areas of the world that Brown notes are in dire need of more study and understanding from a critical, problem-solving perspective. Such a division of labor may be appropriate—there is no particular reason why the academy in the US needs to produce critical theorists—but it also is undoubtedly likely to lead to less conversation and intellectual exchange among the alternative grand theoretical approaches as different camps settle into their geographic homes.
Finally, a note on problem-solving theory and its practical utility. Brown praises those grand theorists, like John Mearsheimer and John Ikenberry, whose work has had an apparent impact on debates over policy and the solutions to various problems in international politics. Are these models replicable? And if they are, should they be? As someone who lives, works, and teaches in Washington, DC, I would suggest that policy makers in this town are interested in hearing from academics, if for no other reason than to legitimate their own views and preferences on various issues.
But I would also suggest that having an impact requires a certain type of theory and writing that Mearsheimer and Ikenberry share in common. Namely, it employs simple, straightforward logic expressed through equally clear and understandable language, absent (for the most part) pretentious social science vernacular or needless neologisms. If we want to be problem solvers, then our work must be intelligible to those doing the problem solving. Otherwise, the effort by scholars to influence policy will be thrown aside as useless ivory tower nonsense. As important as the theories we come up with are, how we present them matter just as much.
So, I am less sanguine than Brown. To be clear, I am optimistic about what the future holds for my graduate students, but not because they are doing grand theoretical work. I think we will have lost something if grand theory fades away, but it is not clear to me how that can be reclaimed at this point. Instead, what I will continue to do is to press my students to think theoretically about the issues that they are studying, even if thinking theoretically doesn’t always, or perhaps ever, mean thinking grand theoretically.
I think this is a nicely considered response, which pretty much confirms my own experiences with students. I do wonder, however, once students move into graduate level study if there aren’t a different set of sociological/disciplinary factors at play. Could be wrong of course, but I think there is a trend towards PhD students doing ‘middle range’ theory to increase their job prospects, which is ironic really if you look at the TRIPS data about relative importance of theorists. I’d link this to (inter alia) professionalisation, the fetishisation of methods and political pressure to demonstrate relevance.
I think this is a nicely considered response, which pretty much confirms my own experiences with students. I do wonder, however, once students move into graduate level study if there aren’t a different set of sociological/disciplinary factors at play. Could be wrong of course, but I think there is a trend towards PhD students doing ‘middle range’ theory to increase their job prospects, which is ironic really if you look at the TRIPS data about relative importance of theorists. I’d link this to (inter alia) professionalisation, the fetishisation of methods and political pressure to demonstrate relevance.
I think this is a nicely considered response, which pretty much confirms my own experiences with students. I do wonder, however, once students move into graduate level study if there aren’t a different set of sociological/disciplinary factors at play. Could be wrong of course, but I think there is a trend towards PhD students doing ‘middle range’ theory to increase their job prospects, which is ironic really if you look at the TRIPS data about relative importance of theorists. I’d link this to (inter alia) professionalisation, the fetishisation of methods and political pressure to demonstrate relevance.
Caring less about (e.g.) whether “states” are primarily concerned with absolute or relative gains — still a big chunk of the “classic” grand theory stuff that grad seminars often assign — than about whether IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programs cause a deterioration in human rights (e.g.) has nothing whatsoever to do with methods fetishes or “professionalization” (as if grand theorists don’t have their own set of professionalization protocols to master).
A big chunk of my dissertation was “grand theory” of a sort, but in the final draft I couched it in terms of “mid-range” debates because that allowed me to engage multiple literatures simultaneously without angering a lot of gatekeepers. Meanwhile, the most provocative grand theory argument I’ve read in recent years — Capital As Power by Nitzen and Bichler — was more or less completely ignored by most grand theorists, because it’s not firmly entrenched in an already-existing paradigm/tradition/whatever.
Price point of the book likely doesn’t help….
a) $30 for a “new” paperback on Amazon (via third-party seller) isn’t so out of line for an academic book. It’s basically what yours costs. Waltz’s TIP is also priced similarly, though I’ll grant that Amazon’s price of $40 is a touch high. (And I agree with the general point that prices of academic books in an age of zero-marginal-cost digital reproduction are outrageous, esp since authors seldom receive anything more than a pittance for publishing them.)
b) That’s what libraries are for.
c) Googling the book yields a link to a full pdf on the first page of results; arguably such methods are ethically justifiable as legitimate activity given the claims made regarding ownership/property in the book.
d) There are a series of lectures on/responses to the book on YouTube, which at least spell out the basic argument (and some high-level discussion of it) for free.
I think a bigger issue is that it’s a “political economy” book written from a non-US tradition. For some reason grand theorists seem to disdain political economy even though neorealism and neoliberalism are both grounded in (overly-simplistic versions of) neoclassical political economy theory, as the constructivist critique made clear long ago. But if the Nitzen/Bichler argument has merit, it has major implications for all discussions involving the constitution of power.
Well, post an idle comment swiping at publishers that set their prices too high and…. :-)
And I’ll take this moment to lament that my book is past its shelf life, having drifted over 1 million for a while on Amazon :-(.
Glad to learn of ‘Capital As Power’. I’m not sure it’s a matter of IR theorists (grand or otherwise) disdaining political economy as of there still being a divide betw. ‘security’ and political economy. Also, all disciplinary boundaries have an element of artificiality but I can see, based on a glance at the ‘look inside’ at Amazon, why this bk was not considered IR or marketed as such. (Which is not to say that IR people shd have ignored it, of course.)
I’m a little bit surprised that the absolute vs relative gains debate is still assigned in any substantial way in grad seminars. (I was assigned D. Baldwin, ed, ‘Neorealism and Neoliberalism’ (1993), but that was only 2 or 3 yrs after its publication.) I don’t even think of that as “‘classic’ grand theory stuff,” to use your phrase.
And actually the electronic version is governed by a Creative Commons license which allows distribution for non-commercial purposes. It is here:
https://dl.is.vnu.edu.vn/bitstream/123456789/238/1/Capital_as_a_power.pdf
Excellent. My experience with PDF to ebook-friendly format conversion isn’t good, though. I guess I can read on a dedicated PDF reader.
I give you a free high-quality pdf and all you do is complain. ;)
Been that kind of day….
I’ll never understand that logic. I say X (professionalisation) is a factor in Y, and then somebody assumes that my saying that implies that I think X isn’t a factor in Z. Of course ‘theorists’ have ‘protocols’ to master. Mostly, since they are in the same discipline, it’s the same ones as the non-theorists (of which there are none) and that’s the point. Anyway, first, I wouldn’t say that book was ignored, second, I think it was marketed as political economy wasn’t it? third, I don’t buy the argument it’s not firmly embedded in an already existing paradigm/framework. Fourth, even if I’m wrong about all that, the fact of it being ignored (if that’s the right term), might be evidence of the argument about the place of theory in the discipline at the moment, not the fact the grand theorists ignored it.
If professionalization is required for both mid-range theory and grand theory, and mid-range theory is more preferred than grand theory by many students, then you cannot explain the second fact by reference to the first. I’m not playing “gotcha”.
1. I didn’t say it had been ignored; I said it had been ignored by grand theorists. At bottom is the full list of citations to Capital as Power, per Google. I’ve just skimmed the list, but it looks to me like attention to that book has not been paid by the grand theorists we’re discussing in this thread. Only one of those citations was in a major IR journal — an article now on early view at ISQ, an empirical piece written by one of Nitzen’s students — and it doesn’t appear to have been reviewed in any prominent outlets. Did a single person in this EJIR issue reference it? (I haven’t read the whole thing so this is an honest question.)
2. Yes, it was “marketed” as political economy (of a sort); but a) why should that matter in the slightest? and b) as I mentioned previously the foundational works in neorealism and neoliberalism were extrapolations of already-existing political economy theory. (Much of it is quite poor political economy, but that’s another discussion.) The whole point of the book is to bring the study of power back into its historical conversation with the rest of the social sciences, which makes sense since there is very little IR grand theory that is “original” (or particular to) IR grand theory.
3. And which would that be? It’s hard to think of a more unique argument that has been made recently.
4. Or it could be evidence that grand theory in the discipline is heavily cartelized. (After all, CaP does have 75 cites — not bad for only having been out 3 years — it’s just mid-range theorists that are doing the citing. But then that has often been a one-way street.)
Of course there is a potential #5: CaP is no good, and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Which may be true. But I think it demands attention at the very least.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=0,15&sciodt=0,15&cites=12751021356455939515&scipsc=
Re first point; yes you can; it depends on the nature of the professionalisation. It favours and rewards mid-range theory at the moment; lots of methods training (which I support), little Phil of SS/GT (that I’m aware of even in the UK), and lots of stuff about making sure your placed to get a job (like much of HE it’s become instrumentalised). Which is why I say it’s ironic given the TRIPS data about citations of GT; go figure I haven’t got a clue. I’m not saying I’m right about that, but I’m prepared to argue the case.
Re 1. Ok, correction accepted, but since part of the argument is that GT is not as prevalent as it once was then the opportunity for GTists to address it maybe isn’t as simple that they ‘just ignored it’. If GT is not getting produced or published…. It’s more that nobody today seems interested. So the neglect of it just makes my argument I think. No, I don’t think anyone did cite it, but given your comments in 2/5 about it being ‘poor’ might explain that.
Re the argument about marketing. Well marketing is done for a reason, if it wasn’t brought to the attention of most folks in IR that’s not necessarily the fault of the people in IR. You can only deal with what you are aware of. I know it because of my interest in Marxist Pol economy. But how books are marketed matters, abstracts, blurbs and so on.
3. I think that’s my point actually, and I’m also not trying to play ‘gotcha’. What I tried to do in the first comment above (which yes is subject to challenge) is to suggest why your 3 is right.
Agree with 4. And with 5, although I didn’t find much in it appealed to me.
Well, I’ve written a fair bit (in comments here and elsewhere) about how modes of “professionalization” are determined by external pressures more than internal. I.e., if a majority of grad students will not get TT academic jobs — much less at R1-type unis — then programs are probably right to emphasize skills with broader application. This is a material reality and no amount of navel-gazing will change it.
But I think a lot of it, too, is that GT devolved into circular debates and didn’t provide a ton of guidance for understanding several quite significant real-world developments from 1989-present. Too often it devolves into squabbling over normative priors. Prominent GTers made loud predictions — which really did follow from their theories — that turned out to be quite false. At least that’s the attitude I hear quite a lot, both inside and outside of grad school: GT might be interesting, but it’s not all that useful. That may not be true, but GTers have probably not done as well as they could to dispel the notion.
1. Perhaps. But they could’ve reviewed it, certainly. They could’ve had symposia on blogs on it, certainly. They could put it on syllabi, certainly. They could’ve cited it as an example of recent grand theories in their articles on the dearth of recent grand theories, certainly. Etc. Pushing the point, where’s the IR GT discussion of Graeber? Michael Hudson? Felix Martin? Panitch and Gindin? McCloskey? All these folks (and plenty more) are active, prominent, and researching in ways relevant to traditional and ongoing debates in IR. But they’ve been ignored almost entirely. This I expect, since GT in IR is cloistered and insular.
Anyway, GT still thrives in policy-oriented journals, including some which are peer-reviewed. It *definitely* thrives in the University Presses. It still gets cited. Considering the senior stature (i.e. iron-clad tenure) many GTers have, they have the security to be a bit intellectually creative and entrepreneurial, to broaden the discipline’s horizons a bit. Instead, I hear those with the most privilege complain about how the less-privileged (grad students, FFS!) don’t conform to their preferences. I’m unsympathetic.
As for Nitzen & Bichler’s marketing, this runs both ways: had it been marketed as IR (rather than IPE), do you *really* think Ikenberry would’ve reviewed it in IO? Or Walt in IS? IR GT is much less open to that sort of thing than (non-American) IPE is, so that’s why it was marketed the way it was. (To be fair, Nitzen and Shimson did their best to stay out of the IR GT debates so perhaps they do deserve some blame as well.)
2. I meant much of GT’s incorporations of neoclassical economics into the IR domain have been shoddy. E.g., Waltz’s expropriation of theories of the firm, which is the primary basis of his TIP. Some of that is because the state of economics theory is/was shoddy, some of it isn’t. Nevertheless, both neorealism and neoliberalism (and, of course, almost all Marxian approaches) are overtly built on economic logics so it’s not nearly good enough for GTers in those traditions to say “well we don’t do political economy”.
3. Okay.
4. This is a real problem that proponents of GT need to grapple with. If they want to encourage more GT, then they need to pay much more attention to efforts made in that direction by grad students and junior faculty and folks from non-Ivies. Co-authorship with younger scholars would be a positive first step. As would promoting work by the underappreciated… e.g. Nitzen & Bichler!
5. I think there’s a lot interesting there. I disagree — vehemently — with some of their conclusions, but it is a serious work. I’ll probably be grappling with elements of it for a long time.
Not much I disagree about here so it’d mostly be quibbling. I agree about the material reality they face, but think it’s also endogenously generated as well. You also have a point, as has been made by many others about the circular debates, but I disagree about the utility.
1. Yes, but it’s not just the GT people. Visibility doesn’t just come about through their engagement with it but mid range people using it to productive effect. I suspect it’s something to do with the idea that we can keep the econ and pols distinct. I’m not sure what you mean by it thrives. It gets cited, but I wouldn’t say that many of those citations mean that much beyond the articulation of some identity. As you said in your previous post it’s hard to think of anything unique (that’s a paraphrase of your argument) these days. Maybe we are exhausted. I’m not sure what there is to be sympathetic about, so I don’t really understand that point. But re innovation and creativity, well at least Wendt is going to doing that in his next book. But then maybe some will say it’s not very useful…:) And yes absolutely about grad students having to conform, that’s part of the internal dynamic. I’m sure it does happen, but I’m not sure how much, but could be lots.
Your point about the marketing and point 2. Yes I agree, but again it goes both ways. We have a Dept of Political Economy here and they won’t cooperate with us at all because they are an economics Dept and don’t want tarred with the pol sci, or even pols brush. I think you are right about the Marxists, but I really can’t see any serious marxist saying that, can you? The neolibs likewise. (although they might try and say it’s not their domain) But I think neorealism is different. It simply raided micro economics for some principles of inquiry that it then tried to use in the political realm.
4. agree, and 5 still on the fence…time may tell.
TRIPS data on theorists can be misleading. In practice, much grand theory is little more than ritual, prefatory citation. Yes, it is widely seen as important, in a self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of way (its importance is a function of being widely seen as important).
That sociology of grand theory puts relatively young, relatively unknown scholars at a serious disadvantage. Risk-aversion points strongly to middle range theory. I think there’s a place in the (U.S.) job market for grand theorizing, but it’s not very large and it’s brutally unforgiving if you’re not absolutely fantastic at it.
You can come in “second place” in the middle range, and still land a position in a pleasant department, at a respectable institution, in a reasonably desirable location. And, failing that, you can always let your wonk flag fly and try plying your trade in D.C.