Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Cameron Thies. It is the 13th 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 Stefano Guzzini‘s article (PDF). Guzzini’s post appeared earlier today.
Other entries in the symposium–when available–may be reached via the “EJIR Special Issue Symposium” tag.
Stefano Guzzini provides us with yet another in a long line of thought provoking contributions on International Relations (IR) theory. There is a great deal that I appreciate about this piece: the observation that IR theorists have become increasingly reflexive over time, that this progression cannot be undone, the relationship between reflexivity and the four modes of theorizing he outlines, as well as the emphasis on concepts and the “unfinished dictionary of the ‘international’.” As is the case for many articles, I wish there had been more space for him to fully articulate the connections he outlined between increasing reflexivity and the modes of theorizing. Perhaps we will be lucky enough to see this article expand into a book at some point.
Rather than continue to extol the virtues of Guzzini’s contribution, I thought I would use my limited space to press the author on several aspects of the article. In the rest of this blog entry I will briefly address the premise of the paper, the generation of theory in contemporary social science, the kind of theory empiricists desire, and a few additional comments on the role of Great Debates in IR theory (because I can’t help myself).
At first, I was drawn in by the premise of the paper: that IR theory is being caught in a scissor movement between those who believe only practical knowledge is important and those who desire a specific version of empirical theory. The former seems to be driven in Guzzini’s mind by professional schools, while the latter is a result of the homogenization of training in the discipline to produce “quantitative-followed-up-by-qualitative” graduate student clones. Upon reflection, this seemed to me to be somewhat of a false premise. How much do professional schools really affect the disciplinary trajectory of IR? It seems to me that the core of IR is still squarely in traditional academic institutions. In fact, if anything, the gap that Alexander George and others wanted to bridge between applied and basic work in IR and foreign policy seems as wide as ever to me. My academic career has largely been spent in departments that might approximate the disciplinary homogenization Guzzini decries as one blade of the scissor, yet I don’t think my empirically oriented colleagues require that all theorizing be reducible to empirical generalizations.
In contemporary social science, theory generation is seen as a never-ending, cyclical process. One might start with an existing theory, generate hypotheses, subject those hypotheses to empirical testing via observation, which may yield empirical generalizations that then are used to refine theory. Or one may enter into this process at any other stage: prediction/hypothesis, observation or empirical generalization. In contradiction to Guzzini, I do not think that empirically oriented scholars believe that that “theory is either the result of the study (the empirical generalization) or its given and external starting point.” Theory is thus never solely external to a research design, nor divorced from methodology. Perhaps a caricature of a quantitative analysis, or the worst of such work, views theory as completely external to the research process or solely a result of empirical generalization, but I do not believe this is the mainstream view or reflective of the best work in the field. What does seem to me to be different today is that people have grown weary of the usefulness of the “isms” in our field. Unlike the theory that empirical researchers desire, the “isms“ are more accurately subject to Guzzini’s criticism since they occupy the space of being either an external given or subjected to repeated amendedments by empirical generalization. One only has to recall Legro and Moravcik’s complaint “is anybody still a realist?” (PDF) to see both a desire to recapture the hard core of an externally given theory in the face of repeated amendments based on observed reality. Instead of this scenario, which most closely fits Guzzini’s characterization, most empirically oriented scholars seem to desire middle-range theory
Robert Merton developed middle-range theory in opposition to the kind of grand theory developed by Talcott Parsons. Both agreed that observational regularities alone could not generate adequate theory, but Merton wanted theories limited in scope to specific conceptual ranges, rather than to identify the entire conceptual structure that comprises a field of study. Such theories of the middle range could eventually accumulate into increasingly general theories, such as our “isms” pretend to be, but the process is more in keeping with how I have defined contemporary social science approaches to theory generation. It also turns out to be in keeping with Guzzini’s desire to advance ontological theorizing for our continuous (re)writing of the “unfinished dictionary of the ‘international’”. As a result, I think Guzzini may actually not have much of a quarrel with contemporary empirically oriented IR scholars after all.
Finally, I am reminded of the differences between Europeans and Americans when it comes to constructing the memory of IR’s defining Great Debates. What was the Third Debate? I had always thought it was about positivism vs. post-positivism (e.g., PDF), but the moniker “Inter-Paradigm Debate” used by Guzzini is more reminiscent of the short-lived Neoliberal-Neorealist Debate (e.g., PDF).
Further, while the Third Debate (however defined) clearly demonstrates the kind of increased reflexivity that Guzzini suggests is a feature of the Great Debates, it is not so clear to me that earlier debates fully share that feature. I have written on the First Debate and argued that there was no real academic debate, hence there cannot have been much reflexivity at the time (PDF). Perhaps in retrospect, that debate serves as a reflexive moment, but I do not believe it did for academics at the time. Indeed, I have argued that the Great Debates are much more about demonstrating academic progress and developing disciplinary identities. It is quite possible that both Guzzini and I are telling compatible stories about the role of the Great Debates in our discipline’s history, but that will have to wait for more in-depth analysis.
Again, I thank Stefano Guzzini for another contribution that stimulated my thinking about some of these fundamental issues for IR and social science theorizing more generally. I look forward to seeing how this conversation unfolds in the discipline, which is indeed in a much more reflexive space as a whole than anytime previously in its history.
I would like to thank Cameron Thies for his comments that require some further clarifications from my side.
The importance of practical knowledge is partly reproduced by professional schools (and I have endured Sciences-Po in the 1980s myself). Thies does not think that they have the same function today, and my article concludes also on this, at least in some environments. So, we agree. But i would still leave it open as a question to be checked whether the syllabi in professional degrees really overturn the primacy of practical knowledge. More fundamentally, however, it is crucial not to lose out of sight many IR communities which are either not yet able to establish their autonomy or where any objectivation of that practical knowledge is largely absent. As Tickner in the same issue again shows, there are are many places where there is strictly speaking no theory whatsoever. (And those places can be important for world politics.)
Thies then criticises that I have a far too narrow vision of empirical theory – or so I read it. He does not refer to the other three modes of theorising, as if the passage through empirical knowledge in terms of testing of generalisation was constitutive for achieving all theoretical results which is exactly what the article argues to be wrong). But maybe he sees his point only applying to the empirical theory part. Here, he offers the classical positivist circle of validation as representative for ‘contemporary social science’. Hence I am not sure whether he agrees with my point that there is more to theorising than empirical theorising, and then, more particularly, that the contact with the empirical is feasible for theories outside the testing and generalisation mode constitutive for this cricle. I have recently worked on interpretive process tracing and non-linear causality in causal mechanisms (in applied empirical analysis) that does not fit the test-generalisation mode as usually conceived of, nor reduces theorising to empirical theory. In a sense, the comment seems almost bear witness for my case. And by labeling it as the ‘contemporary’ approach, he marginalises everything else as antiquity, when, to the contrary, most of the contemporary philosophy of science has exposed the limits of the positivist circle.
This also applies for the use of Merton’s middle-range theory (which is usually applied in a narrower way than Merton may have thought himself). For it ends up in our discipline to reduce theory to empirical theory and, within that, to that part which can fit the positivist circle. The constitutive function of theory is still not seen on a par (or as some would argue, more fundamental) with its instrumental function. This type of middle range theory adds or changes recipes to the cookbook and does not add or re-interpret concepts to the dictionary. Hence, I have no quarrel with empirically oriented IR or empirical theorising, as the comment seems to imply. I do it myself. But that needs to account for the plurality of ways of theorising and also within strictly empirical theorising.
Finally, I did refer to the Inter-Paradigm debate since this is the term used in 1985 by Michael Banks, and which also fits nicely the approach in Holsti’s Divided Discipline of the same year. The postivist-postpositivist debate _as debate_ comes later but the two are indeed linked not different as Thies’ comments seems to imply. The IPD scrutinised our isms for their underlying ontological assumptions. Ashley’s early work on realism did the same and included epistemology. So, it exposed the isms debate to a meta-theoretical check and that opened up for the wider later debate. That means that I am not talking about the isms in their classical manner (say the first debate), but to the meta-theoretical check of those isms, since this was the IPD – for those who wanted to hear. And that surely is adding more reflexivity to our theorising than what goes usually for middle-range theorising which stays much divorced from it.