Disciplinary history is too important to be left only to intellectual historians. It should concern anyone interested in international politics. “The tradition of all dead generations” may not weigh on the brains of today’s International Relations (IR) scholars with quite the fever of Marx’s nightmare, but it does continue to exert powerful and often unrecognized effects on contemporary thinking. The idea of an “end of IR theory” that animates the Special Issue of the EJIR provides an intriguing opportunity to open up this issue: to ask where the field is going by looking again at where it came from.
This story can be told in many ways. One of the most revealing is to take seriously Stanley Hoffmann’s famous claim that IR developed as a quintessentially “American” social science (PDF). Hoffmann was right, though for reasons and with implications quite different from those he advanced. In his eyes, these origins lay mainly in a concern with American hegemony and policy-oriented theory in the context of the Cold War. No one could doubt that these questions were important, yet in many ways IR’s origins and commitments are better located in a wider but generally unrecognized analytic and political sensibility that, in his brilliant study of Desolation and Enlightenment, Ira Katznelson has called the “political studies enlightenment” (note the small ‘e’).
Katznelson holds that diverse figures in post-war American social science including Dahl, Hofstaeder, Lasswell, Lindblom, Polanyi, and Arendt were united in the view that the desolation of the previous half century and its apparent refutation of Enlightenment promises of progress, peace, and the reign of reason. In response, they undertook systematic analyses of the limits of a century and a half of increasing rationalism within the liberal Enlightenment tradition. Yet they did so not to reject modernity or liberalism, but to save it. They held that understanding the calamities of the period required seeing them not as simple irrationality erupting inexplicably into the otherwise placid, progressive, world of reason, but as specifically modern, arising in important aspects from the Enlightenment itself, and representing key weaknesses within it, including its inability to engage the question of “radical evil” in modernity; the increasing dominance of technology, and technical rationality; the rise of “mass society” and mass politics, and the accompanying crisis of classical liberalism and its vision of democracy; and the rise of extreme nationalism and anti-liberal politics as an at least partial consequence of liberal modernity, not as its simple antithesis. The goal was to grasp these dynamics philosophically, historically, and sociologically, in order to understand how they might be countered in pursuit of suitably chastened but nonetheless recognizable Enlightenment values and principles.
At its core was the need to engage in the urgent task of assessing the flaws of existing forms of liberal modernism and… providing foundations for a new and more realistic liberalism.
Katznelson’s account does not include any scholars in the nascent field of IR. Yet his analysis captures remarkably many of the concerns of some of the most prominent thinkers in post-war IR, including Morgenthau, Neibuhr, and Herz, who might well be viewed as part of an analagous ‘IR enlightenment’. Post-war realism was not concerned simply with defeating a facile “idealism”, or teaching realpolitik to a naively liberal America. Nor was it interested constructing a modern social science. On the contrary, IR in this period began as a reaction against rationalist social science. As research by Nicolas Guilhot and others has shown, IR was an irredentist movement driven by political as well as methodological reasons. At its core was the need to engage in the urgent task of assessing the flaws of existing forms of liberal modernism and, I believe, with providing foundations for a new and more realistic liberalism.
If this is true, then the canonical divide between realism and liberalism that continues to dominate IR theory is fundamentally erroneous. Realism sought to reformulate and revive a form of liberalism by looking hard at the legacy of desolation and trying to address it. Far from being its implacable adversary, Realism in post-war IR emerged as one of the most powerful attempts to reformulate and save liberalism. The historical forgetting of these concerns has created the strangely divided theoretical landscape that we see today. It has allowed a denuded liberalism to continue blithely on, as if none of the desolation had ever happened, or as if it had little or nothing to do with liberalism itself. At the same time, it allows large parts of contemporary realism to operate without a serious engagement with its historical relationship to liberalism. Putting the IR enlightenment back into disciplinary history puts this issue back on the contemporary agenda.
Equally importantly, it also lets us rethink the relationship between Realism and critical and constructivist theories to which it is often opposed. It is often claimed that post-war American IR developed as a positivist social science, and that this marks a fundamental divide between American and ‘European’ IR, which remained more historically and sociologically oriented. True as this may be of contemporary theory, it cannot be convincingly traced to the thinkers of the IR enlightenment, who were fundamentally opposed to rationalist social science for political as well as methodological reasons. As IR has moved ever closer toward rationalist political science, it has become increasingly blind to this heritage. Losing its previous scepticism toward social ‘science’, IR became in many ways a standard-bearer for precisely the kinds of political knowledge that the IR enlightenment had been at pains to reject and which they sought to construct the field in opposition towards. In fact, if one wished to be particularly provocative, it is possible to say that from this perspective what is often taken as the defining moment in the invention of IR theory – Waltz’s Theory of International Politics – actually marked the culmination of a move away from the field’s beginnings and represents the ‘end’ of IR theory as conceived by the IR enlightenment. From that point onward, the irredentist analytic and political concerns of its earlier beginnings were almost fully eclipsed as IR was subsumed within the conventions of American social science that the proponents of post-war liberal realism had opposed and sought to avoid.
From its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project.
This history shows, finally, that from its very inception IR was a substantive normative and political project. The IR enlightenment did not have all the answers. But a more serious engagement with it may provide both a clearer understanding of where we have come from, and open paths to a more productive future for the field as an analytic and a political enterprise.
Editor’s Note: This is the 23rd 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 Williams’ article (PDF). A response, authored by Daniel J. Levine, will appear at 10am Eastern.
Other entries in the symposium–when available–may be reached via the “EJIR Special Issue Symposium” tag.
I’m very surprised by what appears to be an idiosyncratic reading of Guilhot’s IPS piece. The thrust of that article is to show that Morgenthau’s purpose in wrapping realism in a scientific mantle was to offer a pessimistic counterpart to liberal behaviouralism while using the same scientific language of certainty. In that sense it was not an enterprise for gradual improvement or progerss but quite the opposite…
“the urgent task of assessing the flaws of existing forms of liberal modernism and, I believe, with providing foundations for a new and more realistic liberalism.”
Not quite right.
1. The task may have been urgent in the 40s, when there was a crisis of liberalism. But there’s no such crisis today, hence no similar urgency.
2. A new and improved liberalism may well be a good thing, but classical realism as the source of improvement? Not likely.
Stripped of the nuances and complications, the basic argument of Guilhot’s article “The Realist Gambit” (Int’l Political Sociology, Dec. ’08) is that postwar American realism, at least in the version of Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson, was an effort to “protect” or “insulate” IR from the ‘behavioral revolution’ in political science and that this effort, in terms of where IR’s center of gravity eventually went (at least in the U.S.), did not succeed.
The argument that Morgenthau, Thompson et al. were part of a postwar ‘IR enlightenment’ that aimed to, in the words of this post, provide “foundations for a new and more realistic liberalism” is Williams’ argument, not Guilhot’s (which is not to say the latter would necessarily disagree, just that there’s rather little about that in “The Realist Gambit,” iirc). The clearest support for Williams’ argument is probably in the work of John Herz, whom Williams mentions and who explicitly advocated a “realist liberalism” or “liberal realism.”
The assimilation or incorporation of IR into “the conventions of American social science that the proponents of post-war liberal realism had opposed and sought to avoid” (to quote the post again), which has happened to a large extent in the U.S. if not as much elsewhere, is the result of a longish process and I’m not sure I’d identify it as completely with Waltz’s Theory of Int’l Politics as the post does. But that’s both debatable and a whole other issue.
William Scheuerman has also done some work on the shift that Williams describes. For example: https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=1642504&jid=RIS&volumeId=34&issueId=01&aid=1642500
William Scheuerman has also done some work on the shift that Williams describes. For example: https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=1642504&jid=RIS&volumeId=34&issueId=01&aid=1642500
@RedWell: The article you link deals (based on the abstract) with a shift in Morgenthau’s own views and the early influences on Morgenthau, whereas Williams in this post is talking about the trajectory of IR more generally. So I think they’re addressing somewhat different — albeit of course not totally unrelated — things.
I think one needs to distinguish a writer’s views on theoretical or political substance (say, Morgenthau on int’l law or nuclear weapons or whatever) from methodological views. To be more specific, as the abstract of that article suggests, Morgenthau moved away to some extent (the qualifying phrase is important) from the leftism of his early mentor Sinzheimer, but Morgenthau never embraced what Williams in this post calls “the conventions of American social science” (emphasis on science).
On that point, and probably other points too, I think Williams and Scheuerman would agree. But Williams is presumably “here” and thus able to speak for himself.