Neopositivist theorising in IR was a misstep: a social art mistaken for a ‘hard science’. Critically engage with this statement.

Occupying a precarious and ill-defined space between the humanities and social science, the discipline of International Relations (IR) is gripped by existential insecurity; unsure of it status as a science. A recurrent theme of intradisciplinary debate has been the question of method; namely, the ability and desirability of emulating the method of the natural sciences. The creed of neopositivism, now dominant in IR, has firmly established the orthodoxy of IR as a narrowly defined science, eschewing the role of normative inquiry and affirming the possibility of value-free knowledge. Contrary to those who would represent this as a victory for rigour over speculation, it is here contended that neopositivism rests on false promises; that of the vanquishing of philosophy, the mastery of humanity’s environment, and a progressivist account of knowledge. In ‘salvaging’ Classical Realism from its metaphysical malaise, Neorealism – the standard bearer of neopositivism – shed some of its profound philosophical insights, along with its sense of methodological modesty. This essay proceeds in three parts. Firstly, a brief overview of neopositivism and its entry into the discipline are provided. From here I will move to the critiques of neopositivism. The second section argues that neopositivism places considerable constraints on what questions can be meaningfully asked. The criteria for demarcation and ‘good’ science, outlined by Popper and Lakatos, are inappropriately restrictive for the subject material of IR, and preclude exploration of many of the central questions of the discipline. The third section examines the way in which neopositivism reifies existing structures and practices, due to its starting points and inability to reflect on its assumptions. This is tied into a discussion over the necessary commitment of neopositivism to an instrumental and atomistic rationality.

Enter Science

A poignant illustration of the fractured nature of International Relations comes in realising that its practitioners can’t agree upon how many ‘Great Debates’ there were, if they were had at all, and if the teaching of them is a valuable narrative of the discipline’s history. Nevertheless, to so-called Second ‘Great Debate’ serves as a useful starting point in the context of this exercise. The behaviourist revolution, which had swept through social sciences elsewhere, materialised in IR in the late 1960s. Traditionally, most IR theorists had been focused on history, contingency, and complexity. Possessed of these sensitivities, the ‘traditionalists’ claimed a special ability to offer in-depth explanations of unique historical episodes[1]. The Behaviorists, contrastingly, sought to class types of events together, searching for commonalities and in the process emphasising simplicity and parsimony. This, at least, is the conventional account of the ‘Second Debate’ in IR folklore. Some critical literature is suggestive of the 1920s or 1930s as being the formative period in which efforts to define the discipline as a science begun to take hold[2]. Regardless, by the 1970s, there was doubtless a shift in emphasis from the small-N, idiographic accounts, to the large-N nomothetic. Behaviourism also privileged study of the observable behaviour of actors, rather than the inherently speculative study of motives and ideational elements, which were after all unobservable as part of subjective experience. A step had been taken. But the turn to neopositivism in IR was not complete. This took Kenneth Waltz.

The turn to more scientific approaches brought a new problem: though many IR scholars continued to cling to the core emphases of Classical Realism – statism, power and the national interest – it became increasingly hard to reconcile these with a perceived need for ‘rigour’ in the discipline. While work of Hans Morgenthau, for example, was widely admired, it nevertheless offered little in the way of an empirical research agenda, based on testable propositions[3]. It was also suspect with its theological undertones. Some kind of foundation was needed with which to ground basic principles of human behaviour. It was the publication of Waltz’s canonical Theory of International Politics (TIP) in 1979 that marked the “scientific redemption” of Classical Realism[4]. “Dispensing with the normatively laden metaphysics of fallen man, they [Neorealists] seemed to root power politics, including concepts of power and state interest, securely in the scientifically defensible terrain of objective necessity[5].” To achieve this, human nature and state attributes were dispensed with as “reductionist” explanations for interstate war. Instead, Waltz erected a structural analysis that purported to delineate the logical conditions of the objective relations of human conduct[6]. Realism had been saved, and indeterminacy, theology and normativity vanquished.

Indeed, Waltz not only redeemed classical realism, but also arguably rescued positivism from some of its pitfalls, by forging a synthesis of Popperian and Lakatosian views of philosophy of science. Waltz outlines his method in Chapter 1 of TIP. From Popper he takes the hypothetico-deductive approach, as well as principles for demarcation; from Lakatos he takes the concepts of research programmes. Positivism can be characterised by a series of commitments. Positivists believe that the appropriate task of the scholar is to establish causal inference, that this is best achieved through examining observable behaviour, and that there can be a strict separation of the observer and the observed[7]. Once uncovered, this value-neutral knowledge can be used to predict, orient efficient action, and extend mastery over humanity’s environment, social or natural[8]. There is sometimes posited a ‘third Great Debate’ between the positivists and post-positivists or ‘reflectivists’. However, there is not a great deal of consensus surrounding this characterisation[9].

Popper’s desire to establish clear criteria to demarcate science from pseudo-science was motivated by his disregard for the theories of his day that seemed endlessly flexible in their standards of verification. Freud and Alfred Adler employed psychoanalysis to explain contradictory scenarios; while Marxists refused to discard their theory when the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 broke out, not in a highly industrialised society via popular uprising, as predicted, but in a feudal and agrarian society. Popper reasoned: verification was too cheap. In his 1935 Logic of Scientific Discovery he proposed a solution. He posited ‘falsification’ as a key criterion for distinguishing science from non-science[10]. Theories would not be weighted according to which could accumulate the most amount of evidence in support of it, but those that survived exposure to the exacting fires of scientific testing after specifying results that would render the theory false. However, the essential empiricist belief that theories were tested against reality remained intact. New problems emerged with the falsification model, as it became clear that theories could be easily falsified, as well as verified. In many cases, adjustment at the periphery of the theoretical framework or additional hypotheses seemed more appropriate than wholesale abandonment of the theory. It was at this point that the theorising of Imre Lakatos becomes relevant. Lakatos had witnessed with alarm the release of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the effect of which he feared would be destabilising to the validity of science, reducing it to mere ‘mob psychology’[11]. However, the forcefulness of his historical arguments was apparent to Lakatos[12]. A common criticism of Kuhn’s paradigm model was that many disciplines contained more than one paradigm at any time. Against this background, Lakatos proposed the idea of ‘research programmes.’ Much like Kuhn’s paradigms, they were mutually exclusive frames of reference, except that they existed side-by-side. Importantly, they were comprised of two parts: the ‘hard core’ of basic beliefs, and a ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary beliefs[13]. The latter could be revised to accommodate new evidence or unexpected outcomes, but a theory could not survive if its hard core were to be compromised. For Lakatos, these programmes progressed by predicting new cases, extending their predictive reach. Theories begin to degenerate when they are constantly adjusting their auxiliary hypotheses in order to stabilise themselves. A crucial distinction from Popper’s scheme was that theories were to be tested not against reality, but against each other. This had the neat effect of negating some of the unwanted implications of Kuhn, by retaining criteria to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ theories, as well as allowing some leniency when it came to falsification, thereby also resolving Popper’s limitations.

This philosophical model of science is not without its problems. For one, the model that Lakatos proposes was designed to retrospectively explain the functioning of a natural science, and how ‘normal science,’ in the Kuhnian sense, operated[14]. It is far from clear that this applies to IR, which is not characterised by the level of internal consistency of other sciences. There isn’t a basic agreement on what constitutes progress in the disciplinary sense. It is also clear from the above that the role of philosophy in the neopositivist conception of inquiry is purely supportive. It is tasked with establishing the parameters of scientific inquiry; what constitutes meaningful statements and claims about the world, etc. Once it has performed this framing role, it is carefully put back on the shelf, consigned to gather dust with other antiques. In some cases, the eclipse of philosophy has been unconscious or, at least, unreflective. In others, authors are forthright in their dismissal. Peter Atkins for example, proclaimed “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance[15].” However, as will be argued in subsequent sections, philosophy is not nearly so easily dispensed with. Indeed, the role of philosophy or judgment intervenes at nearly every stage of the process of knowledge-production.

Before continuing, something in the way of an advance apology is warranted. The adherents of what I term ‘neopositivism’ will not all readily accept the label. Oftentimes the criticisms within are specific to Neorealism since, as remarked at the outset, it is the standard bearer of neopositivism. Wielding such a broad brush, as I do, it is inevitable that someone will be inadvertently smeared. Moreover, the term neopositivism will occasionally obscure difference as well as illuminate, given the diversity of views. Perhaps this reminder of the danger of generalising should serve as some sort of lesson. Additionally, this exercise is a critical one: due to scope, considerations of alternative methodological approaches falls outside its remit.

The Limitations of Discourse

To accept the neopositivist demarcation of the bounds of legitimate inquiry is to severely truncate the realm of permissible theorising. While IR is claimed to be a discipline in the social sciences, the term ‘science’ is often used to discipline debate within IR[16]. The narrow understanding of what constitutes scientific inquiry places limits on the types of questions that can be asked. It is useful at this point to introduce a distinction between epistemic and normative values. The former are values about what counts as legitimate knowledge (generally, how we establish facts about reality), the second are ethical values (‘values’ in the more traditional sense of the term). Both epistemic and ethical values are employed in a neopositivist framework to restrict inquiry in IR. It is contended that this happens in two fashions. Firstly, discourse becomes reduced to the questions that can be reduced to standards of measurement and observable behaviour (epistemic values). Secondly, there are guiding value judgments that direct research to certain areas (ethical values).

In the first case, Hedley Bull, in his impassioned critique of the emergent ‘scientific approach’ protested that accepting strict standards of measurement and verification voided meaningful discussion on many of the central questions of the discipline[17]. He argued:

Some of these are at least in part moral questions, which cannot by their very nature be given any kind of objective answer, and which can only be probed, clarified, reformulated, and tentatively answered from some arbitrary standpoint, according to the method of philosophy[18].

As examples, he cites questions of whether a collectivity of states constitute an international system or society, whether war is contrary to the functioning of international society or whether some wars are just, and there existed a right of states to interfere in the affairs of others. In many instances, empirical investigations can refine our understanding of an issue, by clarifying the likely outcomes of certain actions, but this does not obviate the ultimate need for moral judgment in these cases. Amartya Sen, in reflecting on his different roles as a political philosopher and economist, mused that the type of precision much vaunted by economists was not always possible – or necessary – in the field of political theory[19]. “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” he said, by way of example, “are not exactly bursting with precision. But they are bursting with relevance.” Concepts such as these can only be elucidated with qualitative tools of analysis – tools which the neopositivist forswears. As Bull suggests, the indeterminacy of key questions is not to be taken as symptomatic of the ‘backwardness’ of the discipline – rather, the irreducibility of inquiry to empirics is a feature of the subject matter[20]. Certainly, part of the issue is one of complexity. In his response to Bull’s polemic, Morton Kaplan concedes that, at times, the educated analyst is more adept at drawing historical parallels than models[21]. However, this is not a limiting principle – it is merely that the models are not yet complex enough to rival the human brain in its ability to calculate. This line of reasoning is somewhat revealing, as it unveils a mind-as-computer analogy, which will become relevant in later discussions on instrumental rationality. Yet, while the social world may present more complexity, this is not central to the neopositivist critique. Instead, this is to be located in the privileging of certain questions or areas of concern over others. While quantitative analysts in IR have become very conscious of controlling for ‘selection bias’ in case selection, this fails to recognise that the adoption of their quantitative analysis is itself a selection bias, immediately circumscribing inquiry to those issues reducible to measurement[22].

This is not to eschew the validity of empirical investigations. Rather, it is to assert that IR has a dual normative-empirical nature, and to ignore one is to relegate the field to “intellectual and moral poverty,” in the words of Martin Wight[23]. In addition to epistemological differences, Reus-Smit and Snidal claim that IR theories are ‘practical discourses,’ all seeking to answer the question ‘how should we act?’[24] Approaches might differ in how they constituted the ‘we’ in this formulation, but they are united by their attempt to provide a guide to action. The Neorealists would do well to recall their heritage here, and the prescient warning of E. H. Carr that a strict causal approach would lead to “both action and thought becom[ing] devoid of purpose[25].” Robert Jervis, in a comparison of Morgenthau to Waltz, argues that they both suffer from the defect of attempting to be descriptive at the same time as prescription[26]. He claims that Waltz’s structural analysis was vitiated by a need to inform policy makers how to act, claiming that this sat awkwardly with his supposed findings of objective laws, seeing as it made little sense to direct statesmen how to follow objective laws. This might not be a fair criticism on its own terms – Waltz maintained that states were free to choose their foreign policies; to Waltz, those that did not abide by the logic of the system, would be punished for doing so. However, more importantly for the purposes here, this critique misses the point that the dual nature of normative-empirical theories is not an embarrassing contradiction, but an unavoidable outcome.

The second way in which value judgments function to limit inquiry is in the direction of what constitutes a valid area of research. In his Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper appealed for a ‘unity of method’ between the natural and social sciences[27]. The neopositivists would certainly consider themselves as honouring this commitment. Yet, there are good reasons to consider that there are categorical differences between the two, warranting different approaches. Indeed, it has been argued Popper himself violated his own prescription for unity. Without the presence of universal laws to investigate, Popper struggled with how the social scientist should orient their inquiry. He resolved that they would have to take a  “preconceived selective point of view[28],” selected for its potential theoretical ‘fertility.’ This organising principle would work to generate testable hypotheses, but could not itself take that form. Popper even went so far as to suggest that the social scientist should be motivated to alleviate the most pressing social ills[29]. Crucially, this is a concession that the “inherent moral and practical character of social problems requires a more heightened ethical awareness among social scientists than among natural scientists[30].” This insight – that there must be a methodological ‘original position’ – is a valuable one. Contrary to Hume’s dictum, “no ought from an is,” it appears there can be no ‘is’ without an ‘ought’. This position is irreducibly normative. For most of mainstream IR, this has long come in the focus of interstate war. Supposedly, the discipline was born of the noble enterprise to understand war in the aftermath of WWI, so that it might be extirpated, or at least mitigated. Neopositivist approaches are still strongly tied to this normative goal. Nowhere is this better articulated than in Richard K. Ashley’s magisterial ‘The Poverty of Neorealism.’ He comments on the

…metatheoretical outlook implicit in positivist method, which circumscribes scientific criticism and limits the range of theories about society that can be scientifically entertained…these limits establish among positivists an uncritical receptivity to neorealists’ conceptions of the international system[31].

However, given the inability for neopositivism to evaluate the normative, this means that while the principle might animate a neopositivist research programme, that programme does not itself possess the ability to reflect upon the nature of this principle. What this means, in effect, is that this selective point of view becomes shielded from critique and buried as an implicit assumption in the method. For example, this is evident in debates over ‘security.’ Traditionally defined, security is for the state, and against the threat of war. The pretension of neopositivism to produce value-free knowledge is particularly suspect to the charge that this focus privileges certain types of security over others. There is no epistemic justification for having the state as the referent object of security, rather than the individual. In doing so, it reproduces inequalities, and maintains a value hierarchy; thus, it is essentially political in nature. And yet, without the capacity for self-reflection, neopositivism cannot meaningfully indulge these critiques. Despite highlighting the way in which Neopositivism fails to meet its own criteria, these critical accounts, couched in terms unfamiliar to the neopositivists, are dismissed as illegitimate.

The strict criteria of demarcation advocated by neopositivism, informed by Popper, is therefore too restrictive. It has been demonstrated this restriction has been informed on the one hand by the nature of neopositivist method, which can only accommodate certain types of questions; and, on the other hand, by a ‘preconceived selective point of view,’ which has taken the form of interstate war. In his efforts to distinguish sense from nonsense, Wittgenstein concluded in his Tractatus that “whereof one could not speak, one must pass over in silence,” excluding ethics and metaphysics from the realm of meaningful discourse. But these perennial questions are central to humanity’s self-understanding, and their exploration will be most effective when brought into conversation with empirical studies. In fact, they exist in inquiry covertly, unless they are brought out to be examined. The threat of relaxing the standards, it is claimed, would be to allow speculation to claim an equal footing as science. Philosophy, in this view, is merely a “synonym for undisciplined speculation[32].” Undeniably, there is a cost. As IR is a discipline that purports to be global, the expectation of pluralism is a reasonable one[33]. As Reus-Smit and Snidal state: “we want international relations to be a field that ultimately speaks to the most pressing problems of political action in the contemporary world, even if we always speak with diverse voices, from diverse perspectives.[34]” If such diversity seems suggestive of a cacophony of voices shouting past each other, the alternative – of IR scholars “passing over in silence” all issues not reducible to logically or empirically verifiable statements – is simply unconscionable.

Reification

Another troubling aspect of neopositivism is the pronounced tendency to uncritically leave the world as it finds it. Two trends in particular are identified here. Firstly, the commitment to render subjective action unproblematic by treating ends as pre-given, and applying scientific rationality to the means. Secondly, when tied to Neorealism, the structuralist focus, which imposes a totalising logic that undermines the possibility of transformation and change.

As part of their behaviourist legacy, the neopositivists believe that it is only observed behaviour that constitutes the proper object of inquiry; investigation into internal motivations, thoughts and inspiration is dismissed as a fraught speculative enterprise. Again, this entails quite a radical divergence from the earlier theorising of Carr and Morgenthau. Carr spoke eloquently of the need to hold purpose and practicality in balance, while Morgenthau sketched a complex interaction between human passion and rationality:

Reason is like a light which by its own inner force can move nowhere. It must be carried in order to move. It is carried by the irrational forces of interest and emotion to where these forces want it to move. . . . [Because] even though man is dominated by interests and driven by emotional impulses, as well as motivated by reason, he likes to see himself primarily in the light of this latter, eminently human quality. Hence, he gives his irrational qualities the earmarks of reason. What we call ‘ideology’ is the result of this process of rationalization[35]

Yet, in the neopositivist formulation, reason is assumed to have a self-generating momentum. Or at least, the task of investigating what animates it is bracketed from inquiry. Max Weber seems to have been an influential figure in shaping this instrumental approach. Observing some of his contemporaries, who claimed that the essentially subjective nature of human motivation rendered study of it categorically different to that of the natural sciences, he argued that an objective social science remained feasible. The motivation of actors is ‘hollowed out’ and treated as pre-given, and society assumed to be a subjectless environment of external constraints. Therefore, the actor is assumed to pursue their desired ends in the most efficient means possible. Thus conceived, human action could become amenable to calculation and prediction[36]. This objectivity is bought at some expense. This understanding, when applied to IR, biases analysis towards an atomistic, utilitarian analysis of action, which in turn precludes any normative or sociological explanation from consideration. As Ashely (1984) notes, this:

…commits scientific discourse to an “actor model” of social reality -a model within which science itself is incapable of questioning the historical constitution of social actors, cannot question their ends, but can only advise them as to the efficiency of means[37].

By this contrivance, neopositivism becomes self-enclosing, as it demands an actor model as a ‘scientific point of entry’ into legitimate IR discourse[38]. This explains in large part the neopositivist link to statism. What the above quote likewise highlights is the naked ahisotiricism of such a model. This is done by denying an exploration of the historical formation of these entities. Alexander Wendt struck upon this in his seminal ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It’. Pushing back on the idea that states had exogenously derived interests foisted upon them by the logic of anarchy, he insisted states could have no a priori security interests. Instead, these are historically constituted through a process of interaction with other states. Under his reformulation, self-help was merely one possible outcome of this constitutive process[39]. A neopositivist framework is not conducive to these social and historical considerations, because of its commitment to the purely observable. Wendt’s argument that socially constituted identity has a motivational force hinges on the notion of ideational structures, which are beyond the immediate realm of observed experience (although it may be able to generate testable hypotheses). Any “normative structures transcending and irreducible to individual wants and needs, the utilitarian would hold…to be scientifically indefensible metaphysical notions”[40]. The neopositivist outlook, by contriving to solve the dilemma of subjectively motivated action, thereby commits itself to a model that, while making behavior more amenable to prediction, is far from neutral. Paired with a commitment to the directly observable, this leads necessarily to an adoption of utility, atomism, and statism. These concepts are thus reified, and treated as the undisputable basic ordering units of social inquiry, rather than as the assumptions that they are.

The adoption of a structuralist analysis, such as found in neorealism, also tends to reify the existing order. To a degree, the commitment to behaviourism explains an affinity with a structural focus, because this approach believes that consciousness is ‘not transparent to itself[41].’ Waltz argued that explanations based on the first or second image level – that is, human nature and state attributes – are “reductive.” These are merely epiphenomenal, in the structuralist view. They are merely ‘surface level.’ Morton Kaplan, in responding to the traditionalist critique that his scientific approach was unable to accommodate the inherently subjective nature of human motive, dismissed the proposition he should yield to approaches that could intuit these by ‘introspection[42].’  He protested that motives were not self-evident, but often unconscious. Therefore, it was only carefully controlled scientific examination that could elucidate the real causes of human behaviour.  The structural analysis, popularized by Waltz, was ostensibly the fulfilment of the neopositivist promise of overcoming the subjectivity of human motivation. It purported to move past the superficial levels of inquiry and expose them. In actuality, in seeking to disclose new possibilities for inquiry, the structuralist focus closed off the avenues of theory permitted a critical posture towards the existing order[43].  Waltz sought to explain continuity in the international system, namely the recurrent nature of conflict. In doing so, his model presented a static international order. Through the lens of structuralism, change was only to come at the level of the structure – at long as ‘anarchy’ remained the organising principle, the objective relations delineated by Waltz would hold. In effect, politics became subordinate to science. Ashley provides an illustration of this dehumanising and reifying tendency:

[Structuralism] had produced an ahistorical and depoliticized understanding of politics in which women and men are the objects, but not the makers, of their circumstances. Ultimately, it presented a totalitarian project, a totalizing antihistorical structure, which defeats the Marxian project for change by replicating the positivist tendency to universalize and naturalize the given order[44].

And yet since Waltz’s publication the world has changed immensely. It has become more complex and its essential dynamics harder to distil[45]. Reus-Smit contends that in 1979 the world was more conducive to a parsimonious, totalising approach. The more globalised, multipolar world that is emerging doesn’t lend itself to such theorising[46]. Contrary to Wight’s lamentations, ‘recurrence and repetition’ are not endemic features of IR[47]. New problems are emerging that cannot be snugly packed into the structuralist framework; change is taking place, whether or not the neorealist framework possesses the capacity to comprehend it. The role of theory is to respond in kind to such change.

Conclusion

Neopositivism, it has been shown, is more of a social art than a hard science. In its attempt to bring rigour to the discipline, it has abandoned the methodological modesty of its ancestry. Section one demonstrated how it is underpinned by a philosophy of science that is not clearly applicable to an infant social science. Moreover, as shown in section two, the effect of adopting such strict criteria and principles of demarcation is to severely constrict disciplinary dialogue. The standards of ‘legitimate knowledge,’ in the neopositivist framing, are too exclusionary. This is not merely because many questions in IR are inescapably based on judgment, but because all theories, no matter their scientific pretensions, must embrace normative orientations to some degree. Finally, an analysis of neopositivism’s proclivity to reify certain concepts was detailed in section three. The potential for transformation is further circumscribed when neopositivism is paired with a structuralist focus, as it is in Neorealism. We are left to conclude, then, that such an approach, insensitive to history, dismissive of philosophy, and stubbornly silent on its own commitments, is to be rejected.

Endnotes

[1] Lake, David A. 2013. “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory: The End of the Great Debates and the Rise of Eclecticism in International Relations”. European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), pp. 568.

[2] Ibid., pp. 570.

[3] Jervis, Robert. 1994. “Realism, and the Scientific Study of International Politics”. Social Research, 61(4), 854

[4]Ashley, Richard. K. 1984. “The Poverty of Neorealism”. International Organization, 38(2), 230

[5] Ibid., 233

[6] Ibid., 235

[7] Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory”, 577

[8] Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 249-250

[9] Lake, “Theory is Dead, Long Live Theory”, 570

[10] Popper, Karl. 2002 [1935]. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Routledge.

[11] Godfey-Smith, Peter. 2003. Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 103

[12] Ibid., 103

[13] Ibid., 104

[14] Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2011. “Theory Talk #44: Patrick Jackson on IR as a Science, IR as a Vocation, and IR as a Hard Board”, Theory Talks, Accessed May 16. http://www.theory-talks.org/2011/11/theory-talk-44.html

[15] Atkins 1995, cited in Hughes, Austin. 2012. ‘The Folly of Scientism.” Accessed May 20. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

[16] Jackson, “Theory Talk #44: Patrick Jackson on IR as a Science, IR as a Vocation, and IR as a Hard Board”

[17] Bull, Hedley. 2012. “The Case for a Classical Approach”. World Politics, 18(3), 361.

[18] Ibid, pp. 366.

[19] Conversations with History. 2005. “Reflections on Theory in the Social Sciences, A Conversation with Amartya Sen.” Accessed May 24. http://conversations.berkeley.edu/content/amartya-sen

[20] Bull, “The Case for a Classical Approach”, 369

[21] Kaplan, Morton A. 1966. “The New Great Debate: Traditionalism vs . Science in International Relations”. International Relations, 19(1), 4

[22] Reus-Smit, Christian., & Snidal, Duncan. 2008. “Between Utopia and Reality: The Practical Discourses of International Relations,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 17-18

[23] Wight, Martin. 1960. “Why is there no International Theory?” European Journal of International Relations, 21(1), 37

[24] One is reminded here of Tolstoy’s claim that ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only important question for us: “What shall we do and how shall we live.” (In Weber 1921, 143)

[25] Carr, Edward Hallet. 1946 [1939]. The Twenty Years Crisis 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. London: MacMillan & Co, 92.

[26] Jervis, “Realism and the Scientific Study of International Politics”, 859

[27] Stokes, Gary. 1997. “Karl Popper’s Political Philosophy of Social Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 27(1), 57

[28] Ibid., 68

[29] In The Twenty Years Crisis, Carr points out that the case of a laboratory worker attempting to cure a body of cancer is quite different from the case of a social scientist attempting to cure the body politic of some ill. In the latter case, the purpose is intimately tied with the process, because it may in fact exert an influence on it (1939, 3-4)

[30] Stokes, “Karl Popper’s Political Philosophy of Science”, 69

[31] Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 250

[32] Kaplan, “The New Great Debate: Traditionalism vs Science in International Relations”, 18

[33] Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus. 2011. “Theory Talk #44: Patrick Jackson on IR as a Science, IR as a Vocation, and IR as a Hard Board”

[34] Reus-Smit, Christian., & Snidal, Duncan. 2008. “Between Utopia and Reality: The Practical Discourses of International Relations, 8.

[35] Morgenthau, Hans J. 1947. Scientific Man versus Power Politics. London: Latimer House Ltd, 155

[36] Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 251-252

[37] Ibid., 253

[38] Ibid., 254

[39] Wendt, Alexander. 1992. ”Anarchy is What States Make of It,” International Organization, 46(2), 401-402

[40] Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 243

[41] Ashley “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 234

[42] Kaplan, “The New Great Debate: Traditionalism vs Science in International Relations”, 5

[43] Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 237

[44] Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism”, 226

[45] Reus-Smit, C. 2009. “Theory Talk #27: Christian Reus-Smit on IR cultures, rethinking IR and bridging the normative-empirical divide.” Accessed May 16. http://www.theory-talks.org/2009/03/theory-talk-27.html

[46] Ibid.

[47] Wight, “Why is there no International Theory?” 43

References

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Written by: Jack Shields
Written at: Australian National University
Written for: Matthew Davies
Date written: May 2016

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• The False Dichotomy of the Material-Ideational Debate in IR Theory
• To What Extent is the Realist School of IR Theory Useful for Policymakers?
• How, if at all, Does Hierarchy Exist Both in the Theory and Practice of IR?
• A Review of Critical Race Theory’s Critiques of Mainstream IR
• IR Theory and The Ontological Depth of the Material-Ideational Debate
• Tracing Hobbes in Realist International Relations Theory