Plurality is the law of the earth.
— Hannah Arendt Footnote 1
Every so often, political science finds itself enmeshed in curiously vehement intramural debates: the “new political science” of the 1920s; the behavioral revolution; perestroika; and most recently, DA-RT. Footnote 2 Our nonacademic friends often wonder at—or are bemused by—the intensity of these debates. How can recondite questions over methods, disciplinary self-organization, or publishing practices engender so much argument? The answer, John Gunnell notes, lies in the relational character of our field: “no matter how social science may theoretically construe its subject matter, that subject matter is discursively pre-constituted and autonomous.” Footnote 3 Reflection on the discipline’s identity is thus “baked in” to the academic study of politics. Moreover, as these reflections often reveal deep disagreements over the essential “stuff” of politics, they are often irresolvable in their own terms. For this reason, Gunnell argues, political science’s self-understanding as a plural discipline does a distinctive, significant kind of work: it allows divergent—if not wholly orthogonal—voices and commitments to share a common disciplinary/intellectual space.
Following on two decades of “great debates” and a series of far-reaching structural transformations, the International Relations subfield has staked out its own pluralist consensus. Footnote 4 The view that political knowledge—both in the academy and in policy circles—is improved by confrontation with a diverse range of viewpoints has gained wide acceptance. So has the view that American School IR is unable to provide such diversity. Footnote 5 In themselves, these views are not new. What has changed is the disciplinary respectability they now enjoy—their emergence from what had for decades been the “dissident” margins of the field. Footnote 6 Pluralism’s supporters range from committed neo-positivists and rationalists to ardent post-positivists; Footnote 7 from younger scholars to their senior colleagues; Footnote 8 and from policy wonks to students of high theory. Footnote 9 Moreover, they hail from around the world, despite the fact that the hegemony perceived in US IR does not obtain everywhere. Footnote 10 Pluralism has become the company all IR scholars want to keep.
This newfound consensus nevertheless conceals profound differences as to what pluralism means and the proper basis on which it should be defended. Pluralism has been brought forth in a number of distinct guises: these include attempts to broaden the field’s understanding of scientific knowledge; Footnote 11 calls for various forms of eclecticism, in the vein of Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein; Footnote 12 the invocation of Aristotelian phronēsis as a form of practical know-how fostered by a range of analytical viewpoints; Footnote 13 “reflexivist” approaches that trace the dissemination of academic knowledge from IR into international politics; Footnote 14 a growing interest in surmounting the barriers to more policy-relevant knowledge; Footnote 15 and finally calls for a robust exchange between different theories as the best route to knowledge. Footnote 16 These literatures are in addition to singular calls for more or less of particular forms of analysis, typically quantitative or rationalist, Footnote 17 which often invoke pluralism in positive terms.
Yet convergence around a shared term of art does not automatically bring with it consensus as to that term’s substantive meaning. It is not at all clear that contemporary advocates of pluralism are calling for the same thing. Indeed, the term would seem to function as convenient shorthand that betrays fundamental disagreement over its nature and value. With that in mind, we subject pluralism to concerted analysis. We ask, what is pluralism in the study of international politics? On what basis can it be defended—not in terms of the disciplinary work it does, but as an inherent good in the study of politics?
We hold to the notion that pluralism necessarily entails epistemological skepticism: the position that no single knowledge system can ever possess the whole truth, at least as this applies to political matters. As Nick Rengger points out, pluralism in this sense is not the same thing as plurality: the fact that International Relations theorists already do deploy a range of approaches, theories, “-isms,” and methods in the pursuit of their work. Footnote 18 This latter position is less a statement of value than a grudging acknowledgement of certain stubborn disciplinary realities: the failure of neo-positivist “falsificationism” to create a uniform, normal social science of IR (or of political science) on the one hand, and IR’s rapid growth and persistent variegation on the other. Footnote 19 Pluralism, by contrast, embraces diversity as inherently valuable for students of international politics, given that social-scientific concepts and categories can never do more than make provisional claims about a world that resists comprehensive organization through any single mode or scheme of explanation, interpretation, or analysis. Footnote 20 Following Jeffrey Isaac, it holds that scholarship from a variety of different perspectives and sensibilities must have “not simply a place” in the academic study of politics, “but a valued place.” Footnote 21
So understood, a clear fissure seems to run through what might otherwise appear to be widespread agreement on the value of pluralism, creating at times strange intellectual bedfellows. Despite differences over methods and methodology, analytical eclecticists like Katzenstein and Sil, bridging-the-gap pluralists like Bruce Jentleson, and some proponents of phronēsis, share a view of knowledge as ultimately singular and attainable. On the other side of the equation, those arguing for a wider understanding of science and knowledge like Patrick Jackson and Daniel Nexon, and reflexivists concerned with scholarship’s influence on politics like Inanna Hamati-Ataya share with scholars such as John Mearsheimer a concern with fostering pluralism and not just plurality—despite disagreement over many other issues of theory, method, and interpretation.
Beyond highlighting the lack of consistency in what appears a unified call for greater pluralism in IR, our contribution is to demonstrate that, when understood as a necessary implication of epistemological skepticism, claims to pluralism take on a more critically reflexive role than present debates have recognized. As such, pluralism no longer promises to resolve the inherent contingency of politics or to transcend the limits of theory. Rather, its use is rather fundamentally pedagogical: it “teaches us to beware the tyranny of certainty.” Footnote 22 Pluralism thus becomes a habit of mind, which one cultivates to resist the ever-present danger of reification: conflating the concepts used to describe or classify things with the things themselves. “Philosophy . . . lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” noted Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor Adorno. Footnote 23 Adorno’s point, which applies to social and political theory no less than to “pure” philosophical speculation, was threefold. First, that the continued search for truth beyond thought contained an ineluctable limitation, insofar as such truth could only be arrived at through thought—and thought always takes place within the world it means to understand or explain. Second, that the nature of thinking makes that limitation difficult to keep fully present to mind. Mere awareness of it does not suffice: scholars need to “arrange their thoughts and actions” so as to continually underscore it. Footnote 24 Third, that failing to do so renders theory vulnerable to the worst kinds of tendentious appropriation, notwithstanding the intention of the theorist.
Holding firm to a skeptical understanding of pluralism also suggests that the argument is far broader than its contemporary instantiation in IR admits, extending to the broader discipline of political science and beyond. The metaphor of bridge building, whether within the academy or between it and the policy world is thus limited, because the questions raised go well beyond bringing people together and breaking down barriers to mutual intelligibility. Certainly, a true practice of pluralism sometimes includes collaborative moments of this sort: scholars working together to enrich political discourse by bringing many voices together. But such a practice is also, sometimes, deeply agonistic as well: for those different voices will often disagree, even to the point of mutual incomprehensibility or essential contestation.
Both collaboration and contestation are needed because the academy does not afford an objective perch from which to view political life. As Beate Jahn notes: “the modern sciences . . . emerged in response to particular political problems. They address these through their very separation from politics—that is, through a process of abstraction, or theorization, that provides scientific knowledge with an aura of objectivity and political neutrality.” Footnote 25 When the mutual imbrication of science and politics is forgotten—that is, when Jahn’s “aura of objectivity and neutrality” becomes taken as the genuine article—then science metasticizes into something much larger and potentially more menacing. Rather than informing political life, it threatens to displace it: the government of human beings, to paraphrase Saint-Simon, becomes the mere administration of things. Footnote 26 This is the point of the Hannah Arendt quote that serves as our epigraph. Because plurality is “the law of the earth,” pluralism constitutes a foundational ethical obligation for those who dwell upon it. Failing that, we may little wonder when even “hard” scientific findings, from global warming to the age of the universe, become objects of fierce political contestation. “The claims to truth associated with science,” noted Ernst Haas et al. in 1977, “if not objectively ‘true,’ have the function of being socially true and compelling because modern man has put himself in the position . . . of being unable to do otherwise.” Footnote 27
In making this case, the first section reviews six arguments commonly made in favor of pluralism in International Relations. While persuasive on their own, each argument fails to capture fully the notion of pluralism alluded to above, suggesting the need for a more robust one. The remainder of that section then sets the groundwork for such an argument, by expanding on the important distinction between pluralism and plurality. We argue that structural diversity in IR and its relationship to politics—different forms of plurality—cannot on their own sustain disciplinary pluralism.
In the second section, we then offer a robust argument in favor of pluralism, drawing on the sensibility set out in the previous paragraphs. We argue that pluralism matters because, when fully understood, it can be translated into disciplinary practices that address the ever-present danger of reification, and with it the tendency of theory to lend itself to tendentious appropriation. The conclusion then brings the two sections together. We hold that the six roads to pluralism identified in the first section represent elements of such a practice, yet they do not fully constitute one on their own.
Arguments for a Pluralist IR
Discussing pluralism in the context of either world politics or the academic discipline of IR is counter-intuitive: both are inherently plural at the outset. Footnote 28 World politics concerns relations among a range of unique actors, as students of IR’s English School have long recognized. Footnote 29 The academic study of IR meanwhile includes many theoretical and methodological approaches, often couched as “-isms” (e.g., realism, constructivism, feminism, etc.), and in that sense is also already plural. Nonetheless, the virtues of pluralism have been invoked more intensely in recent years by six distinct literatures.
Six Roads to a Pluralist IR
Pluralizing knowledge.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Nexon have put forward three cases for widening the field’s understanding of knowledge as it relates to world politics.
First, Jackson distinguishes among four modes of “doing” science: neo-positivism—characterized by the testing of hypotheses against cross-case multi-variate data; analyticism—the use of ideal-typical models to contrast with observed outcomes; critical realism—the search for causal relationships among unobservables; and reflexivism—a broad set of approaches, including Marxism and reflexive sociological approaches, like certain brands of feminism, that seek to include the position of the scientist within the bounds of scientific inquiry. Footnote 30
Second, Jackson and Nexon have elaborated three modes of knowing in IR theory more broadly: social-relational—which focuses on the social configurations underpinning particular outcomes; choice-theoretic—which focuses on the parameters of choice situations faced by individual actors; and experience-near—which focuses on the immediate knowledge communicated through emotions, habits, and practices. Footnote 31 For Jackson and Nexon, when operationalized in research, these three forms of knowledge get closer to what Thomas Kuhn referred to as paradigms and Imre Lakatos as scientific research programs. Footnote 32 This is important since typical cleavages in IR—from debates between “-isms” to methodological debates like that between the traditionalists and the scientists—actually refer to disagreements that can and should be settled empirically—hence disqualifying them as paradigms or research programs defined by their incommensurability—while these three more basic modes of knowing produce genuinely incommensurable knowledge-claims.
Third, Jackson has more recently addressed the relationship between scientific and non-scientific forms of knowledge. Distinguishing between engaged and detached forms of knowledge on one axis, and value-perspectival and impersonal on the other, yields the following four modes: epistemic—detached and impersonal; technical—detached and engaged; aesthetic—value-perspectival and detached; and finally normative—value-perspectival and engaged. Footnote 33 For Jackson and Nexon, each of these modes can be defended as a valid route to knowledge and should not be excluded from a pluralistic field.
Analytical eclecticism (AE).
Rejecting the narrowness of paradigm-driven research, Sil and Katzenstein have meanwhile argued that IR scholars should engage in what they term analytical eclecticism, defined as
any approach that seeks to extricate, translate, and selectively integrate analytic elements—concepts, logics, mechanisms, and interpretations—of the theories or narratives that have developed within separate paradigms but that address related aspects of substantive problems that have both scholarly and practical significance. Footnote 34
In a similar vein to David Lake’s claim that “the ‘-isms’ are evil,” Footnote 35 Sil and Katzenstein urge scholars to borrow and combine ideas and theories from different paradigms as the research problem demands, rather than to stick within one’s own narrow research tradition. Analytical eclecticism is thus offered as a solution to the problem of an ostensibly growing gap between academic political science and the needs of the policy world, and at the same time as a tonic to scholarly intramuralism or scholasticism. As such, AE is built upon the sensibilities of a pre-existing push for “problem-driven” research across political science, adapting it specifically to the disciplinary milieu of IR. Footnote 36
Bridging the gap.
The notion that the ivory tower and the policy world can no longer communicate with one another has itself generated a large literature in recent years. Footnote 37 A common theme in this literature is that the retreat into high theory or methodological sophistication has taken place at the expense of practical relevance, leading practitioners to abandon academic social science. For Paul Avey and Michael Desch, policymakers “are skeptical of much of academic social science, which they see as jargon-ridden and overly focused on technique, at the expense of substantive findings.” Footnote 38 While such concerns are as old as political science itself, Footnote 39 pluralism in the contemporary context is generally invoked as a defense of non-neo-positivist work: “policymakers often find the contributions of qualitative social science research, which is increasingly less well represented in the discipline’s leading journals, of greater utility.” Footnote 40
Attuned to the structural, rather than merely theoretical, impediments to that divide, the founders of the Bridging the Gap Project—housed at the American University School of International Service in Washington, DC—have consequently developed a number of initiatives that seek to promote policy-relevant work while still playing the professional game of US political science. These include a book series with a leading university press—Oxford—and conferences offering advice and networking opportunities for scholars interested in pursuing policy-relevant work. For their part, a range of scholars have offered first-person advice for getting one’s ideas heard within the counsels of government, while managing the cross-cutting tensions of a scholarly career and the demands of the policy world. Footnote 41
From technē to phronēsis.
Fourth, and related, another rejection of the dominance of neo-positivism in political science has sought to re-appropriate the Aristotelian notion of phronēsis, typically translated as prudence or practical wisdom. Footnote 42 Aristotle, it will be recalled, distinguished among phronēsis, epistēmē—knowledge that can be demonstrated from first principles—and technē—technique or skill. The importance of phronēsis lies in the fact that it is concerned with situated knowledge: it asks what must be done in a specific instance, where not only application of some knowledge developed outside of the situation is put into effect, but where ends and means must be weighed against abstract values that exceed the case at hand.
Proponents of phronēsis hold that it better describes both what policy-making is like, and also how the humanities and humanistic social sciences view knowledge creation vis-à-vis their counterparts in the natural sciences. Footnote 43 As opposed to technē, phronēsis offers a useful hook on which can hang defenses of broadly-speaking interpretive methods. Footnote 44 While most proponents of phronetic social science do not argue that deductive/rationalist/neo-positivist forms of knowledge should be done away with, they do assert the inadequacy of such thinking for cultivating democratic modes of political judgment, and hence the necessity of keeping a space open for alternatives, and for normative reflection.
Reflexivity.
A fifth call for pluralism has emerged from interest in the sociology of science as a way of exploring the social factors conditioning knowledge production. For reflexivists, the asocial and ahistorical vision of knowledge production sustained by the normal science view of research is fictitious. Far from a neutral social science, IR is quintessentially grounded in its socio-political and historical contexts. Footnote 45 Although pluralism is held to be good as an end unto itself, reflexivists need it in order to hold open a space within IR for historical and sociological self-analysis, in order to prevent the development of institutionally ingrained myopias. A second strand of reflexivism does similar work, but takes a more confessional tack: drawing on autoethnographic literature, it invites or calls upon the scholar to consider their own ethical, personal, and professional identities and commitments, and to interrogate the ways in which those differences are formed and received. Footnote 46
Socratic belief.
This final case for pluralism has been made by scholars as different in methodological approach as Steve Smith and John Mearsheimer, and is based on what we might term “Socratic belief.” Footnote 47 Here the main idea is that knowledge is best pushed forward by a robust—even bare-knuckled—exchange of ideas derived from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. As Mearsheimer notes, we foster pluralism because in so doing “we learn from engaging scholars who look at the world in ways that are fundamentally different from our own.” Footnote 48 Constant questioning, rather than the search for foundational truths, is thus taken to be the mark of a responsible discipline. Footnote 49 On Smith’s account, a narrow focus on explanatory theory in US IR made the discipline complicit in the events following September 11, 2001, by reflecting the interests of the dominant and the predominant representations of world politics, rather than offering spaces for various representations that could have “sung into existence” a different reality. Footnote 50 For his part, Colin Wight refers to this as “engaged pluralism.” Footnote 51
Plurality, or Pluralism?
Each of the six roads to pluralism just outlined are persuasive when considered singly. Yet they are also highly divergent, entailing distinct ways of conceptualizing pluralism and justifying why it matters. There are two related reasons for this. First, the six literatures refer to different understandings of International Relations itself, such that they do not share a common referent object. Second, they refer to pluralism as a way of ordering or organizing the field of IR—however it is understood—and its relationship to politics, rather than as a basic problem in how to know or act politically. Recognizing this entails clarifying how IR has been represented in the debate, and making an important distinction between plurality and pluralism—a distinction which has been frequently gestured to, but not fully explored.
The debate over pluralism in IR elides an important difference between International Relations as an academic discourse—traditionally if not uncontroversially understood as a series of “great debates” Footnote 52 —and as a profession—rooted in the traditions and academic/institutional frameworks of particular states. These are overlapping, but not coterminous. Footnote 53 IR’s relative disciplinary coherence masks the social and economic forces driving these divergent frameworks. Although IR scholars in, say, the United States and Australia are taking part in a generally shared discourse, their day-to-day activities remain driven by local forces acting upon the academic profession in each of these contexts. Footnote 54 In the United States, IR scholars are primarily trained in departments of political science and go on to careers therein. In Australia, graduate training is conducted through departments of politics or IR, as they are in Britain. By profession, then, we mean forces that fall outside strictly intellectual debates: career opportunities and trajectories; the average age and socio-economic status of scholars; access to research funds and publication expectations; and the relationship between the profession and the various bureaucracies and political communities within which it is nested.
The national and regional nature of IR-as-profession can be overstated: there is significant cross-border movement of scholars. Yet it remains essential to distinguish between IR as a broadly transnational discourse and IR as a set of nationally and regionally-ordered professions, because it helps identify the diverse origins of contemporary calls for pluralism, and hence explains why those calls vary in substance. Different understandings of pluralism in contemporary debates over theory and method in IR reflect both different understandings of the field, and the different locations of various authors within that field. Footnote 55 Crucially, the debate over pluralism has up to now been dominated by concerns with plurality. Footnote 56
The first and most popular meaning of pluralism is then better considered discursive plurality, which refers to a condition of IR as a discourse about world politics and how to study it that includes multiple substantive theories and approaches. As noted, however, IR as a discourse is already highly diverse. Its students have access to a range of theoretical approaches—realism, liberalism, constructivism, Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, green theory, and the English School—and methodological ones, from discourse analysis to formal theory. Footnote 57
Given this, calls for disciplinary pluralism are often conflated with, or collapse into, concerns about professional plurality: the popularity of particular approaches and the implications of choosing one over another when it comes to one’s prospects for employment and advancement. Here, pluralism emerges as a set of objective disciplinary conditions facing scholars who must compete over scarce resources—jobs, graduate students, promotions, editorial board memberships, column inches in journals—in light of what Cynthia Weber has called IR’s patterns of “disciplinary gentrification”: its relative closure to certain modes of scholarship, from feminism and queer theory in particular to critically and historically-inflected work more generally. Footnote 58 Here a pluralistic field would see a multiplicity of different approaches practiced by scholars active in IR’s diverse contexts. All of this is rendered more acute given profound structural changes in the academic profession: the decline of tenure and concomitant concerns over job security; the rise in for-profit business models; and productivity metrics that stress deliverables or impact. Footnote 59 An often-unstated secondary assumption—though not one which Weber herself would necessarily authorize—is that the profession of IR outside the United States is more pluralistic.
For their part, concerns over professional plurality are often conflated with what, following David Lake, could be called ascriptive plurality: the openness of the academy across key markers of difference such as race, ethnicity, gender, and class. “At least in the United States,” Lake notes, IR scholars “are a relatively homogenous set of individuals, mostly male (68 percent), mostly white (85 percent).” Footnote 60 This homogeneity, Lake argues, creates a comfortable environment for bias and provincialism, which then feeds back into questions of professional and discursive plurality. “These ascriptive characteristics both cause and correlate with similar lived experiences, which lead to convergence in questions, approaches, and findings while, at the same time, leaving other questions unasked.” Footnote 61 On Lake’s account—which can on this point be charged with a degree of “standpoint” essentialism—ascriptive pluralism assures discursive and professional pluralism: the former brings about the latter as a matter of course. Footnote 62
A fourth approach to pluralism addresses the diverse relationships between the academic study of politics and its actual practice: this might be called bridging the gap plurality. For those concerned with plurality in this sense, IR scholars should, alongside think tanks, the media, lobbyists, and strategy groups, seek out policy-makers in order to aid them in making informed decisions. Footnote 63 The unique value of IR from this perspective is the objectivity that academics ostensibly bring, in contrast to avowedly partisan voices. In addition, academics are said to enjoy longer time horizons than other experts. Though these timelines are said to complicate the provision of relevant information to policymakers, they are also said to give scholarly theories both a more tried-and-tested character, and a deeper familiarity with their subject matter. Byman and Kroenig nicely characterize how this tradeoff is generally understood among would-be gap-bridgers: “as part of our goal is to teach and explain, accuracy should be at the core of our discipline. Yet for work to matter for policy, it must arrive in time for it to be considered as policy is formulated.” Footnote 64 This entrepreneurial approach—placing the onus on the individual scholar to bring her work to the attention of those policymakers who might (but might not realize) they need it—makes particular sense when we consider, with John Gunnell, that one possible consequence of pluralism is to sharply limit the ability of an academic discipline to speak in a single voice on matters of public interest or concern. “For criticism to be effective, it must be taken seriously, and a discipline that seeks its identity in diversity is especially weakly positioned.” Footnote 65
As with the six roads to pluralism set out earlier, these arguments are persuasive when taken singly. Yet they conflate pluralism—as noted, a set of beliefs about ideas and their ability to capture reality—with plurality—the various structural and sociological factors that make up a discipline. To be certain, the two are not unrelated, and plurality is in no way unimportant in its own terms. That said, the latter does not automatically follow from the former. Diversity in various academic-institutional contexts is neither equivalent to a thoroughgoing sense of epistemological skepticism, nor does it necessarily produce one.
Why Pluralism, Not Just Plurality, Matters
As noted, the six arguments for pluralism reviewed in the first part of section one are not simply to be dismissed. Narrow readings of scientific knowledge do, as Jackson and Nexon argue, exclude the world’s full diversity from theoretical characterization and impoverish scholarly debate. Analytical eclecticists and bridging-the-gap pluralists, for their part, are not wrong in observing that paradigm- and methods-driven work can lead to insularity and scholasticism. Meanwhile, the deeply technical nature of late-industrial modernity does necessitate an uneasily-negotiated balance among phronēsis, technē, and epistēmē—which, in turn, sometimes necessitates the kind of vigorous argument to which Socratic-belief pluralists hold. Finally, reflexivists are correct to underscore the ways in which power dynamics work inside the academy no less than outside of it.
Yet these arguments on behalf of pluralism are disparate pieces of a larger story. They can be woven together, we suggest, by taking the line that pluralism necessarily entails skepticism in epistemological terms. From this perspective, what has been missing thus far has been proper attention to what pluralism works against: the idea that truths about politics can somehow transcend politics, and that the “right” theory or conceptual schema can lead us to them. Rather than a response to institutional or structural narrowness—to be solved by greater plurality—the call to pluralism responds to a tendency to forget that social-scientific concepts extrapolate from a world they can never fully capture, and then to conflate the former with the latter. This tendency to forget—known as reification—inheres in the very nature of thinking itself. As such, it demands explicit attention and remediation.
On this account, pluralism matters because—when properly understood—it combats this reifying tendency: it “rearranges our thinking.” The scientific desire to make sense of things must be balanced against an acceptance of the fact that we live in a world that overflows neat conceptual definitions and categorical divisions; in which “everything is related to everything else.” Footnote 66 Yet, at the same time, we must still act in and on that world. In order to answer the practical question what do we do, we must compare situations facing us with others that are similar but not identical. We must be willing to toy with ideas, identify patterns, change perspectives, reason by analogy, and think from case to case, even as we recall the inherently provisional nature of such work.
The remaining challenge is threefold. First, we must lay out the broader political and historical context that gave rise to the systematic study of world politics. The tools and ideals of IR—the idea of using theoretical knowledge to produce leverage over events in world politics—did not emerge from nowhere. They were born from a belief that the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century were indicative of a general condition of crisis in late modern politics, one that had become universal in scale and open-ended in time. Scientific intervention in world politics was born not out of idle Humean curiosity, but out of fear: a response to “the crater,” as Karl Mannheim put it, “which is yawning beneath our western society.” Footnote 67
Second, we must show that the wish to use theory to transcend or control politics nevertheless cannot succeed; that it actually perpetuates the crisis it was meant to resolve. This second point has less to do with what individual scholars intend, and more to do with delineating what thinking does: the way theories work in the mind, the peculiar combination of reified knowing and forgetting they suborn. Third, we must show how pluralism—understood as entailing epistemological skepticism—can be mobilized to combat such knowing and forgetting. Each of these points will be taken in turn.
Modernity as Crisis
A widely repeated narrative about IR’s disciplinary origins anchors it in the great catastrophes of the twentieth century. “The study of IR originates within and was a response to an epoch of generalized crisis and global conflagration, representing the paradigmatic moment in the discipline’s formation and subsequent trajectory.” Footnote 68 To the extent that IR has an explicit sense of vocation, it derives from this paradigmatic moment: to build “a cumulative reservoir of knowledge for the stewarding of an increasingly dense, heavily armed, and persistently diverse world, whether by the creation of new capabilities, institutions, or procedures.” Footnote 69 The extent of these catastrophes was so great, it was believed, that it essentially enforced a kind liberal-pragmatic consensus on students of world politics: “our . . . modern mentors in IR theory,” noted Ernst and Peter Haas in 2002, “did not differ over values: realists and idealists preferred peace to war, life to death, wealth to poverty.” Footnote 70
There are certainly good reasons to suspect such narratives of IR’s history. For Pierre Bourdieu, the autonomy of scientific communities—their ability to be guided solely by the free play of ideas and their shared normative and practical commitments—tends to decline as individuals and disciplines get closer to political power. Footnote 71 The work of a number of disciplinary historians has borne this out in the case of IR and political science: competition for resources, and the prospect of acquiring political influence are deadly to the ideal of a disinterested—or purely vocational—science of politics. Footnote 72 A related claim can be found in critical and post-colonial histories of the discipline, in which the much-ballyhooed vocation of IR is simply the speedy completion or efficient maintenance of an expansive colonial/imperial project. Footnote 73
Such accounts do not negate the possibility of a scientific or social-scientific discipline ordering itself around a shared claim of vocation—in this case, IR scholarship as the reasoned pursuit of “better” international relations. That said, they strongly challenge the pragmatism to which Haas and Haas lay claim. Hans Morgenthau and Herman Kahn, to pick a well-known example, both wrote evocatively about the obligation to think passionately and creatively in the shadow of nuclear war. That said, they disagreed materially as to what sort of thinking was needed, and what its practical-policy upshot should be: whether life “the day after” would be worth living, and what ought to be done in light of that judgment. Footnote 74 If both wrote from a strong sense of vocation, they were nevertheless not writing in the service of the same vocation.
This distinction remains with us. Consider comments on climate change made by former NASA administrator Michael Griffin in 2007. Griffin did not doubt human-caused climate change. But when asked what ought to be done, he demurred. “I guess I would ask,” he continued, “which human beings . . . are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings.” Footnote 75 It may well be that Griffin was engaged in rhetorical evasion—trying to protect his agency’s funding by avoiding a controversial stand that might cost him congressional or budgetary support. But his motives are beside the point: the rhetorical move works because Weber’s fact-value distinction survives even at these hypertrophic extremes. “Unlike in baseball,” Patrick Thaddeus Jackson noted in 2006, “not everyone in political science has the same goals.” Footnote 76 Put differently, the claim of a common disciplinary vocation can do important intellectual (or ideological) work notwithstanding its veracity.
The sense of urgency brought on by the crises of late modernity, and the resilience of the fact-value distinction even in the face of those crises, follow from a point that is foundational to the limits of social science, and which speaks, in turn, to the very heart of pluralism. Whether or not a given theoretical project is relevant to a particular policy discourse, Jahn has recently noted, all theory is inherently politically relevant. For as noted above, the modern sciences and social sciences “emerged in response to particular political problems.” Footnote 77 Scientific rhetoric claims authority because the language of intellectual abstraction connotes objectivity, or at least dispassion. Yet what motivates the turn to such acts of conceptual abstraction? The answer, Jahn asserts, lies in what Michel Foucault called “epistemic rupture:” the unsettling experience of having one’s basic onto-political understandings—the understandings through which one locates oneself, both inwardly and to the world—challenged by outside events. Footnote 78 Scientific communities self-organize on the basis of shared experiences of this sort—experiences which have become increasingly exigent as the great transformations of the nineteenth century have turned into the great catastrophes of the twentieth and the twenty-first.
If so, then subjective, contingent experiences of loss function as key—if not sole—drivers of social-scientific thinking: the fearful, dislocating experience of rupture combined with faith in the power of reason to smooth that experience out or give it meaning. Footnote 79 Both are as contingent as the events themselves: bound up in everything from one’s existential commitments to petty prejudice and historical circumstance. As Immanuel Kant noted in his considerations of the “dynamic sublime”—events in nature whose scale and intensity summon up both speculative fascination and sheer terror—the question comes down to a kind of affective or emotional distance. One must be close enough to see something and be moved by it; yet far enough away to safely reflect, interpret, analyze, or judge. Footnote 80 At the same time, the general condition of crisis is universal: scholars responding to their own particular experiences of loss or rupture will have every reason to equate these experiences with the larger condition from which they draw. How are theorists to refrain from conflating the former with the latter? Footnote 81
If that were not problematic enough, consider two further complications. First, both distance and the power to create it can be made as much as found. Bruno Bettelheim, to pick an extreme example, records (albeit with all the problems of any post-facto self-account) that he continued to engage in psychological evaluations while a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald. He did so because such thinking created a kind of distance from the horror and powerlessness of his circumstances; he could “forget for a time that he was in a camp.” Footnote 82
Second, the cognitive work of distance-making can also take place unconsciously—and can have, even so, considerable intellectual and political consequences. In this latter vein, consider Susan Buck-Morss’s evocative account of the suppression of the Haitian revolution and its influence on Hegel’s well-known “master-slave dialectic.” Footnote 83 As a young man, Buck-Morss argues, Hegel appears to have been deeply moved by the common desire for freedom among Haitian and French revolutionaries. That unexpected proximity, she argues, was what first suggested the possibility “that the desire for freedom was truly universal, an event of world history.” Footnote 84 As Hegel imbibed the anthropological studies available in the 1820s, however, that sense of proximity seems to have dissipated: Haitian revolutionaries no longer seemed quite comparable to French ones. This loss of proximity would be reflected in his later thinking on questions of freedom, progress and “universal” history, in which only Europeans played a role. Crucially, this elision seems not to have been something that Hegel consciously chose. It happened to his thinking, on Buck-Morss’ account, rather than following from a self-conscious moment of decision. “It is sadly ironic that the more faithfully his lectures reflected Europe’s conventional scholarly wisdom on African society . . . the more bigoted they became.” Footnote 85
While each of these examples merits more consideration than can be offered here, the foregoing discussion presents two key takeaways. First, theoretical sensibilities cannot be divorced from any number of affective, intellectual, sociological, or temporal circumstances that collectively make up the perspective from which one views and experiences events, and that motivate the turn to scientific or social-scientific abstraction. There are as many experiences of an event as there are unique sensibilities and distinctive vantage points; and there will be as many scientific discourses around those events as there are communities that need them and can sustain them. Each will be reflective of its participants’ distinctive metatheoretical and ontological sensibilities, and will suborn its own intellectual commitments. That holds, even if the sense of crisis from which these distinctive sensibilities derives is effectively universal in scale and scope. Footnote 86 Second, as our perspectives solidify, we can forget—as Hegel forgot—how events may have seemed or felt before we found, or developed, the scholarly frameworks into which they came to be inserted. The sense of epistemic rupture that initially drives thinking loses its urgency as thought begins to fill in the gaps. Further, this forgetting can take place without being consciously willed or chosen.
The Problem of Reification
The process of forgetting Buck-Morss traces out in Hegel can be tied to a broader cognitive-intellectual process known as reification: the tendency by scholars to forget that the concepts we use, and the theories into which they are fitted, constitute partial (in both senses of this term) extrapolations from a much larger, more diverse, and indeterminate world. As a term of art, reification means to set out how this forgetting happens, and to trace its effects: the conflation of particular conceptual-theoretical accounts of complex events, experiences, or phenomena with the events, experiences, or phenomena themselves. It is by such conflation that (to pick well-known examples) war becomes any event that occasions more than 1,000 battle deaths; freedom becomes merely the conjunction of positive and negative liberty; and peace becomes simply the absence of conflict. Footnote 87 When theory gets “Bushwhacked” Footnote 88 —the term Bruce Russett, a leading promulgator of democratic peace theory, gave to describe how that theory was appropriated by proponents of regime change in Iraq—it is in large measure facilitated by this sort of forgetting.
A brief account of this intellectual pathway—from reified forgetting to Bushwhacking—could proceed as follows. A particular kind of intellectual work must be done upon things in the world before they can be made tractable to human understanding, or useful to human ends: they must be organized on the basis of desirable outward qualities. A community anticipating winter, by way of example, will need energy sources that can provide heat and light. A factory owner must distribute a set of tasks among a group of workers: who possesses which combination of skills? To think in these terms—fuel, rather than a stand of trees or a bank of peat; skilled and unskilled labor instead of particular human beings—is to sort things in this manner: according to their ability to satisfy particular desires, interests, ends, or needs. Footnote 89
Thinking in these terms is sometimes referred to as instrumental reason, and a longstanding historical-sociological narrative associates the progressive development and application of such reason with the dramatic increases in productivity, comfort, and efficiency that characterize the modern age. Footnote 90 Yet this form of outward sorting also has distinctive moral and cognitive effects. To organize by type is to make individuals within that type fungible: to subordinate their specificity and uniqueness. The idea that people or things might have inherent value—value that precedes or transcends our subjective needs or wishes—is eclipsed: dismissed as sentimentalism or simply forgotten. Reification speaks to that moment of forgetting, after which things come to appear only in terms of their subjective utility. From there, instrumental appropriation becomes as morally unproblematic as was the erasure of the Haitians for Buck-Morss’s older, “more bigoted” Hegel: since there is nothing unique or essential to capture one’s speculative imagination, there is nothing for reason to violate. Strong critiques of instrumental reason point out that such forgetting is not accidental; the latter is a necessary consequence of the former. Footnote 91
To see the consequences of this forgetting, consider the following example, drawn from Joseph Nye’s Nuclear Ethics. Footnote 92 Politics, Nye wishes to explain to his readers, is deeply contingent; there are no firm principles for action, and imperfect moral choices are sometimes necessary. Forgiveness, circumspection, and humility are thus needed. A favored anecdote-cum-thought experiment means to illustrate this.
Imagine that you are visiting a Central American country and you happen upon a village square where an army captain is about to order his men to shoot peasants lined up against a wall. When you ask the reason, you are told someone in this village shot at the captain’s men last night. Footnote 93
You protest: the men are probably innocent! The captain, unmoved, sternly informs you that “civil wars do not permit moral niceties.” Wishing to “prove the point that we all have dirty hands in such situations,” he makes you this offer: if you will shoot one of the prisoners yourself, he will release the other. What, Nye asks, do you do?
Will you shoot one person with the consequences of saving one, or will you allow both to die but preserve your moral integrity by refusing to play his dirty game? Footnote 94
The same anecdote is reproduced in Nye’s undergraduate lectures. Footnote 95 One can readily imagine its rhetorical effect on well-meaning (but perhaps somewhat cosseted) Ivy League undergraduates who must now grapple, perhaps for the first time, with the limits of virtue ethics and good intentions. Political realism as paideia. Footnote 96
The centrality of forgiveness and fallibility in politics is of course an ancient theme, and Nye’s anecdote makes this evident. But it does more than that. To work, it must draw on—selectively abstract from, and naturalize—a long, familiar history of imperial relations. These relations produce his gallery of familiar types and themes: restive peasants, heavy-handed strongmen, naïve North Americans, imperial politics and the problem of “dirty hands.” Nye’s students and readers, one could argue, are being prepared not for politics in some abstract, universal sense—Athens versus Corcyra versus Melos—but for the particular role they may be expected to play in those relations.
In that vein, casting contemporary suffering in syllogistic terms enables a particular kind of historical forgetting. Peasants suffer not because of a specific constellation of relations in which we may be implicated, but because that is their lot; they always suffer. Since their suffering is now timeless, there is—just as with Hegel’s Haitians—no “event” here: no experience of epistemic rupture, no “dynamic sublime” into which reason must be called to intervene. All that remains is the upshot of the anecdote. To be sure, such forgetting would likely make the work of a young public servant easier. If so, then imparting it may well constitute a kind of vocation. But little wonder, if so, that the notion of vocation in IR is so often invoked independently of its substantive content.
When theorists like Russett complain of Bushwhacking, what they presumably mean is that others have appropriated their intellectual work-product to serve ends they either oppose or did not intend: democratic peace theory was, after all, never meant to justify regime change. But that secondary (mis)appropriation is only possible because Russett and his colleagues, like Nye, had already effected an appropriation of their own when they decanted the complexity, violence, and indeterminacy of war into a system of simplified conceptual signifiers. Neither Russett nor Nye is specifically to blame here: all theorizing, whether qualitative or quantitative, formal or anecdotal, must perform such decanting to some degree. Footnote 97 To meet the challenge reification poses, then, one must understand instrumental reason as necessarily predicated upon a particular form of forgetting, and to arrange one’s thinking contrapuntally against it. Footnote 98 That could be pluralism’s work.
Pluralism against Reification: Toward the Cultivation of Critical Memory
Imagine a vigorous, diverse field of International Relations in which different—and mutually exclusive—ontologies, epistemologies, and methods are all constantly narrating and re-narrating events in different ways and by different means. Now situate that field in a vigorous, diverse political culture in which one finds different—and mutually exclusive—ways of identifying and conceptualizing problems relevant to it, while also contesting its own limits and nature. The structural conditions of the two fields themselves are not what would achieve pluralism in this scenario, but they do provide the possibility for a pluralist mind-set to obtain.
In the case of IR, such a diverse field would not be one in which “anything goes”—in which any claim was as good as any other, or was to be judged only in terms of the political “work” it was understood to perform. Each research program—each combination of a stipulated ontology, epistemology, and methodology, with their generative intellectual, affective, and normative commitments—would still entail close scrutiny from others. Each, moreover, would be bound to the rules that it stipulates for itself. Interpretive claims of truth and hypothetical-deductive ones would still be bound to their own particular methodological rules and logical warrants, even if—as Jackson and Nexon have noted—the specific knowledge claims they produce are incommensurable with one another, and hence also irrefutable in one another’s terms. Footnote 99 Each, moreover, would continue to reflect the value commitments and fears—the experiences of epistemic rupture—around which their promulgators had initially constellated.
If the field practiced IR in such a diverse and contested fashion, our hunch is that such a practice would do much to combat the notion of reification-as-forgetting advanced earlier. If, that is, theorists writing in these distinctive veins talked to, understood the claims made by, and argued with one another from positions of roughly equal disciplinary prestige, then coming to terms with radically dissimilar ways of theorizing the political would become a matter of course. The effect of this would be to force individual scholars to think systematically about their own assumptions, concepts, and commitments: the logical warrants and a prioris that are always on the verge of passing into reified forgetting. A path would be opened for Nye’s peasants and strongmen, and for Haiti’s revolutionaries, to appear on the same terms as up-and-coming American elites and revered European philosophers. The skepticism each scholar naturally brings to the sensibilities and projects of others would be constantly turned back on their own as well.
Here, then, is the wager: that the continuous assault of multiple theoretical narratives would force theorists from every quarter just slightly off balance—still able to draw conclusions from data and to advocate for what follows from them, but without forgetting their limited ontological and epistemological warrants. Research design would include that experiential aim in its deployment of different intellectual lenses. The researcher would think, partly, in the same terms as might the curator of an artistic exhibition: seeking out and deploying pictures of a complex event in ways that would buffet both the theorist and the reader of theory with a variety of unsettling and mutually incommensurable accounts.
If such an approach to pluralism seems facile, that is because on some level it is—self-consciously so. The very possibility of mutually incommensurable accounts changes the epistemic status of social-scientific authority. One is no longer promising settled truth, but only provisional claims, whose partiality—again, in both senses—is constantly being underscored even as their analytical findings and policy upshots are never entirely abandoned. Not truth, but something rather less grand: what the comedian Stephen Colbert once called truthiness, or what Adorno—to return to a theme developed in the introduction—called “clowning”:
The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of this thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning . . . . Philosophy is the most serious of things, but then again it is not all that serious. Footnote 100
For philosophy, substitute social science: the attempt to systematize politics through conceptualization, explanation, and interpretation. Such efforts, as Ned Lebow and Toni Erskine—and before them, David Ricci—have noted, are inherently tragic. Footnote 101 Static concepts cannot contain the vitality and contingency of politics; and yet, they are all we have.
While the term clowning connotes a lack of seriousness, it is not merely goofing off. Clowning, as Adorno intends this term, does for social science what the likes of Colbert, Jon Stewart, and a host of others have done for television news: to affirm the ideals of a discursive form—the “serious business” of social science or public-interest journalism—even as it underscores how those ideals can never quite be lived up to. Footnote 102 Through the juxtaposition of many perspectives, the scholar underscores the limits of her own sensibilities; scholarly authority derives from one’s ability not to capture the truth, but to mark the space between the best accounts of a complex world one can obtain, and the actual complexity and indeterminacy of things. Thus might epistemological skepticism be sustained.
One could hope that such clowning would produce a change of affect or sensibility. That change can be described as proceeding in three phases. First, a sense of dislocation is hoped for, stemming from the realization that any account of a given event both discloses a sense of that event, and betrays a larger reality that lies beyond it. We might begin to wonder how that selective disclosure works, what normative or ideological worldviews it suborns or suppresses. Second, from this sense of dislocation a sense of finitude or humility might follow: that while such narratives are inadequate, they are all any of us—thinkers, policymakers, human beings—have by which to make sense of the world. Third, from this sense of finitude, a sense of compassion and fellow feeling might emerge for those bound up in conflict, and for all of us when we consider our common vulnerabilities and worldly possibilities. This, we submit, would be a pluralism worthy of the name: a helpmate to political judgment, rather than an ill-starred attempt to replace it. Footnote 103
Conclusion: Why This Pluralism?
We have interrogated a popular term in IR, one with implications for the whole field of political science: pluralism. Many scholars, of diverse intellectual stripes, espouse pluralism as an intellectual good. However, what they understand by pluralism and their reasons for defending it have up to now been far from clear. Identifying inconsistencies in current usage of the term has not led us to reject pluralism, however, or the intellectual impulse underpinning its popularity. Pluralism, we affirm, does indeed matter, but to see why involves resisting the temptation to equate pluralism with plurality. To that end, we have defined pluralism here as a necessary consequence of epistemological skepticism: the position that no single knowledge system can ever possess the whole truth, at least as this applies to political matters. From this premise, we have offered an account of pluralism that stresses those forces inherent in thought that militate against it—reifying forces that tend to press social-scientific inquiry into reductive epistemological, ontological, or paradigmatic frameworks.
In itself, the argument that pluralism necessarily entails epistemological skepticism is relatively uncontroversial. Aspects of it can be found in each of the six paths to pluralism traced out in the first part of section one. Where the argument developed here differs is in its foregrounding of reification and its consequences. To take reification seriously is to acknowledge that theorizing is structured by dynamics outside of the conscious awareness or control of the individual scholar, and to rearrange how one thinks accordingly. Pluralism matters, we have argued, insofar as it is a means to that rearrangement. Its value lies in its ability to cast the limits of individual theories and approaches in sharp relief. In the process, we hold, it undercuts both their tendency to reified forgetting and to political appropriation.
To get a sense of this difference, we might return to the six accounts of pluralism surveyed in the first section, with an eye to their various claims and counter-claims. Consider, first, those who embraced pluralism because they felt that IR had become trapped in a series of intramural methodological debates: bridging-the-gap pluralists and analytical eclecticists. In both cases, the narrowness and scholasticism of methods- and paradigm-driven scholarship was to be overcome by a combination of middle-range pragmatism and public-mindedness: committing to “socially important normative and policy issues,” in lieu of “recurrent debates over metatheoretical issues that def[ied] resolution.” Footnote 104
Well and good; but as Anne Norton has pointed out, “socially important normative and policy issues,” do not emerge from a vacuum. Footnote 105 Political agendas, perhaps even more than scholarly ones, tend to reflect both the priorities and discursive frameworks of the powerful; or alternatively, arise out of partisan political discourse, with all its associated prejudices and myopias. At what point, if ever, must the problems to which the eclectic or gap-bridging political scientist has devoted herself themselves be subjected to critical or normative analysis? What tools would such a scholar have at her disposal, having eschewed “metatheoretical” issues in favor of middle-range political analysis, or having seconded her ethical sensibilities to the needs of policymakers? In light of recent political events, let us not mince words: how should the problem-solving scholar respond, when called upon to study best practices for the mass expulsion of illegal immigrants, or for the registration of a particular religious minority? To be sure, some of these scholars have long admitted this problem. Footnote 106 But to admit a problem is not quite to have thought one’s way through it.
If questions of political judgment are absent from bridging-the-gap pluralism and analytical eclecticism, they are central to two of the other paths to pluralism that we sketched out: phronēsis and Socratic belief. Yet these approaches face limitations of their own. For students of phronēsis, a broad, Aristotelian notion of prudence—“what is good and bad for humans”—is meant to provide a basis for just this sort of judgment. Footnote 107 Yet—as we saw with Hegel—it turns out that humanity is not a stable analytical or ascriptive category. This does not, on its own, negate phronēsis as a legitimate means for making social science matter. It does, however, restrict the basis upon which it can be said to matter. As such, it risks eliding or suborning certain kinds of violence—or else becoming an object of contestation, as did the notions of vocation surveyed earlier. To be sure, all modes of judgment conceal their own limitations. But if so, all the more reason to deploy them multiply and in sharp relief. “Even the best research is imperfect, limited, and contestable. And invariably contested.” Footnote 108
Similarly, it is true that vigorous Socratic argument can effectively dislodge entrenched reifications or uncomfortable scholarly blind spots. Yet it remains the case that such notions of argument are often predicated on the unstated—and perhaps somewhat naïve—assumption that spaces for such arguments exist, and that they are generally accessible to everyone. Could a meeting between Buck-Morss’s older, “more bigoted” Hegel and an inheritor of the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture (say) have been arranged? If such a meeting were indeed possible—and if it had taken place—would it have restored the former’s appreciation of the latter’s humanity? In both cases, the answer can only be speculative: perhaps. Even if it did, would that suffice? “Critiquing race only through its own schema is a fundamental failure of our politics and imagination,” Robbie Shilliam (2017) noted recently. “In doing so, we are silencing the response.” Footnote 109
More such critical re-readings could be offered—between, say, Jackson and Nexon’s notions of pluralizing knowledge and the exclusionary notions of scholarly expertise bound up in Jackson’s (2015) more recent work—but the essential point has been made. Few students of IR dispute the importance of pluralism, and many have offered useful—if necessarily partial—accounts of why it is needed. Each of them, we have tried to argue in the foregoing, captures a piece of a complicated problem: how to sustain a position of epistemological skepticism given the challenges and dangers posed by reification. On the account offered here, pluralism matters neither as a fixed structural condition in the field, nor as the ritual reflection upon different perspectives in a debate whose bounds are fixed a priori. Instead, it matters because of the moral-epistemological sensibility which, if understood and practiced correctly, it might help sustain in the mind of the individual scholar: a means to remember that thinking is distinct from and can never adequately capture the practice or experience of international politics. Pluralism matters, not because of what it adds to our understanding of world politics, but because of what it takes away: the pretension—present in thinking even when it is not consciously willed—that the entirety of the world can be placed under a single scheme of interpretation or explanation.
