Nicholas Greenwood Onuf’s new book retells the story of modernity as the creation of a “mighty frame” that shapes the conditions of political rule. The book is presented as a complement to his World of Our Making (1989), which has justifiably become a seminal work in international relations theory. However, this book is not strictly speaking a work of IR theory. Indeed, Onuf says that it is not really an attempt to contribute to “some cumulative store of reliable knowledge” (p. 10). Rather, he presents it as his story and states that he has not made systematic choices in selecting references and historical touchstones. The result is a creative and rich reading of modernity centered on developments in international society.
The Mightie Frame is strongest when we can lose ourselves, with Onuf, in the twists and turns of exegesis. His range is on impressive display as he skillfully works through a wide variety of texts. While the book is easy to read and become absorbed in, it is demanding on the reader. Onuf moves easily between philosophical and historical registers and is trying to develop a large number of themes and histories. So it is difficult to pull all its elements together. In what follows, I present those themes I think are most central to the book while trying to convey a sense of its open texture.
The title of the book is drawn from Onuf’s orienting metaphor for modernity: a mighty frame that fixes “the limits of possible knowledge for modern minds and the conditions of rule in the modern world” (p. 9). Onuf divides the modern era into a number of epochs. Following Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970), he calls the first three epochs the Renaissance, the classical, and the modern ages. However, he argues that Foucault did not afford enough importance to the rise of modernism and therefore he missed the emergence of a fourth age. Onuf raises the possibility of a fifth postmodernist age, but he is not sure whether or not it will come about. These epochs mark ruptures within modernity that alter the mighty frame (p. 30). Nonetheless, he notes that elements of the conditions of rule and the conditions of possible knowledge carry over from one epoch to the next, and so they do not displace one another entirely.
Onuf begins the work in a philosophical mode, working out a version of philosophical idealism via Kant and Foucault. For Onuf, we encounter the world through first- and second-order representations that we work out in relation to the world’s resistance (p. 24). He then develops this idealism into an account of rule. In brief, he argues that rules concatenate into orders when they are knotted together into institutions. Political institutions of rule take three forms: hegemony, hierarchy, and heteronomy (p. 33). The mighty frame is an arrangement of ideas (knowledge and rules) that shapes the formation of political institutions.
The historical narrative begins with the transition into the classical age. The classical epoch is introduced via Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf and culminates in the institution of the European balance of power. The modern epoch is articulated through Kant, Smith, and Madison, expressing itself in the formation of “state-nations.” Husserl, Durkheim, and the Fabians are used to conceptualize the modernist epoch, which is characterized by the destructiveness of the world wars and the subsequent attempts to create world order. The postmodernist epoch is introduced via Austin, Forrester and Haraway, and can be seen in the rise of globalization and expert rule.
In this historical narrative, Onuf argues that international society has been characterized by heteronomy, which is defined as liberal spontaneous order, since the classical age. While the author concedes that forms of hierarchy and hegemony certainly exist, they do so within the frame provided by heteronomy (pp. 184–85, 195–96). On my reading, he highlights two kinds of changes in the conditions of rule: the rise and persistence of the heteronomous, sovereign order in the classical age and its various permutations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Regarding the latter, Onuf notes the emergence of liberalism and its division into two modernist traditions: a market-based tradition that emphasizes freedom and a state-based tradition that emphasizes planning (pp. 153–57). In the wake of the World Wars, these two traditions have been used as the basis of projects of rule: attempts to establish world order (pp. 166–71). These have produced only a set of constitutional fragments that are now struggling to grapple with capitalism’s contradictions: declining growth rates, ecological devastation, and increasing inequality. Onuf worries about the ability of a technocratically organized, global economy to deal with these problems (pp. 196–206).
The book then closes with two philosophical chapters. The first develops a new theory of “positional ethics.” Positional ethics holds that our duties are prescribed by the positions we occupy in status-orders (p. 220). It is not clear why Onuf felt it was necessary to include this chapter. I believe it is because for him, existing systems of ethics (consequentialism, de-ontology, virtue ethics, and postmodern) are premised upon the existence of the mighty frame of modernity. However, in a world of “turmoil” in which “symptoms of decline and malaise” are everywhere, these systems are ineffective. Appeal to universal principles, for example, just will not work. In the event of collapse, we will have to fall back upon positional ethics. Each of us will be obliged to find our position in status-orders and ask what our duties are. Those in the highest positions have the most demanding duties. These duties cannot be outlined in advance; they must be worked out by talking about who is responsible for what (p. 223).
The final philosophical chapter presents a defense of idealist constructivism against Latour’s variant. But more than anything else, Onuf rejects Latour’s implicit mighty frame: a flattened ontology of humans and nonhumans linked together in a hastily conceived republic. He “overreaches,” Onuf says, when he “decides on new conditions of rule without an adequate grounding in what it means to think and therefore to act, just for example, as a spokesperson” (p. 232). Reading this in light of the chapter on ethics, it becomes clear that for Onuf, rule must be worked out in normative terms. If it is the case that we are headed into an age of transition, we must take seriously the task of linking knowledge and rule into new forms.
Given that the book works in multiple registers, efforts to evaluate it from within the standard modes of international theory are not likely to be fruitful. We could read it as IR theory and ask for more details about the ontology of the system or the mechanisms that shape and drive epochal change. But Onuf is clear that he is not offering a theory. We could read it as history of thought or international law and ask for more comprehensive historical references. But the author is clear that the figures and events in the book are selected for reasons specific to him. We could read it as international political theory and ask for clear normative principles to guide the creation of international institutions and ethical codes. But he would likely suggest that such principles would have to be worked out in situ.
More charitably, we can read the book as a story about the meaning of modernity and its potential descent into a postmodern era. Let us return to Onuf’s claim that Foucault ignores modernism. Onuf says that though it is difficult to define modernism, we can get a handle on it via the dictum that “form follows function.” Modernism in art breaks through the surface of classical order to reveal “ensembles of relations, stable or shifting, linked by purpose” (p. 137). For him, this underwrites a new epoch in which functionalist thought is used to rethink rule (e.g., by the Fabians, Mitrany, and others).
Onuf argues that the modernist-functionalist project has been unsuccessful in building a coherent world order. Moreover, increases in social complexity seen in the modernist age have produced unsustainable growth and social dislocation. While he seems to value the modernist world he worries is crumbling, he does not quite mount a defense of modernism against postmodernism. Perhaps this is because he is fatalistic, and believes that all we can do is fall back on positional ethics. But is giving primacy to positional ethics not antimodernist itself? Letting position (form) dominate function (purpose)? Should we not as scholars lead with purposes even if we do not believe in some ultimate philosophical foundation for them?
Read practically, from the standpoint of those confronting capitalism’s contradictions and the inadequacies of world order, the book is unsatisfying. Onuf tells us that we live in a mighty frame in crisis, but he has not given us a theory that would allow us to diagnose the drivers and potential political or ethical responses to that crisis. Put more sharply, the philosophical opening and closing of the book is insufficient to confront the challenges of the history it maps.
If the book is about the history and meaning of modernity, then we could also raise two historical criticisms. One is about colonialism, which Onuf largely leaves out. Both he and I will have to accept the criticism that our books are Eurocentric, but I do not think we can understand the history of the West without taking colonialism into account in some way. But Onuf sets aside colonialism as a residual. He says: “Where there are no state-nations, then imperial or colonial administration on the model of the patriarchal household prevails” (p. 132). Here, colonialism is the other of modernity, which produces and becomes organized around state sovereignty. But I would argue that colonialism grows out of and becomes constitutive of modernity. The conditions of modern rule in Europe were surely transformed through colonialism, as Siba Grovogui, Antony Anghie, and others have shown. So Onuf (with Waltz and others) cannot maintain a sovereign system with pockets of hierarchy when the whole system, especially from the eighteenth century on, was premised on the hierarchical ordering of North and South.
Imperialism and colonialism are certainly not new to modernity, however. This raises a broader question about periodization. If modernity is continuous to the premodern era and needs to be subdivided into epochs, is it really the case that we need a specific understanding of modernity as a distinct unity? Why not tell stories that focus on drawing out ruptures and continuities across periodizations and make that the focus of our work? If history is complicated and highly textured, which I think it is, then we have to develop conceptual models that allow us to describe the ongoing, dynamic structure of change while clearly identifying its mechanisms and effects. I think such models are necessary for grappling with the practical political problems that Onuf seeks to confront under the aegis of the mighty frame. Although he offers a looser model than I would like, it is nonetheless rewarding to work through his new book, folding it back on itself again and again, searching for a new understanding of our age.
