International Relations and Scientific Progress: Structural Realism Reconsidered.

By Patrick James. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. 328p. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Since the end of the Cold War, structural-systemic theories of world politics, which dominated the field's intellectual landscape for decades, have fallen out of favor and been replaced by dyadic studies of conflict and war in the quantitative empirical literature and by “second-image” theories in the qualitative literature. There are many reasons for this sea change within the discipline. Critics of neorealism—the most well-articulated and familiar structural-systemic theory—claim that it failed to predict and cannot explain the end of the Cold War; that its emphasis on parsimony and enduring continuities of international politics make it irrelevant in an increasingly complex and turbulent world; that its state-centric assumption and “billiard ball” view of the state is anachronistic in today's highly interdependent and globalized international environment populated by powerful transnational and subnational actors; and that it cannot explain and, indeed, is subverted by the robust empirical finding that dyads composed of democratic states rarely, if ever, go to war.

Swimming against this intellectual tide (or, more accurately, tidal wave), Patrick James aims, as the title of his book suggests, to reinvigorate systemic theory, in general, and structural realism (neorealism), in particular. Unlike Kenneth Waltz, whose neorealist theory only explains a few very important things, James ambitiously sets out to construct a structural theory with wide explanatory range, covering most aspects of international conflict, crises, and war. For this task, James offers a new state-of-the-art version of Waltz's theory, which he calls elaborated structural realism (ESR). The theory's ontological foundation is rooted in “systemism,” an awkward term for theory that incorporates both unit- and system-level variables and their interactions. In James's parlance, systemism is a superior alternative to either individualism or holism because it can account for micro-micro, macro-macro, and hybrid (micro-macro and macro-micro) connections.

Borrowing from the work of Michael Brecher and Hemda Ben Yehuda, James defines the international system to include, in descending order of abstraction, an environment (or external setting), structure, actors, context, issues, and process. The advantage of adopting such a comprehensive definition is that it can account for both structural and process-level variables and the reciprocal interactions between these two dimensions of the international system. The disadvantage, and it is a serious one, is that the model is composed of so many moving parts that it is nearly impossible to hold the variables constant for the purposes of untangling their individual effects and, more difficult still, specifying the model's internal dynamics, namely, how, why, and what changes in the parametric values of the variables lead to specific outcomes as opposed to others.

Undaunted by this complexity, James goes on to expand neorealism's minimalist definition of system structure (as anarchy and the system-wide distribution of capabilities among “like” units) to include, among other things, the concentration of capabilities, the number of alliances, and polarization within the system. Here, James commits a conceptual misstep, in my view, because his definition of structure consists of not only structural elements associated with capabilities but also behavioral characteristics, for example, polarization and the number of interstate alliances. The latter are more correctly viewed as effects of structure, not components of it. Leaving aside the issue of conceptual clarity, there is a practical reason that limited definitions of structure tend to be more useful than more expansive ones: Elements used to define structure cannot be explained by it. Thus, the more elements used to define system structure, the less it explains.

In the next three chapters, James engages the reader in a hard-core discussion of the meaning of scientific progress in international relations. In Chapter 3, he painstakingly develops a framework for evaluating scientific progress that can be applied to the field of international relations. This analysis culminates with the introduction of a new concept, the scientific research enterprise, which facilitates the proper scope and mechanism for evaluating worldviews, ontologies, paradigmatic entities, theories, and hypotheses. In Chapters 4 and 5, he describes the foundation and evolution of structural realism as a scientific research enterprise, and then applies his methodological framework to make a substantive evaluation of structural realism. Not surprisingly, he concludes that structural realism as a system-level theory has great unrealized explanatory potential. More surprisingly, James asserts “that an actor-oriented approach, paradoxically, may be at an increasing disadvantage when it comes to theorizing about the twentieth century and beyond” (p. 203). The sophistication of this analysis is truly impressive and, at times, mind-boggling. If nothing else, he clearly shows that he is one of the heaviest hitters in the field with regard to these lofty philosophical matters. Readers should be warned, however: If your eyes glaze over when reading recondite Lakatosian discussions of positive and negative heuristics, you will probably fall into a state of unconsciousness well before completing these chapters.

Although there is a bit too much exposed plumbing for my taste, James's insightful and provocative theoretical musings throughout International Relations and Scientific Progress should be required, though difficult, reading for specialists in the field. Conversely, nonspecialists will likely characterize most passages of the book as dull, jargon-riddled, excessively abstruse, self-referential, and of no practical value. The question remains, however: Does James succeed in reinvigorating structural realism? Perhaps. But there is no evidence to support this view or its opposite. The problem is that elaborated structural realism, at this early stage of its development, falls well short of being a fully articulated theory. Indeed, James offers the reader only a schematic (mostly, bare-bones) presentation of ESR—one that amounts to little more than a periodic table of elements devoid of substantive content, much less specific propositions that can be tested and falsified. Since empirical testing of James's theory must await its further development, I was left feeling as though I had been told a joke without a punchline. After all, the only surefire way to know if one has built a better mousetrap is to set it on the floor and see how well it catches mice. Notwithstanding the author's high-powered ruminations on the scientific research enterprise, the best evidence of theoretical progress in the social sciences is, in my view, a convincing demonstration that the proposed theory is more useful, not just more comprehensive or descriptively accurate, than the one it seeks to replace. On this verdict, the jury is still out for ESR.