Half a century ago, Michel Foucault asked what is (im)possible to think at any given moment, and he labeled discursive practices within the limits of the possible an episteme. Bentley Allan’s impressive book offers an intriguing answer to the celebrated question with which Foucault began The Order of Things (trans. 1970): Any culture’s cosmology, which integrates what its members know into a general scheme about the constitution and purpose of the universe, sets the limits of what they can know. In this book (p. 33; see Fig. 2.1), Allan in effect reconfigures Foucault’s inclusive sense of an episteme as a “totality of relations” (The Archeology of Knowledge, 1972, p. 191), into a multilevel structure, in which lower levels “constrain possibility at higher levels.” For Allan, cosmology subsumes ontology (what exists) and episteme (what counts as true), underwrites meaning and purpose, and generates rules and institutions eventuating in a succession of international orders. By extension, when cosmology changes, so does everything else.
Allan could have followed Foucault’s example and sketched a conjectural history of epistemic changes in the modern world. Instead, he adopts the stance of contemporary social science and develops a multilevel model centered on “mechanisms and processes of change” (p. 6). From the outset, he holds that alterations in “state purposes” (p. 10) are key to the model’s cascade of changes. Risking the charge of teleological thinking, he discriminates between purposes and state interests or goals, and then links the former to prevailing cosmological ideas. In doing so, he ignores the Hobbesian claim that security is the state’s primary purpose and generally neglects the conditions of rule within and among states. Hegemony is a “pathway” selected on purpose (p. 58), and not a description of rule in the guise of an order. Allan does treat the state as an association, along with international organizations, businesses, unions, and advocacy networks, all of which are readily identified by purpose; associations are “the central actors in the international system” (p. 43). For the purposes of his model, state purpose is a red herring.
In the author’s multilevel model, associations occupy the middle or meso level. The micro level is dedicated to “individual social action” (p. 39). Agents are embedded in a great variety of physical and social relations, of which discursive configurations and institutional settings are paramount. Consequently, the individual fades from the picture and Allan spares just a few words on the social constitution of agency (p. 42); most scholars would say he has defined away what they would call the micro level. Instead, his constructivist sensibilities align him broadly with Foucault’s emphasis on discursive practices and yield a sophisticated discussion of the way discursive change effectuates associational dynamics, and thus the institutional features of successive international orders. In short, he proceeds to conflate the micro and meso levels he is initially so careful to distinguish.
“The key question,” for Allan, “is how meso-level changes are converted into macro-level transformations” (p. 53). The methodical way that he goes about answering this question may indeed be his greatest contribution to international relations theory. The answer’s key is “recursive institutionalization” (pp. 57–62), itself depending on hegemonial imposition, the activities of epistemic networks, or some combination of the two. On a Gramscian conception of hegemony, both processes would be hegemonial. If we take the state to be just another association, as Allan intimates, then variously motivated agents of well-placed associations engage discursively, recursively in the social construction of large-scale social arrangements. That his theory does not need the three-levels scheme is made all the clearer when he argues that associations strategically deploy novel ideas to solve problems and advance interests (p. 21). When he identifies specific individuals to illustrate associational change through strategic deployment, agency comes in through the back door.
Allan believes that his theory is not limited to associational change prompted by novel cosmological ideas (pp. 73–74, 274). He is right, all the more because his meticulously executed case studies, featuring carefully justified text selection, a bottom-up approach to discourse analysis, and process tracing, give his theory significant substantive support. There are three cases. He identifies them by reference to prevailing international orders: the balance of power between 1550 and 1815, the “liberal-colonial order” manifest in British colonial policy between 1850 and 1945, and the postwar hegemonial order, illustrated by the World Bank’s rationale for its lending policies between 1945 and 2015.
Each case starts with a discussion of the shifting terms of cosmological discourse. In setting up the project, Allan says that new cosmologies produce radically new ways of thinking but do not eliminate old cosmologies entirely: “Instead, cosmological shifts introduce nonlinear ruptures and reconfigurations that disorder and reorder discourses” (p. 65). Rupture is a favored term of Foucault’s. Yet Allan’s three cases introduce a subtle change in this conception of shift. First comes a cosmological rupture. Then there is a consolidation of the new cosmology and its appropriation for public purposes; here Allan’s theory of change across levels kicks in. Finally, a reigning cosmology dilutes and weakens to the point that the causal flow eddies, even reverses, and cosmology itself shifts in content, perhaps anticipating the next rupture.
Allan does not spell any of this out. It is, however, plainly evident in the way he characterizes the cosmological backdrop in each case. To illustrate the utter novelty of cosmological developments after 1550, he contrasts them with Renaissance cosmology, still medieval in character and dominated by “a patterning or resemblance account of knowledge” (p. 90). Allan’s patterning episteme resembles Foucault’s characterization of the Renaissance as the age of similitudes. Foucault went on to identify the classical age as an epistemic shift from resemblance to representation; Allan invokes Copernicus and Newton to sketch a materialist-mechanical ontology and a representational episteme. While one might want to qualify the materialist label by granting some attention to Descartes and Kant, Allan is on familiar ground in emphasizing the play of mechanical metaphors in the new cosmology.
Moving from the cosmological backdrop in his first case to the balance of power, Allan gives the new cosmology an epistemic twist: Rationalism joins representation in the discourse on states’ interests (pp. 98–102), and then rationalism joins with materialism as the episteme’s defining feature (pp. 109–11). By 1815, “a rationalist episteme of calculation” (p. 120) drives the reconstruction of the balance of power at the Congress of Vienna. Allan’s second case, on social knowledge and development, picks up on the theme of calculation, but it does so in the context of a new cosmology exemplified by a turn to history in the study of nature and society already underway by 1750, but culminating in evolutionary thinking a century later. Once again, his new cosmology parallels the historically oriented episteme that Foucault associated with the modern age beginning around 1800.
As with Foucault’s modern episteme, Allan’s new cosmology is harder to pin down than its predecessor. Its central feature is the rejection of determinism exemplified by natural laws in favor of a contingent, probabilistic universe subject to manipulation for human purposes. Allan finds this rupture foreshadowed in the concept of improvement already “inchoately institutionalized” in 1815 (p. 139). Improvement is a standard trope of the Scottish Enlightenment subsequently informing the history of liberalism—Hume used the term dozens of time is his Essays and Smith hundreds of times in The Wealth of Nations. Rather than linking it, and liberalism, to the concept of utility, and thus to positivism and utilitarianism, Allan identifies “a new episteme and ontology centered on objects like society, culture, public health, and classes” (p. 164). Unclear as to whether this is a vaguely dated shift to or in nineteenth-century cosmology, he concludes that “social knowledge altered cosmological discourses” (p. 170).
Claiming epistemic novelty for social objects, Allan forgets the long history of corporate metaphors undergirding his own theory of purposive associations. He does notice the rise of specialized expertise and the institutionalization of disciplines, and his discussion of functionalist anthropology says more than he realizes: Function, and with it functional differentiation, is the key to what is going on. When he draws on James Scott to call this development “epistemic modernism” (p. 165), he rightly departs from Foucault to mark a significant shift from/in the modern age of measurement, and he does so in terms that speak across the liberal arts.
Allan’s last case focuses on the World Bank’s changing conception of purpose. The Manhattan Project signals the cosmological backdrop, which he links to cybernetics and systems thinking in physics, engineering, and economics between 1930 and 1960. This shift is epistemic, not cosmological. The cosmological backdrop draws attention to energy and its uses. Engineering may have seen a shift to cybernetics, but physics and economics not so much. As Allan admits (p. 231), neoclassical economics is grounded in earlier cosmologies. By contrast, particle physicists met colossal ontological uncertainty—what are we measuring so precisely?—with linguistic legerdemain. What he does not see in cybernetics is the shift from energy to information. To all appearances cosmological, the digital revolution has already had an incalculably large impact on purposive association.
Scientific Cosmology and International Order is Allan’s first book. As such, it honors the stringent demands of modern social science, and it does so to good effect. It is also an improbably, incongruously ambitious book—ambitious in its reach across many centuries and fields of study, ambitious in its Foucauldian resonances. To hold that deep, irrevocable changes in the way we Westerners think are systematically related to cascading international orders is a brave and perhaps a brash act, yet one that Allan’s book goes a long way toward vindicating.
