Paradigms: Is the liberal approach theoretically distinctive?

One common way to distinguish different IR theories is by the causal mechanism through which independent variables impact state choice.Footnote 5 From this perspective, there is something distinctive about the liberal assumption that the critical causal mechanism is variation in state preferences (not ‘state strategies’ or ‘policy positions’).Footnote 6 This is quite distinct, say, from the realist position that the critical mechanism is variation in coercive power resources, the institutionalists focus on variation in information and transaction costs, or the constructivist, cognitive, and epistemic focus on shifting beliefs. In the article Jahn criticizes, I point out that some of the prominent among major IR theorists – among them Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Robert Keohane, and Robert Powell – distinguish major existing IR theories precisely in terms of their refusal to invoke variation in state preferences.

To the list of theorists who acknowledge the distinctiveness of the liberal paradigm in this way might be added many constructivists, who distinguish socialization and role adaption that focus on views about appropriate means-ends behavior from theories about how a shifting set of material or ideal interests inspire policy change.Footnote 13 The same might be said of the English School analysts.Footnote 14 The distinction is grounded in general social theory.Footnote 15

The distinction is empirical as well as theoretical. In a recent article – which Jahn does not cite – I offer the following illustrations.

It is hard to imagine a more clearly documented, consensual case for theoretical distinctiveness.

Yet Jahn is unsatisfied with it. Her core concern is that the liberal paradigm ‘does not fulfill the criterion of distinctness …. Moravcsik’s general assumptions … are shared by a host of other approaches’.Footnote 17 After asserting this view several times, she applies it to specific liberal mechanisms. With regard to republican liberal theory, she writes:

With regard to ideational liberalism, she continues:

The assertion of ‘non-distinctiveness’ is central to her critique of liberalism. She uses it not only to deny that there is anything new in the paradigm, but, as we shall see later, to dismiss much prima facie evidence in favor of it and to assert that it lacks sufficient generality. Yet, curiously, Jahn proceeds as if the truth of her claim is so obvious as to require no support. She offers neither an argument nor even a single counter example to back it up. Not only does Jahn ignore the citations to Waltz, Keohane, Powell, and Morgenthau in favor of distinctiveness, she offers no discussion of IR theory at all – although any claim about paradigmatic distinctiveness is only meaningful in a particular context of other paradigms.Footnote 18 The sole support she offers is a quotation from David Long’s critique of my work – and this quotation is taken out of context. What Long wrote is: ‘An emphasis on preferences is enough to distinguish Moravcsik’s approach from realism and neo-realism, which are concerned with the constraints on state action and the limits of power in the international system’. The quotation admits no ambiguity: it supports my contention that the liberal paradigm is theoretically distinct.Footnote 19 The utter lackof support for Jahn’s position calls into question her entire critique, which depends heavily on this claim.Footnote 20

Theories: Are individual liberal claims derived properly?

Specific liberal theories – the various strands of republican, ideational and commercial theory – are derived from a combination of the three core paradigmatic assumptions of the liberal paradigm, and ‘auxiliary assumptions’ specific to the strand of liberal theory in question. The three core assumptions concern: (1) the nature of societal actors (‘Globalization generates differentiated demands from societal individuals and groups with regard to international affairs’), (2) the nature of the state (‘States represent the demands of a subset of domestic individuals and social groups, on the basis of whose interests they define “state preferences” and act instrumentally to manage globalization’), and (3) the nature of the international system (‘The pattern of interdependence among state preferences shapes state behavior’).Footnote 21 In order to derive individual liberal theories precisely and to circumscribe their empirical scope (e.g. an explanation of the ‘democratic peace’) one needs auxiliary assumptions, not simply the three core assumptions.

In her critique, Jahn misunderstands all this. She believes that all social science theories must be derived logically and uniquely from core assumptions alone. Thus she contends that since republican, ideational, and commercial liberal theory, as well as individual theories within each category – particularly as applied to liberal states – are not so derived, they must therefore be arbitrary.Footnote 22 Thus Jahn accuses me of proceeding backward, deriving the three core assumptions of the paradigm from specific theories, such as the ‘democratic peace’, endogenous policy theories, and theories of legitimate values. Importantly, she repeatedly presents the failure to derive individual theories unambiguously from first principles as a failure to meet my own explicit standard, namely to ‘derive the [liberal] theory of international relations from … general assumptions’.Footnote 23 There is something at stake: Jahn dwells on his point to show, apparently, that a ‘general’ theory of international relations is impossible, and thus we should settle for particularistic historical interpretation.

This is an outright misreading not just of the liberal paradigm, but also of social scientific paradigms in general. The notion, that theories and hypotheses are rigorously deduced from a small set of core paradigmatic assumptions is not one I espouse. Indeed, it is one I explicitly reject in various publications that Jahn fails to consult. No realistic modern philosophy of science proposes such a thing (Jahn’s only evidence for the claim that I or anyone else holds this view is that Karl Mannheim says it must be so). According to the modified Lakatosian and Laudanian views I actually defend in the body of my relevant work, which Jahn ignores – including a book chapter devoted almost entirely to this issue – individual theories need only be consistent with paradigmatic assumptions, not deduced from them.Footnote 24

This slight difference is of fundamental importance; Jahn overlooks my explicit cautions against the fallacy of assuming universal applicability of theories on the model of the natural sciences.

Social scientific research paradigms aim instead to maintain a measure of coherence and distinctiveness (via ‘core’ assumptions), while affording precisely the sort of flexibility, particularity, and diversity Jahn espouses via ‘auxiliary’ assumptions.Footnote 26

At the same time, however, it is important to formulate theories in a hypothetically generalizable way, so we can seek to determine the scope of potentially general claims under hypothetical conditions. Testing of claims of varying scope should proceed without us having made up our minds before the fact what that scope must be.

Some specific examples illustrate the point. My ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ theory on European integration is circumscribed, for example, as follows:

Similarly, for example, liberal theories of economic interdependence assume bounded rational individuals and groups as actors, state institutions as transmission belts, and variation in state preferences as the critical determinant of state behavior. Yet each applies only under specific conditions defined by assumptions about the nature of markets, economic interests, budget constraints, beliefs, political incentives, etc.

The important philosophy of science point here is that to see whether a paradigm is coherent, one must trace the evolution of specific mid-range theories, of which the paradigmatic assumptions are only a lowest common denominator. Jahn does not do this, so she is in the no position to be a critic. Given the broad and rigorous empirical and theoretical debate in areas such as democratic peace, endogenous policy theory, and theories of ideas and politics, however, the benefit of the doubt surely rests with liberal theory. Due to the diversity of the arguments in this camp, moreover, the liberal paradigm surely addresses Jahn’s concerns about the need to recognize particularity. In lieu of acknowledging this, however, Jahn simply imposes a narrow conception of ‘generalizing’ social science, and criticizes it as ‘ideological’. In the end, she is just arguing with herself.

Data: Is the evidence about liberal theory biased?

My articles on liberalism do not claim to conduct a systematic empirical test of the liberal paradigm. For reasons I shall discuss in a moment, it would be inappropriate to do so. In the article she criticizes – for reasons of space, if no other – my goal is far more modest, namely to illustrate the potential fruitfulness of some ongoing research within various strands of the liberal research programme.Footnote 29 In various articles and chapters I cite dozens of studies by liberals, and have systematically compared the performance of the liberal paradigm to realism and other paradigms, while discussing the alternative criteria one might use for doing so.Footnote 30 Others have done so even more comprehensively, using quantitative methods, arguing that liberal results have been underweighted in assessments of IR research.Footnote 31 Few observers of contemporary IR theory would deny that theories that focus on variation in state preferences have been fruitful and powerful.

Jahn, nonetheless, asserts that the empirical evidence cited to illustrate liberal theory in the 1997 article is biased and therefore invalid. She claims the data were, in her view, selected in what she considers an arbitrary and ‘subjective’ manner.Footnote 32 The article is ‘a methodologically flawed piece of scholarly writing’.Footnote 33 Since I do not seek to ‘test’ liberal theory, we might just ignore her entire critique. But because Jahn makes a serious, if scattershot, effort at detailed methodological criticism; I will consider three of her specific concerns – at the risk of trying the reader’s patience.

Jahn’s first charge is that the evidence draws too heavily on cases of ‘contemporary relevance’ and ‘intra-liberal politics’, that is, cases from the past 200 years involving liberal states – a selection criterion she attributes to my conscious choice.Footnote 34 She writes: ‘Moravcsik applies the acid test of the continuing relevance of historical data in contemporary international affairs’.Footnote 35 And then she concludes: ‘This reduction of evidence to the intraliberal sphere and, indeed, to its contemporary achievements only, finally, leaves Moravcsik’s conclusion completely unsubstantiated’.Footnote 36

It is hard to know what to make of this. Nowhere do I set forth such a selection criterion; nowhere does Jahn try to document that I did so. Nor does she parse the data to show it is implicitly the case. She herself admits that I present data from non-liberal states in past historical epochs. In any case this is simply a theoretical article in which these are illustrations, not a rigorous empirical test – no one ever claimed otherwise. Ironically, the real reason why non-liberal and pre-modern cases fall out of consideration is that Jahn herself, being a ‘particularist’, draws the distinction between the non-liberal and liberal worlds – and rejects all my evidence from the former, even when she admits it tends to support what I claim to be liberal predictions. Apparently, the reason for this odd procedure is her belief (spurious, as we have seen in section (1) above) that there is nothing distinctive about liberal theory except when it is explaining the behavior of modern liberal states.Footnote 37 In other words, Jahn first rules out much of the relevant evidence, then accuses me of working with biased data. What can one say?Footnote 38

Jahn’s second criticism is that any social scientific theory that aims to generalize across history, including a liberal one, is necessarily ‘ideological’, that is, it imposes a conservative political bias. This is inherently so, she believes, whether the data to confirm it are convincing or not. Following Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, Jahn believes political science is committed to universal generalization, and since political knowledge is actually particular, all generalizing social scientists are therefore ‘ideological’ by definition. She writes: ‘What makes ideological knowledge ideological is thus not its particularity – which it shares with all forms of political thought – but rather the fact that it hides this particularity’.Footnote 39 She favors, instead, what she claims is a ‘nonideological alternative’, namely ‘a historical investigation of liberalism’s competition with alternative political projects’ and an ‘engagement with its conditions of emergence’, so we understand ‘a particular historical context that generated liberal or proto-liberal ideas’.Footnote 40

Why, I wonder, is this criticism directed at me? To be sure, I do insist that those who seek to understand social behavior in a historically particular way can benefit from the theories formulated in general terms to help them do so. But using general theories, as an instrument is different than arguing for the ideological hegemony of a theory, or for believing that theories have a de facto universal scope – a distinction lost on Jahn. And among IR scholars of my generation, I am among those who have opposed claims for simple ‘universal’ theories. Liberal theory, as I have formulated it, embraces particularity in a way that actively seeks to avoid imposing a historical bias.

In addition to the point, already discussed, about auxiliary assumptions, this is evident in three ways. First, I conduct historical and geographical research. Among IR scholars, I am among the small minority who publishes in historiographical journals and employs primary sources that must be analyzed in context – certainly more so than Jahn herself.Footnote 41 Second, I explicitly champion multi-causal explanations. In my most recent article on liberal theory – ignored by Jahn – I write: ‘Perhaps the most important advantage of liberal theory lies in its capacity to serve as the theoretical foundation for a shared multi-causal model of instrumental state behavior – thereby moving the discipline beyond paradigmatic warfare among unicausal claims’.Footnote 42 Third, any claim – inside or outside the liberal paradigm – is open for revision in the face of empirical evidence or logical challenge in favor of competing theories. Jahn treats liberalism as if it is a single hegemonic discourse. But it is not: I proposed it as a paradigm seeking equal stature alongside already recognized realist, institutionalist, and non-rational paradigms. The purpose of doing so is to encourage scholars to self-consciously recognize international relations as a fuller, more inclusive, and rigorous field of debate.Footnote 43 There are, for example, constant challenges – from inside and outside the liberal paradigm – to the veracity and causal logic of even prominent claims, such as the ‘democratic peace’ proposition.Footnote 44 Jahn entirely underestimates the role of competition among theories because for her, following Mannheim, paradigms and theories are simply assertions of underlying ideological bias.

Defining the scope of paradigms empirically is a far from perfect process, but what is the alternative? Jahn’s own proposed methodology for drawing inferences, insofar as one can make it out, seems dubious. Though the language of being ‘non-ideological’ and ‘particularistic’ suggests tolerance and open-mindedness, in fact her stance is (unconsciously, I am sure) precisely the opposite. In contrast to the agnostic approach of the true social scientist, Jahn in fact presumes that we already know the (limited) scope of scientific claims before theory-guided empirical analysis within the paradigm has been conducted.Footnote 45 Yet, absent a set of comparative theories and potentially generalizable claims with which to order the data, what gives us confidence in this? These are precisely the issues with which philosophers of science like Lakatos and Laudan struggle, and which they ultimately resolve by treating theoretical paradigms as part of a multi-causal universe of potentially generalizable theories, all of which should be tested even-handedly and empirically – both with regard to specific events and long-term dynamics over time.Footnote 46 Empirical competition among potentially generalizable claims is the key.

Jahn’s failure to accept any methodological discipline is, in essence, the assertion of a special epistemological status for herself. She herself draws transhistorical conclusions, while criticizing others for doing the same. As a positive analyst, for example, she asserts that for four centuries there has been more expropriation and coercion in liberal politics than its apologists concede – and she claims that historical analysis helps us predict similar trends indefinitely into the future. (‘If past experience is anything to go by, can we expect this latest round of liberal foreign policies to end in failure’).Footnote 47 Yet, as a critic, she dismisses similar transhistorical claims made by others, even when there exists what she concedes to be strong prima facie evidence in their favor. And she does so with total disregard for evidence. In criticizing liberals for espousing modernization theory, for example, Jahn comes close to denying that economic development has generated conditions propitious for democratic stability, and that both are linked to interstate peace. Does Jahn really mean simply to ignore the current era of unprecedentedly low and declining interstate conflict, which appears linked to liberal variables? My point is not that liberal empirical claims are correct. It is that Jahn, methodologically ill equipped to engage this sort of empirical discussion, seeks instead (unsuccessfully) to rule out opposing positions by methodological and philosophical fiat.

This brings us to Jahn’s third and final methodological criticism, namely that liberal research tends to downplay political and ideological conflict, particularly when it is provoked by liberal states themselves or calls into question the fundamental nature of liberalism. My 1997 article, she notes, says little about the conditions in which liberal states arose and perpetuate themselves. This process may, she conjectures, have involved coercion, imperialism, or other zero-sum dynamics between developed and developing or unorganized areas of the globe. Citing the examples of enclosure and colonialism, she argues that liberal polities are based on expropriation. This leads her to accuse me and other liberals of promulgating a simplistic modernization theory: a ‘substantive picture … of linear historical development from the initial recognition of the rationality of market economy and government by consent through their progressive realization in domestic settings to their gradual change of the nature and principles of international politics’.Footnote 48 Against this view, Jahn contends that: ‘The transformation of non-liberal into liberal societies was thus not the evolutionary process characterized by an extension of peace, prosperity, and cooperation as which it appears in Moravcsik’s narrative. Rather, it took the form of a political struggle’.Footnote 49 In general, Jahn asserts, ‘political science fails to study…ideology’, particularly ‘essentially…contested’ ones.Footnote 50

The notion that liberal theory fails to theorize political conflict, or that it disregards interaction between the liberal and the non-liberal world, is simply false. Again, Jahn bases this judgment on assertion rather a close reading of my or any other liberal text. Liberalism is a theory of political conflict par excellence. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, any other IR scholar believes that socioeconomic change is an ‘evolutionary process characterized by an extension of peace, prosperity, and cooperation’ without ‘political struggle’. Such a simplistic linear narrative would be inconsistent with liberal theory’s stress on both the complexity of preference formation and on domestic and international power dynamics.Footnote 51 This is why concepts like ‘hegemony’, ‘asymmetrical interdependence’, ‘interest groups’, ‘embedded liberalism’, play such an important role in modern international political economy.Footnote 52 In claiming that such analyses of conflict do not extend to negative dynamics or to the origins and dynamics of liberal politics, Jahn simply ignores what I, and many others, have written about precisely these issues.Footnote 53 Indeed, the notion that liberalism rose on the basis of coercion and exploitation of unorganized territories is not, as Jahn seems to think, unresearched among political scientists. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have recently argued, precisely as Jahn believes, that control of the Atlantic economy was critical for the rise of liberal political institutions in the West, sparking one of the most vibrant debates in recent political science.Footnote 54 In this regard, as I have argued, commercial liberal theory dovetails with traditional Marxist and radical themes – once we strip out the historical teleology, something on which Jahn and I apparently agree.Footnote 55 Nothing in my paradigm rules out such zero-sum conflict.

Contrary to Jahn’s claim that ‘political science fails to study…ideology’, particularly ‘essentially…contested’ ideology, liberal IR theory’s commitment to theorizing conflict extends to deep ideologies. In my first publication on liberal theory and international relations, I wrote:

Because liberalism is essentially about incommensurable goals, it includes a theoretical strand – ‘ideational liberalism’ – to take account of conflict driven by competing basic values about legitimacy. In direct contradiction to Jahn’s assertions, liberalism is not simply about ‘administration’, but does theorize essential conflict over political ideology, inside and outside the liberal fold. The article Jahn is criticizing contains many examples, including nationalist conflict, fundamental ideological conflicts (both among competing forms of liberalism and between liberalism and its competitors),Footnote 57 competing claims over legitimate redistribution and regulation (which often implicate different strands of liberalism),Footnote 58 and the ideological cloaking of imperialism in liberal ideologies of the general interest.Footnote 59

To be sure, Jahn has raised a genuinely engaging empirical issue, and I wish she had devoted more time to it. A closer examination of the sources of liberal policies, in the early modern period or now, might generate a successful challenge (liberal or non-liberal, depending on what the data showed) to existing liberal interpretations. This would be welcome: Social science is constantly up for revision, based on the results of mid-range theory testing. It would certainly be interesting to develop further the notion that as she, Acemoglu, Robinson and others believe, North–South relations over the past 500 years have been more zero-sum than some analysts concede. There is, of course, an enormous social scientific literature on this issue, but if Jahn feels certain elements deserve more stress, she should conduct empirical research about them.Footnote 60 Yet, there is no need to engage in broad-brush methodological or philosophical criticism of the liberal paradigm, or dismiss presumptively correct empirical findings just because they are general, in order to study such things.

Implications: Are liberal policy prescriptions normatively undesirable?

At its core, Jahn’s critique is not about social science but about politics.Footnote 61 What is the proper relationship between academic work and public policy? This is a difficult question, and I do not believe it affords a ‘one size fits all’ answer. As someone who has served the governments of three different countries, and who has long been active as a political journalist, I am fully aware of the legitimate temptation to seek to influence public opinion and policy. My own view is, nonetheless, Weberian: there can and should be limits to the extent to which academic work is influenced by policy advocacy. I do not believe, we should judge the veracity or coherence of scholarship by asking: Whose political interest does this serve?Footnote 62 I also believe that we can, to a limited extent, progressively advance our general understanding of social life through objective academic work. Here I differ from Jahn, who believes all scholarly work is inherently particularistic and, as I read her, ultimately political in a Marxist/Mannheimian sense. I strike a Weberian compromise, choosing to play by the rules of academic life: I select topics and theories according to my subjective interests and values, but impose on myself inter-subjective standards of objectivity and transparency in the selection of data, theories to test, presentation of results, and the shared norm that we seek broad regularities in social life. I believe that inter-subjective communication of social science, the notion that findings are ‘universal’ – that is, that we can in principle communicate objective theories and results to everyone – is an attractive ideal, with certain affinities to democracy.

The thrust of Jahn’s critique is that I and others, who stress variation in state preferences as an explanation of state behavior, have a politically significant effect on the beliefs of influential people outside of academia, dampening their tendency to criticize dysfunctional liberal practices. For example, Jahn believes that my observation that ‘there is good reason to believe that the most powerful influence in world politics today is not the deployment of military force or the construction of international institutions, but the transformation of domestic and transnational social values, interests, and institutions’ is an ‘ideological’ statement, because it masks the true role of liberalism, which is, we have seen, to expropriate non-liberal property and cultures.Footnote 63 I am, in short, an apologist for the Western pursuit of global hegemony.

Jahn criticizes such practices by asking: Whose interest is this scholarship serving? The answer: American hegemony.

We should recall that ‘ideology’, in Mannheim’s language, is a term reserved for ideas that obscure progressive political alternatives and, instead, promote (‘sell’) essentially backward policies. Yet there is hope. ‘International Relations as a social science’, Jahn reminds us, ‘can yet challenge ideologies and fulfill its original promise: by explicitly exposing these particularities’.Footnote 66 The ultimate aim, on which she concludes her critique, is to ‘open up spaces for change in political thought and practice’.Footnote 67

As a criticism of liberal IR theory, this is at once far-fetched and evasive. Far-fetched because (leaving aside its exaggeration of scholarly influence in the world) those familiar with my applied and policy writings based on liberal theory will surely find the notion odd that it is all a smokescreen (even an ‘unconscious’ one) for liberal ‘administrative’ rationality and American hegemony. Two examples must suffice.

First, as regards global power, it is hard to construe liberal theory as an apology for the ‘short-term interests’ of the US hegemon (‘a dominant liberal power’). To the contrary, perhaps the most important theme in my foreign policy writing over the past 5 years has been the limits of American power and the misguided nature of US conceptions of interest. In particular, I have stressed ‘civilian power’ and the preference for the more consensual, negotiated system in which Western powers must make substantial compromises of sovereignty and wealth – more like the European Union’s customary mode of institutionalized engagement with the outsiders and potential members than that of the United States. The important issue here is not the identity of the great power, but the instrument of power. The liberal focus on civilian power follows directly from liberal theory, with specific national preferences underlying power. In such a world, external coercion is less likely to be cost-effective than realist or institutionalist theory implies. Instead, power stems from an asymmetrical interdependence of preferences. Thus domestic or transnational social engagement will be more effective when it seeks to work with societies to generate a process of mutual social development consistent with common goals. This requires civilian policies that reach deep into society, if stable outcomes are to be achieved at less than enormous costs. This is closer to what the European Union does, with its more preferences-based tools of influence, such as European enlargement, trade, foreign aid, and international law, than to US coercion.Footnote 68 The use of such tools is fundamentally constrained, so research tells us, by the evolving local consensus in the societies in question.

Jahn’s objection to this view is that any discussion of the ‘transformation of domestic and transnational social values, interests, and institutions’ disguises coercive, inherently self-defeating, aspects of liberalism. But her position is confused. Jahn and I seem to both accept that coercive liberal policies are ineffective, to judge from her scholarship. Is her objection then simply the rubric ‘liberal’?Footnote 69 Or that acknowledging the truth out loud is bad politics? Either way, I am unsympathetic. She seems to assume also that less coercive liberal policies are similarly doomed to failure, as long as liberals are behind them, and ‘an altogether more radical option must be countenanced’.Footnote 70 Yet, she provides no empirical evidence. I stick to my position: domestic social, economic, and political development is first and foremost an endogenous process. External efforts to promote it through intervention, assistance, or pressure can be at best secondary. They must attend to local circumstances. Certainly, there are many areas of the world, as we have seen already, where such social change has worked. Moreover, in proposing a ‘radical option’, Jahn displays her preference for allusive abstraction over concrete policy analysis. She never tells us what that ‘more radical option’ is. Until she does, there is little reason to abandon current policies, despite their uneven result.

The second reason why liberalism is not an apology for centralized US or liberal hegemony is that the central tenet of my scholarship – most notably in the case of European integration – has been to insist upon the enduring existence of hard bargaining among diverse societies with only partially compatible interests and values.Footnote 71 I criticize those who stress centralized ‘administration’, supranational or hegemonic. In the case of the European Union, for example, I am a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’, in that I insist that there is, will be, and should be a ‘European constitutional settlement’ that preserves a legitimate democratic domain consisting of redistributive, fiscal, and cultural issues subject to national and local control.Footnote 72 Again, this follows from the basic liberal view that diverse national preferences impose a binding constraint on the willingness of countries to integrate: Until values change, whether for functional or ideological reasons, further integration would be neither practical nor ethical. Though my major area of research is not the developing world, my positions concerning issues as disparate as Chinese foreign policy, reform in Libya, and the war in Iraq neither apologize for, nor entirely reject, classic Western ‘liberal’ positions.Footnote 73

What is most troubling is Jahn’s evasiveness about the underlying foundation of her own position, given her commitment to criticizing others for their unspoken political values. Jahn dismisses the ideal of intersubjective communication of social science, based on the notion that findings are universal or objective. She does not believe we can in principle apply and communicate theories and results to everyone – the essentially democratic ideal underlying social science.Footnote 74 Yet she gives no positive argument in favor of this position. Instead, she appeals to authority: Karl Mannheim, she glosses Mannheim to show that generalizations simply disguise political ideology. Mannheim’s position, though one would not know it from Jahn’s extended discussion of Ideology and Utopia, rests on Marxist teleology: objective social science as a norm is based on a ‘bourgeois rationalist’ notion of ‘generally valid knowledge’ – an affectation of the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’.Footnote 75 This Marxist view of history is quaint, but at least Mannheim is serious enough to accept the responsibility of grounding his Ideologiekritik in explicit ‘objective’ assumptions. If this is also Jahn’s view, she should say so – although, of course, that would contradict her previous historical particularism. If not, she should tell us what her position is. As it stands, her criticism simply floats in a philosophical vacuum.

The absence of consistent foundations is convenient for Jahn, for it permits her to criticize the conventional methods of others as ideological, yet, cite conventional social science to support her own political preferences. For example, when she advances her own policy agenda by criticizing Western policy in the Middle East, she ditches the epistemology and cites general social science research (‘host of scientific analyses questioning every single one of its claims’) to make her point – just like a good positivist.Footnote 76 Make, no mistake, this claim is not particularistic.

If this is how Jahn is going to critique policy, what was the point of all the sociology of knowledge?

We could pursue the point further, but it is no use. Everything about Jahn’s policy analysis remains vague: her theory of ‘ideological’ policy making, her view of history, her sociology of knowledge, her preferred alternative. In the end, all we know is that Jahn believes that the solution to current problems lies in deep philosophical reflection on social theory: ‘Sooner or later…if the cycle is ever to be broken, an altogether more radical option must be countenanced: the critical self-analysis and actual revision of liberalism itself’.Footnote 78 It is a nice (transhistorical) claim, but not a plausible one. If history teaches us anything, it is that more than a critique of someone’s IR theory is needed to ‘open up spaces for change in political thought and practice’.

Conclusions: Why did we have this debate and not some other one?

We have seen that nearly every aspect of Jahn’s critique rests on outright misunderstandings of liberal IR theory. She misquotes specific liberal claims and misconstrues the context of IR theory, philosophy of science, empirical research, and policy analysis, which surrounds it. These are not judgment calls: Jahn misreads black-and-white textual evidence and overlooks literally hundreds of pages of directly relevant work. The resulting misunderstandings are significant and unambiguous. Finally, over and over again, she is flagrant in her unwillingness to provide any logical or empirical support for critical claims, ranging from the assertion that core assumptions of liberal theory are not distinctive to the assertion that all general social scientific claims are ideological.

The underlying problem is not Jahn’s sloppiness; it is her basic mode of criticism. By arguing in this way Jahn is acting as a principled scholar, for she is deeply committed to the view that liberals like me do not know what we are talking about. That may sound flip, but I mean it precisely. Jahn is, and admits to being, a theorist of false consciousness.Footnote 79 She contends that all who do generalizable social science are carriers of social ‘ideologies’ who falsely obscure progressive change. It is the higher purpose of social science, a purpose reserved for critical social theorists such as Jahn, to expose and criticize such ideologies. The rest of us, quite literally, do not know what we are talking about.

Anyone seriously committed to such a dismissive view of other scholars will naturally tend to spend a great deal of time lecturing them about the real meaning of what they are saying. This has two unfortunate effects. One is to transform debates between competing views of international relations into debates about competing views of the sociology of knowledge. Everyone spends less time talking about people, states, power, and other real things, and a lot more time talking about epistemology, methodology, and other abstract concepts. I did not become a scholar to do that. The second is that debates become one-sided. According to Jahn’s epistemology, only the critical theorist like herself divines the true meaning of what has been said and done. Thus Jahn seems to see little need to document precisely what liberals say before she imposes her own (mis)reading. In the end disciplinary relativism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I believe that a scholarly community should be the site for conversations, not soliloquies.

The greatest loss lies in the scholarship that might have been. I admire Jahn’s intense interest in the complex relationship between interest and ideology across the history of modern international relations. Some of her empirical work, though conjectural, is bracing and provocative. Such issues deserve more serious research. However, in order for it to be coherent and credible, it must be more tightly disciplined. It must involve concrete testing of competing mid-range theories, using objective data, communicated in a way all can understand. Had Jahn taken this route, her paper might have launched an interesting empirical and theoretical discussion about the concrete causes of liberal policy failures. But no such debate can flourish as long as one deploys method and philosophy of science to evade direct confrontation with real-world evidence. Jahn spends much time lambasting liberals for their inability to imagine grand alternatives to the geopolitical status quo. Among those who view scholarship as a vocation, the first steps on the road to utopia are more modest.