Realism and the Liberal Tradition

The International Relations Theory of Whittle Johnston

Whittle Johnston, David Clinton, Stephen Sims

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137577641
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents a posthumous collection of previously uncollected works of political theory written by Whittle Johnston. Johnston believed that both the liberal tradition of political thought and the realist tradition of international thought had contributed much to humanity's store of political wisdom, but that each had limitations that could most easily be recognized by its encounter with the other. His method of accomplishing this task was to examine the liberal conception of political life in general and international political life in particular and then to explore the realist critique of the liberal view, particularly as it was expressed by three great twentieth-century realist thinkers, all of whom were, in their various ways, skeptical of liberal assumptions: Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and E. H. Carr. In doing so, Johnston reveals the power of the realist outlook, but also the areas in which it remains insufficient, and insufficient particularly where it underestimates the complexity and prudence that liberalism is capable of displaying. There have been studies of both liberalism and realism, but no other work has put them into conversation with each other in the way that this book does.

Part I
“The Long Road to Theory”

© The Author(s) 2016

David Clinton and Stephen Sims (eds.)Realism and the Liberal Tradition10.1057/978-1-137-57764-1_2

Begin Abstract

1. Politics and Science

Whittle Johnston¹ and Stephen Sims²

(1)

American University, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

(2)

Baylor University, Waco, Texas, USA

End Abstract

We cannot begin to deal with the question of whether or not we can have a “science of international politics,” or with such related questions as whether or not history is a science, unless we first make clear the concept of science we have in mind when we ask the question. For the word “science” often means nothing more than systematic knowledge, and in that sense, we must give a positive answer to the question. For I should be hard-pressed to justify why it is I am here giving a series of lectures and why you are spending your time listening to them, unless I felt that something in the way of systematic knowledge could be transmitted. In this very loose sense, then, I should certainly say that a science of international politics is possible and that, indeed, we already have something of one.

If, however, we shift from this general and modest definition of science to a more precise, ambitious, and tight-knit one, I should have to give a different answer. As Stanley Hoffmann has pointed out, the work of Morton Kaplan admirably sums up the scientific purposes of systems theory:

To discover laws, recurrent patterns, high-level generalizations; to make of predictability a test of science; to achieve as soon as possible the ideal of a deductive science, including a “set of primitive terms, definitions and axioms” from which “systematic theories are derived.” ¹

As Hoffmann points out, this rather tight model rests in part on a misunderstanding of the role of law in natural science; laws are not as rigid there as we sometimes assume, nor are they able to predict the fate of particulars. E.H. Carr has made the same point in What Is History?. ² They merely can say that, under certain circumstances, if this and that happens, then this will follow. Thus it follows that in our conception of “law” and of “prediction,” we should not be disturbed if the best we can do is, to quote Hoffmann, “project into the future a limited number of possible trends, and rank them conditionally (‘other things being equal’).” In this modified sense of “law” and of “prediction,” I also think it is possible to speak of the theory of international relations as a “science.” Indeed, in our studies on “relevant utopias,” we are asked to make a prediction in the above sense, that is, the projection into the future of a limited number of trends and a conditional ranking of them.

[To dwell on this at somewhat greater length, in your paper on a “relevant utopia,” you will be asked to spell out your “views on the purposes, the prerequisites, the possibilities, and the procedures of an ideal international order.” ³ In writing this paper, you will be asked to relate your conception of what you think would be a desirable international order (i.e., your values, as applied to international relations) to your knowledge of the actual structure of international relations today (i.e., your estimate of international reality). In short, you are asked to show the relevance of the values you hold to what you take to be realistic trends at work in international relations. This is designed to be a corrective for utopianism, in which certain values are postulated, but no meaningful discussion is given of the way in which we are to move toward them. As Hoffmann has put it, one should “not only plead for the destination” but also “tell us in detail how he can reach it.” It is also designed to avoid the pitfalls of involvement in a purely empirical theory, in which your values are introduced in unconscious fashion and often in such a way as merely to preserve the status quo. I think Hoffmann is right when he argues that conceptions of “equilibrium” and of “systems analysis” often tend to put the bias in favor of the maintenance of the status quo.

However I think you would err badly unless you realized that all such projections are conjectural. They are contingent on the skill with which (1) you are asked to grasp the principal forces at work in that area of world politics on which your paper centers, (2) the judgment you show in the weight you assign to these several factors, and (3) the time which you think it will take to move toward the posited goal. Your “interpretation”—the relative skill or lack of it in your analysis—will thus depend on these three factors: (1) Did you grasp the important factors at work? (2) Did you assign roughly the correct weight to them, that is, set up roughly the correct hierarchy among them? (3) Did you estimate with rough accuracy the time it would take to move toward this or that stage of the postulated goal? Such forecasts are, of necessity, conjectural, and they must be subjected to recurrent “feedback” from experience. The skill of a statesman is in part determined by “how fast he is on his intellectual feet,” so to speak, that is, how rapidly he can reassess, in the light of new developments, the whole prior pattern of his projections. Unless the need for constant reassessment, and probable readjustment, is seen, such projections can do more harm than good.] ⁴

Once these qualifying remarks are made, it remains true that such projections are indispensable. They are somewhere, in usefulness, between a compass and a map. It is surely a fool who think we can have a precise and detailed map of the international political future. But it is also foolhardy to start on this journey without such compasses and rough charts as we can discover. The failure to sense the necessity for such projections—other than in vague and rather ineffectual terms—is great in a culture as pragmatic as that of the USA. America’s vices are the defects of its virtues. This culture is freewheeling, pragmatic, skeptical of abstraction and speculation, but is it capable, on these terms, of bearing the enormous responsibilities of leadership it carries? One wonders, at times, if there is not something of a vacuum in the national intelligence, as suggested, for example, in Henry Kissinger’s important discussion of the need for strategic doctrine or Dean Acheson’s appreciation of the importance that a workable body of theory might make to the navigation by America of uncertain international seas. James Reston gave an indication of this difficulty in the following passage:

I once asked him [President Kennedy] in a long private talk at Hyannis Port what he wanted to have achieved by the time he rode down Pennsylvania Avenue with his successor. He looked at me as if I were a dreaming child. I tried again: Did he not feel the need of some goal to help guide his day-to-day decisions and priorities? Again a ghastly pause. It was only when I turned the questions to immediate, tangible problems that he seized the point and rolled off a torrent of statistics about the difficulty or organizing nations at different levels of economic development. ⁵

The pronounced pragmatism of President Johnson is probably even less inclined to the large projection than was the case under President Kennedy.

The third aspect of a science of international politics, as described by Kaplan, is the ability to achieve deduction. Though there may be some hope to move in this direction, there is danger in the attempts now before us of pure formalism. It is well to bear in mind that the model of the deductive science is mathematics, which is also the most formal of sciences. In a science like physics (as Cohen and Nagel have pointed out), one clearly has an interdependence of induction and deduction. However the extent to which you can rely on the deductive model is closely related to the extent to which one has quantifiable entities that can be assimilated to mathematical analysis. It is clear that one has this, at least to some degree, in physics, in chemistry, and in economics. However it is clear that economics as a “science” would be radically transformed without money, which can be treated more or less in quantitative terms, as a roughly measurable quantity. Now in politics there simply does not exist any such measurable quantity. One might appropriately take “power” to be the basic unit in politics, but all attempts to “measure” power have been failures. (See, e.g., the effort of Bertrand Russell in this direction.) ⁶ The difference between economics and politics may be illustrated by an example. It is meaningful to ask what one would have bought with a thousand 1965 US dollars in the USA in 1910 or what one could buy with this money in the Soviet Union today. It may not be easy to answer these questions, but it is, at least, meaningful to ask them. When one turns to the political realm, by contrast, it is a meaningless question to ask “What is a thousand units of power worth in the United States today?” and even more meaningless to try to compare its worth now to its worth in 1910 or its worth in the USA to its worth in the Soviet Union. Thus the quantitative measurements, which link the formalism of mathematics to the empirical world in physics or economics, are missing in politics. As a consequence, one of two results is likely to follow from the attempt to make politics “scientific,” in a mathematically deductive sense. The first is pure formalism, which achieves its systematic nature largely through its irrelevance to actual life; the real world never seems to break through to such a system. The second is triviality. I think Hoffmann is correct in his indictment of Deutsch’s tendencies toward triviality:

Often, the scientist included in his model only the variables that can be measured; in this case, he is likely to leave out some of the more decisive…Hence, far from explaining reality, many such models seem only to give mathematical substance to shadows, and to drive research into the chase and measurement of shadows. This, it seems to me, is one of the dangers of Mr. Karl Deutsch’s recent efforts at arriving at a quantitative theory of national integration, and at taking measureable factors as indices of community formation. For instance, a sudden increase on the flow of communications between neighboring areas (mail, trade, travel, intermarriage, and so on) may well reflect a collective desire for integration or a determination on the part of the leaders in those areas to promote integration; but it may not: we can find out only if we look at such non-measurable factors as the role of political elites, the attitudes and mores of various groups, the nature and effects of political and economic organizations, and so on. ⁷

Now part of the difficulty in determining the method proper for the study of international politics—indeed of politics—is the inadequacy of the conception which is held of politics. The method one takes to be appropriate is, after all, to be determined by the nature of the subject matter one is studying, and the inadequacy of the methods previously attempted has been a consequence, at least in part, of an inadequate conception of the subject matter. Hans Morgenthau has been a leading proponent of the emphasis on politics, in the study of international politics, and in the emphasis on power as the essence of politics. However Stanley Hoffmann takes Prof. Morgenthau to task—and properly so—for the dual meaning he attaches to the concept “politics.” At one stage, Prof. Morgenthau talks as if we can abstract the “political” from human relations in the same way in which we can abstract the “economic” or the “biological” or the “legal.” At this level, politics is viewed as a coordinate discipline to be ranked horizontally with other disciplines. This view of politics is, in my mind, an erroneous one. In Hoffmann’s words:

…the decision to equate politics and power would be acceptable only if power were analyzed, not as a limited and specific set of variables, but as a complex and diffuse balance between all the variables with which the social sciences are concerned. Political man should properly be seen as the “integrator” of moral man, economic man, religious man, and so on—not as a creature reduced to one special facet of human nature. ⁸

And it is in this generic sense that Morgenthau often does use the concepts politics and power. It is this generic usage that, I would argue, is the correct one. As Hoffmann points out, this is the conception also developed by Talcott Parsons in The Social System. ⁹

If one accepts this conception of politics, the implications for the method taken to be proper are important. And I do think this is the correct meaning, as well as the operable meaning. In politics, we find the total man engaged. In an age accustomed to think in terms of the fixed categories of an established division of labor, we do not (at least in the academic world) like to be reminded that all the pieces of humpty-dumpty must be put together again in the real world. What is more, much of politics transcends the “natural” and calculable dimensions of human behavior to which the scientists like to reduce man. (One of the reasons that politics has such a strong appeal to Reinhold Niebuhr is probably to be found in his realization that there is an important link between the “transcendent” dimension of man revealed in politics and that revealed in religion.) Thus we may speak of politics as the “synthetic” discipline. As a consequence of its very sweep, it may also be taken as the discipline in which scientific analysis, as described by Kaplan, has the least to offer. It is this character of politics which makes it a particularly precarious venture to try to reduce it to a “science”—even in the general sense of that term, much less in its more precise and narrow definition.

Now if politics is a synthetic discipline, an “architectonic” science, what implication does this have for the methods proper in its study? If politics is an architectonic discipline concerned with the total man, we must consider the determinants of the behavior of the total man. And this brings us to a consideration of the concepts of the “image” as developed by Kenneth Boulding.

Notes

1. 1.
   Quoted in S. Hoffmann (1960) Contemporary Theory in International Relations (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall), 42. See M. Kaplan (1957) System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons).
2. 2.
   E.H. Carr (1961) What is History? (London: MacMillan), 88.
3. 3.
   Hoffmann, Contemporary Theory, 189.
4. 4.
   This material was intended to be spoken to Johnston’s students, but we have retained it both to respect his authorship and because it helps clarify his views on historical trend, historical “laws,” and the role of science in the study of international relations.
5. 5.
   “What Was Killed Was Not Only The President But The Promise” New York Times Magazine, November 15, 1964.
6. 6.
   B. Russell (1938) Power (London: Allen & Unwin).
7. 7.
   Hoffmann, Contemporary Theory, 45.
8. 8.
   Ibid. 31.
9. 9.
   T. Parsons (1951) The Social System (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.), 551, ff.

© The Author(s) 2016

David Clinton and Stephen Sims (eds.)Realism and the Liberal Tradition10.1057/978-1-137-57764-1_3

Begin Abstract

2. Politics and Value, Part 1

Whittle Johnston¹ and Stephen Sims²

(1)

American University, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA

(2)

Baylor University, Waco, Texas, USA

End Abstract

Although an animal may very well have a consciousness of himself, it is inconceivable that he should have a consciousness of history in any way analogous to that of man. Let us take for purposes of illustration a dog—in this instance a pug, that friendly little breed good primarily for sitting on the laps of old ladies. It is quite clear that the pug has an image, and a complex image, of the world. He has a memory; although it may be dependent more on the sense of smell than on other senses (and certainly more dependent on this sense than is man), this is not the point. The fact is he has a memory. And this is fairly well developed, as in the capacity to distinguish among a whole series of toys by name. In the second place, it is quite obvious that they have a rich range of emotional responses; they are sensitive to joy and sadness. I am inclined to think the range of emotional responses is wider than that of the human being, or at least of many human beings. They have a strong sense of sympathy and will comfort a suffering or unhappy child or adult. The ears are very expressive and go down in times of contentment and up in times of danger or excitement. The tail, needless to say, registers a whole range of emotions! What is more, they also have wills, which become quite apparent every time one passes the favorite fire plug or oak tree. They also have multiple forms of self-expression, as revealed in Daniel Schorr’s story about the dog in East Germany. Why then did you leave? Well every now and then I sort of wanted to bark!

If these then are some of the traits the pug possesses, what does he lack? It is inconceivable to me that he has any extended sense of the past. It is clear that he has a memory, but to the extent that this exists, it is only within the span of his own lifetime. He cannot in the nature of the case have any knowledge of experience before that time. He cannot carry in his mind a sense of his ancestral Chinese background and hence become involved in the politics of the Chinese question. He is supposed to have been brought from China to Europe by British and Dutch sailors, but t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1. “The Long Road to Theory”
• 2. International Relations and History
• 3. Liberalism and History
• 4. International Relations and Liberalism
• Backmatter