International Relations Theory and Philosophy

Cerwyn Moore, Chris Farrands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135233600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

This book discusses the contribution of philosophers and thinkers whose ideas have recently begun to permeate international relations theory. It provides an introduction to the contemporary debates regarding theories and methodologies used to study international relations, particularly the relationships between interpretive accounts of social action, European philosophical traditions, hermeneutics and the discipline of international relations. The authors provides a platform for dialogue between theorists and researchers engaged in a more specific area studies, geo-political studies, political theory and historical accounts of international politics.

The volume analyzes a variety of theoretical and explores the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Levinas, Bakhtin, Patocka, Derridean, Deleuze and Susan Sontag. Making an important contribution to discussions about how to study the complexities of world politics, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of international relations, politics, sociology, philosophy and political theory.

1
Introduction

On philosophical traditions and hermeneutic global politics

Cerwyn Moore and Chris Farrands

The academic study of international relations – International Relations (IR) – captures a drama of debate, a vital conversation, as Professor C.A.W. Manning (1962) described it, perhaps with the most important consequences if those involved misunderstand each other. Sixty years after he wrote these ideas, when much of the theory that has been discussed in the field in the meantime has been forgotten, that idea that knowledge can be produced by a conversation remains alive and kicking. The context has changed, and Manning would not recognise some of the arguments. The conversation is at least as much between individuals and social groups as between states. But as one of the originators of the academic study of IR, who insisted first of all on the importance of a philosophical understanding of the subject, Manning would certainly recognise the importance of the motives behind this collection of essays. The rationale for this book derives first of all from a desire to integrate the diverse set of ideas that are broadly concerned with dialogue, with dialogic understanding, with ‘interpretive’ theory and methods in the discipline of academic IR. It aims at the same time to explore the richness of continental philosophy as a tradition of understanding that can help scholars in IR make sense of the drama unfolding before them. Many contemporary discussions in IR neglect that tradition; others may take it in a rather simpler or more formulaic way than it deserves. Recent attempts have been made to highlight the trans-disciplinary nature of the discipline of International Relations in many studies (including many discussed in this volume), drawing extensively on social studies, literature, aesthetics and gender studies as well as on philosophy. But one unfortunate by-product of this synthesising exercise has perhaps been the fragmentation and reintegration of ‘post’ theories (i.e. postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-development theory, post-feminism and so on), creating a discipline by proxy, a kind of new icon that in turn demands deconstruction. It is also significant that the discipline has gone through a number of ‘great debates’ and, whilst these have provided important contributions for the study of war and peace, the further transformation of the international system in the last twenty years has once again led to the need for adaptations in IR, both as a practical endeavour and as a critically thought through body of theoretical debate. This book is a timely re-evaluation of important elements in ‘post’ thinking as well as an exploration of how fruitful specific engagements with philosophy can be for IR.

From this rationale, the book will identify a set of questions concerned with the discipline. The primary aim, then, will be to further dialogue by introducing or building upon the work of a number of philosophers, critics and writers, whose ideas have only recently begun to permeate British, European and American IR theory more deeply. Reflecting on the current debate (among the contributors as well as the two editors), it became obvious that the ideas drawn from this series of philosophers have not, as yet, been explored together in an edited collection. Still further, a survey of the leading theoretical literature in some of the most important American, British and European journals reveals that contributions drawing on powerful influences such as Bahktin and Deleuze, Gramsci and Gadamer, Arendt and Levinas (amongst others) are only now being considered in depth by those who research and study IR, political science and political theory. Often, scholars, understanding the inadequacy of an IR narrowly defined within traditional boundaries, recognise the importance of drawing fully on the political theory tradition which, as writers from Ashley (1981, 1984) and Walker (1993) to Connolly (2005) and Butler (2006) demonstrate, provides a more solid foundation for critical reflection on the global. In a small way, we hope the book makes a contribution to debates that draw on these writers and extend the capacity of IR to engage with philosophy and political theory. It is exactly the right moment to open the question of their value in IR. If the collection also stimulates further disagreement, we shall not be sorry, although we hope it would be constructive.

The contributors themselves are in many cases involved in contemporary debates about the shape and form of International Relations. The opportunity to involve this selection of contributors is one of the strengths of the book. The choice of topics and themes is in part a result of the availability of some outstanding scholars who are already engaged in these debates. The approach is to explore questions of epistemology, ontology and methodology through interpretive dialogues. In so doing, it is intended that the book will establish a hermeneutic intervention, born of dialogue, as a way to further debate beyond the current ‘post’ positivist character of IR. Mostly, the contributions here do not intend to defend the broad approach taken; instead, they seek to explore much more detailed methodological and philosophical issues that arise with respect to their chosen topic. In short, the content and theoretical scope of the book is its justification. It is also the case that much of the phenomenological tradition to which Heidegger and Gadamer contributed so much, and most of its other leading figures, share a vision of knowledge generated by dialogic exchange– dialogue, as Farrands points out in his chapter on Gadamer here, serves not only as a procedure but also as a form of epistemological check on what is claimed. Dialogue is explicitly important in the work of Arendt, Derrida, Bakhtin; it is even more important, absolutely the whole point of the discussion, in Habermas, Gadamer and Levinas. But whether or not particular philosophers argue for a dialogic conception of knowledge, the exploration of dialogue around their work is a principle concern of all the contributors to this volume.

The book is thus designed to bring together recent reflections on the development of a range of interpretive approaches to the study of international relations. The collection presents a platform for dialogue between theorists and researchers engaged in more specific area studies, geopolitical studies, political theory or historical accounts of international politics. Finally, therefore, the book draws on a number of philosophical writers and presents a variety of theoretical ideas related, primarily, to the interpretive study of IR, whose work has sometimes been touched upon, but not fully contextualised by the dominant modes both of positivistic and post-positivist thought. Some branches of critical or radical thought have fetishised or exoticised particular writers, with an added currency being given to those who align themselves with, for instance, the body of work by this scholar or that theorist without fully contextualising the value or importance of other writers in the field. Our aim is to open the door more widely to some of those writers.

This may be thought to reify traditions or ‘schools’ of thought as dominant hegemonies with very concrete fixed boundaries within the discipline. The editors and contributors to this volume have very much sought to avoid this, and although the concept of ‘tradition’ is relevant to interpretive thought as a starting point for identifying relations between concepts and influence in theory, the contributions to this collection never slip into the kind of objectification of specific traditions that the writing of R.G. Collingwood or Michael Oakeshott would seem to support. To recognise that there is a sustained debate between Gramsci and the successors of the Frankfurt School, or between Heidegger and Gadamer on the one hand and Derrida and Deleuze on the other, does not require an ontology that freezes the idea of tradition uncritically.

There are many established authors who have explored, and who continue to explore, traditions within what is often labelled post-structuralism around very specific approaches and methods. The obvious examples in IR are writers drawing on the work of Foucault and on structural linguistics and discourse analysis. Our contribution does not reject Foucauldian scholarship in IR out of hand. But there is a tendency to identify post-structural research in IR primarily with Foucault, and often with specific aspects of Foucault’s work. No philosophic influence in IR better illustrates the idea of liquid modernity that Bauman has suggested, for Foucault was extraordinarily diverse in his work, and became one of the most potent critics of some of his earlier work towards the end of his life. Foucault’s contribution to IR has been valuable, but his work is perhaps too easily simplified or rendered down to a few conceptions – genealogy, governmentality, biopower, discourse, power/knowledge – which do not do justice to the sophistication of his ideas and the caution with which he expressed them. Foucault himself came to doubt the ways in which his ideas could become a formula, as the elderly Marx famously stormed out of a First International meeting in London crying ‘If that is what you call marxism, then I am not a marxist!’ Other interventions linked to the linguistic turn, to aesthetic understanding, to uses of narrative, to meetings of mind between critical theory and phenomenology, to different ways of reading the relation between theory and practice and to different ways of disrupting established approaches (including some of those derived from Foucault) have been marginalised because of the exclusivity afforded to one particular theorisation of radical IR. Different contributors have different views of the value of Foucauldian IR, but all agree on the value of refreshing the resources of contemporary critical IR by looking also elsewhere. This is also valuable because there has always been much dialogue between the branches of philosophy represented here, much of which is rarely acknowledged in International Relations per se. Our purpose is, therefore, to open the doors of IR to this broader agenda of debate, not to reject anything.

This debate has been further stimulated by work by Roland Bleiker and Stephen Chan, and by others who do not appear in this volume, to develop approaches that have come to be labelled the ‘aesthetic turn’, a strategic move to think critically about aesthetics as a form of knowledge as well as an attention to art objects of different kinds as focus points for the interrogation of ethical and critical thinking about IR very broadly defined. Note that it is an explicit purpose of much of this discussion to move away from the conventional boundaries of ‘what counts’ as IR. And this has attracted a diversity of contributions –from Christine Sylvester (1999), Peter Mandaville (2003), Cynthia Weber (2006) and others as well as some of the contributors here. The interest generated by the aesthetic turn has done much to reinvigorate debate about exactly what research in the discipline of IR should focus upon, what its parameters are and how it can draw on debates in continental philosophy associated with hermeneutics. Similarly narrative interventions, particularly those that ably highlight how history can be employed by scholars of world politics, have provided a rich terrain for scholars at the cutting edge of the discipline, although much of this work has yet to filter into the mainstream. In both cases, however, it is important to recognise the philosophical traditions associated with these interventions, perhaps highlighting the significance of largely neglected philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur, in IR. His work is touched upon in a number of places throughout this collection, given the importance of his contribution to theories of narrative and hermeneutics. Equally it is important to recognise that continental philosophy itself also filtered eastwards, impacting on the development of social theory and aesthetics in Russia, for example.

In all this, our concern has been to look at work in the phenomenological tradition, but also that which has emerged from critical theory (taking that loose phrase to embrace both Frankfurt School and Gramscian thought). The editors (but not necessarily the contributors) share a common view of the relations between these two bodies of thought. That is that, although there are some very clear differences between them, there have also always been overlaps. From the work of Alfred Schutz (1967) in 1930 to the critical response to the Holocaust and the evenements of 1968, critical theorists and postmodernists, existentialists and those drawn to more activist debates on environment, feminism, sexuality and alternative visions of global order have drawn extensively on the conversation between the two bodies of ideas. These studies therefore represent a stage in the conversation between the postmodern arguments drawn from phenomenology and the ‘late modernity’ of critical theory, although each of the authors has their own way through that discussion, and we have not sought to direct them in how they might take it forward.

We have to apologise for the omission of some writers we would have liked to include. Pragmatic reasons affect this too: Routledge, our publishers, have generously supported this project from the start, but they were never going to allow us an unlimited number of pages. Apart from Ricoeur, who gets a number of mentions in these chapters, we might easily have included a number of other writers. We did not include Pierre Bourdieu, although his influence reaches across all the humanities, or Giorgio Agamben, whose work is becoming a significant influence, although in a longer edition we would have counted both ‘in’. Edith Stein’s (1997) humanistic phenomenology would have made a compelling accompaniment to her contemporary, Arendt, offered an important critique of Heidegger and forming an interesting contrast to the parallel work of Pato

ka, but she too is missing. Karl Jaspers, Husserl, Bachelard and Sartre all have claims on our attention – even if they are all relatively unfashionable now – but the impact of their work is felt in this volume through their influence on others. There are many more discussions of Spivak, Rorty and Chomsky’s influence in IR, and for that reason they are not represented here, but we would have certainly included them with good will if we had had more space. We offer some excuse for not including chapters on the illuminating work of Judith Butler (2006) or the ethical achievement of Martha Nussbaum (2007) in going well beyond Rawlsian liberalism in her recent work – both are still writing, and have extended their work directly into the field of IR in their important recent writing; we would encourage readers to follow this up for themselves. At the margins of these debates, Guy Debord, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, a range of critical realist scholars and others might suggest themselves as candidates for inclusion, but they are too marginal to phenomenology and the critical tradition to earn inclusion here, even though there are plenty of other good reasons to study them. Finally, some writers – Alain Badiou (2002) is the most obvious example – have enjoyed a recent fame that may yet justify their consideration in a collection such as this in the future, but we would withhold judgment right now on their possible impact on IR. And of course, as we have noted, there is not a chapter on Foucault in the collection, although his work does filter through many of the chapters. If we have not included writers you would prefer, we can only point to limited resources and encourage the reader to engage as fully as possible with the very wide range of contributions we have been able to include.

It has been a pleasure to put this volume together. Contributors produced their work more or less to time and to a very high standard, but all the work in this edition has been read, often in multiple versions, and all has gone through several drafts. The editors thank the contributors for their patience, and the contributors, some perhaps through gritted teeth, thank the editors. Drafts of some of the papers have been circulated more widely, but all the papers have been read by both editors and often by other contributors. As a result, we have learned a lot, and we hope we have produced a much higher quality volume. The collection has also been refereed by Routledge. This is not a question of something as mundane as ‘quality control’. It is also an attempt to practise what the volume preaches in terms of the development of understanding through collective exchange of ideas and through shared critical endeavour. That said, at the moment of putting the collection together in its final form, the editors are aware of the considerable work that all the contributors have done to make this a compelling debate that is more than the sum of its parts because many of the different chapters speak effectively to each other.

Structure of the collection

The edited collection brings together experts in International Relations in order to offer an innovative contribution to the contemporary theoretical debates in IR by presenting and exploring ideas at the cutting edge of the discipline. Indeed, whilst other single-authored texts and edited collections aim to tackle related issues, concerned with ‘post’ international relations – post-Cold War, postindustrial, post-positivist, post-development, post-feminist and so on – this book brings together a set of dialogic contributions in order to frame the ongoing theoretical ‘interpretive debate’. In this way, the collection is concerned not only with the hermeneutics, philosophical traditions and interpretive debates but, rather, it uses this set of dialogues to introduce further critical avenues of theoretical and methodological interest beyond post-positivism. At the same time, the book is not intended to be a comprehensive introduction to philosophical traditions in IR. Instead, it offers a reading of the discipline of IR and the influence of philosophical traditions, which, although they have been recognised in a number of journal articles, have, as yet, been missing from the public debates in IR.

Therefore contemporary theoretical approaches to the discipline of IR, including both disjunctures and commonalities, in interpretive International Relations furthers the disciplinary framework offering a coherent, structured and innovative collection of ideas. In this sense, therefore, the book is neither conclusive nor all encompassing; it is interpretation in process and has an internal logic based on the contingencies of interpretations. In particular, whilst the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emanuel Levinas, Antonio Gramsci or Ludwig Wittgenstein are employed by critical realists, neo-Gramscians, poststructuralists, critical theorists and social constructivists, the application of their particular theoretical ideas to IR has not been successfully presented in an edited collection widely available in English. At the same time, the collection recognises how an ongoing dialogue with British, European and American scholars, draws on contributions from essayists, cultural critics, literary theorists and contemporary sociologists such as Susan Sontag, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Jan Pato

ka or Gilles Deleuze.

Likewise, the epistemological and ontological debates across these philosophical and theoretical subfields of IR are currently breaking down disciplinary barriers. This collection offers an opportunity to reimagine and reread the state of the discipline, and indeed to critique the very notion of ‘discipline’ here, taking hermeneutics as a point of departure, and further assessing interdisciplinary dialogues, in world literature, poetry, stories, art, texts and narratives. Therefore, Interpretive Dialogues also makes an original and convincing case for further trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogues, deriving primarily from comingling European philosophical debates. Just as the debate between critical theory and phenomenology has tended to break down, so too has the conventional distinction between anglo-saxon and ‘continental’ philosophies recently collapsed. Even if many textbooks tend to reinforce the older stereotypes of each, there has been a change in the way philosophy understands itself, which IR can do well to recognise. The collection will explore the influence of this diverse set of thinkers in a coherent way in order to highlight a contemporary interpretive framework, which is needed to contextualise derivations, transformat...

Table of contents

• Routledge advances in international relations and global politics
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nietzsche’s style
• 3 Deconstructing the modern subject
• 4 Gadamer’s enduring influence in international relations
• 5 Jan Patočka and global politics
• 6 Emmanuel Levinas, ethics and rupturing the political
• 7 Walking corpses
• 8 Wittgenstein and international relations theory
• 9 Bakhtin
• 10 Derrida
• 11 On the nature of sovereignty
• 12 Edward Said and post-colonial international relations
• 13 On Habermas, Marx and the critical theory tradition
• 14 Post-structuralism and the randomisation of history
• 15 Regarding the pain of Susan Sontag
• Bibliography
• Index