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AN AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

(Stanley Hoffmann, 1977)

For the students of int’l relations there was only a little political philosophy (e.g. Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau) available, however this was sufficiently provocative for them to study further, because
the philosophers disagreed about the nature of the int’l milieu and the ways for making it more
bearable.

Domestic order is stable enough for the search of the ideal state, but on the int’l level the order
has to be established first. Also, the contrast btw the precepts of law and the realities of politics is
greater in the int’l realm than in the domestic realm. ⇒ makes the students want to shift from the
normative to the empirical in order to understand the plight of the normative.

But why did a social science of int’l relations fail to appear (i.e. in the 19th century)?
⇒ Democratization ⇒ With democratization came the age of positivism ⇒ Political science
flourished, but int’l relations remained as the specialized activity of soldiers and diplomats ⇒
Only in the USA was the foreign policy put under domestic checks and balances ⇒ 20th century
brought democratization to foreign policy, more countries joined in the game.

WW1: Only little scientific analysis of int’l relations ⇒ Reassertion of utopia. No science, but
normative dreams.

First scientific treatment of world politics: E.H. Carr (Twenty Years Crisis) ⇒ Foundations of the
normative approach of realism (against idealism) ⇒ served the cause of appeasement.
(Lessons: it is impossible to separate the empirical and normative in one’s work; int’l relations is
a realm of both objective investigation and the battle btw predatory beasts and their pray → here
normative dogmatism has pitfalls.)

It was in the USA that int’l relations became a discipline. Circumstances: Rise of USA to world
power status, accompanies by renewed utopianism and a mix of guilt about and revulsion against
prewar impotent US idealism, escapist isolationism and participation in appeasement.

If the discipline has a founding father it is Hans J. Morgenthau. He wanted to erect an empirical
science opposed to int’l utopias. He wanted to be normative, but to root his norms in the realities
of politics, not in the aspirations of politicians or constructs of lawyers. He tied his analyses to
two masts: concepts of power and the notion of national interest.

The development of int’l relations as a discipline in the USA results from the convergence of
three factors:
1. Intellectual predispositions:
a. The conviction that all problems can be solved through objective science. Resort
to science yields practical applications that will bring progress.
b. The very prestige and sophistication of the exact sciences are bound to benefit the
social ones as well.
c. The role of scholars who had emigrated from Europe. With their philosophical
training and personal experience they asked bigger questions about ends, not only
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means. They brought a sense of history, an awareness of the diversity of social
sciences.
2. Political circumstances:
The growth of the discipline cannot be separated from the American role in world
affairs after 1945.
a. Political scientists are fascinated with power. ⇒ USA and its conduct in world
affairs. Two drives merged: i) the desire to concentrate on what is the most
relevant, ii) the tendency to want to be useful.
b. What the scholars offered, the policy-makers wanted, because they needed a
compass. Realism provided what was necessary although there was always a
sufficient margin of disagreement btw its suggestions and actual policies. The
scholars’ work was inseparable from the tendency to devise a strategy for USA,
and priorities of research and of policy making blended.
3. Institutional opportunities:
In the case of the USA, three institutional factors acted as multipliers of political
connection.
a. The “inner-and-outer” system of government, which puts academics and
researchers not merely in the corridors but also in the kitchens of power.
b. Half-way houses btw Washington and academia, such as foreign policy think-
tanks.
c. Universities: flexible, arenas of research, having large pols departments which
could serve as the matrices of the discipline of IR.

Three advances of the discipline:


1. The concept of the int’l system: an attempt to do for int’l relations what the concept of
the political regime does for domestic pols ⇒ way of ordering data, a construct for
describing the way in which patterns of interaction change.
2. The way in which the literature on deterrence has analyzed and codified the rules of game
which have served as the intellectual foundation of the search for tacit and explicit
interstate restraints.
3. Attempts to stud the political roots, the originality and the effects of economic
interdependence.

With respect to the desire to proceed scientifically, int’l relations as a discipline has run into
three particular snags:
1. The problem of theory: A theory of undetermined behavior cannot consist of a set of
propositions explaining general laws that make prediction possible, and can do little more
than define basic concepts, analyze basic configurations and make the field intelligible.
Kenneth Waltz: The only theory of int’l relations is the balance of power. There is the
absence of common sense clues, but here the subject is created and recreated by those
who work on it.
2. What is it that should be explained?
a. The level of analysis problem. Should we concentrate on the int’l system itself or
on individual units? It is hard to be on both at once.
b. Fragmentation at each level of analysis. Each scholar has his own version of an
abstract scheme for the int’l system.
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c. Functional fragmentation. There are different clusters of research, each of which
has tended to foster its own jargon.
d. Whatever it is we want to study, how should we do it? Traditionalists remain as
close to historical scholarship and political philosophy as possible; behavioralists
believe that there can be a political science of int’l relations. Neither side is totally
consistent and each one tends to oversimplify what it actually does. In domestic
pols their coexistence is easier, because their respective approaches fit separate
parts of the field. In int’l relations, a functional division of labor is much harder to
apply.
3. The problem of usefulness. In their relations with the real world, scholars are torn btw
irrelevance and absorption by the service of the government. Their only excuse is the
populist dream of arousing the people which would force the elites.

Far more than domestic politics, int’l relations is an insider’s game. Problems:
1. The closer the connection to the government, the greater the temptation of letting oneself
to be absorbed.
2. Outsider advice always suffers from oversimplification. Insiders have advantage, because
they control all the facts and links connecting separate realms of policy.
3. There appears the tendency to slight the research and to slant the advocacy for reasons of
personal career or of political/bureaucratic opportunity.

Because of the American predominance, the discipline has taken some traits which are
essentially American and less in evidence in those other countries, where the field is now
becoming an object of serious study:
1. Quest for certainty. Int’l relations should be a science of uncertainty, of the limits of
action, of the ways in which states try to manage but never quite succeed in eliminating
their own insecurity.
2. Preponderance of studies dealing with the present. Because we have an inadequate basis
for comparison, we are tempted to exaggerate either continuity with a past that we know
badly or the radical originality of the present.

The stress on the present and the heavy American orientation have combined to leave in the dark
several important issues:
1. The relation of domestic politics to int’l affairs.
2. Functioning of the int’l hierarchy, i.e. the nature of the relations btw the weak and the
strong.

A major problem of the discipline: the tension btw the need for a so called basic research, which
asks more general and penetrating questions that derive from the nature of the activity under
study, and the desire of who -in the real world- support, demand or orient the research for quick
answers to pressing issues.

The discipline of int’l relations needs distance:


1. It should move away from the contemporary toward the past.
2. It should move away from the perspective of a superpower (and a highly conservative
one) toward that of the weak and the revolutionary.

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3. It should move away from the impossible quest for stability.
4. It should move away from the glide into political science, back to the steep ascent toward
the peaks which the questions raised by traditional political philosophy present.

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