Principia Discordia

It probably comes as no surprise that I read quite a lot.  And while I mostly read e-books, I still take plenty of notes about what I'm reading, if I find them useful or interesting.

Anyway, I'm going to dump my notes online as well.  I'm working through them, and adding to them, but there is a lot, and its entirely possible that someone else with run with, or work from, something I found but did not have the time, imagination or inclination to follow up on.

First book is After Authority:

QuoteAs states open up to the world economy, they begin to lose one of the raison d'êtres for which they first came into being: defense of the sovereign nation. Political change and economic globalization enhance the position of some groups and classes and erode that of others. Liberalization and structural reform reduce the welfare role of the state and cast citizens out on their own. As the state loses interest in the well-being of its citizens, its citizens lose interest in the well being of the state. They look elsewhere for sources of identity and focuses for their loyalty.

QuoteInstead [of military power], police power and discipline, both domestic and foreign, are applied more and more. Even these don't really work, as any cop on the beat can attest. Order is under siege; disorder is on the rise; authority is crumbling.

QuoteThe heedless pursuit of individual self-interest can have corrosive impacts on long-standing institutions, cultures, and hierarchies, and can lead to a degree of social destabilization that may collapse into uncontrolled violence and destruction.

QuoteWhereas it used to be taken for granted that the nation-state was the object to be secured by the power of the state, the disappearance of singular enemies has opened a fundamental ontological hole, an insecurity dilemma, if you will. Inasmuch as different threats or threatening scenarios promise to affect different individuals and groups differently, there is no overarching enemy that can be used for purposes of mass mobilization (a theme of one of Huntington's more recent articles; see Huntington, 1997). Those concerned about computer hackers penetrating their cyberspace are rarely the same as those concerned about whether they will still be welcome in their workplaces tomorrow. Whereas it used to be taken for granted that threats to security originated from without—from surprise attacks, invading armies, and agents who sometimes managed to turn citizens into traitors—globalization's erosion of national authority has managed to create movements of "patriotic" dissidence whose targets are traitorous governments in the seats of national power

QuoteIn short, loyalty to the state has been replaced by loyalty to the self, and national authority has been shouldered aside by self-interest. The world of the future might not be one of 200 or 500 or even 1,000 (semi-) sovereign states coexisting uneasily; it could well be one in which every individual is a state of her own, a world of 10 billion statelets, living in a true State of Nature.

QuoteI do propose here that, in the long view of history, the two hundred-odd years between 1789 and 1989 were exceptional in that the nation-state was unchallenged by any other form of political organization at the global level.  That exceptional period is now just about over.

QuoteOne of the much-noted paradoxes of the 1990s is the coexistence of processes of integration and fragmentation, of globalism and particularism, of simultaneous centralization and decentralization often in the very same place. James Rosenau (1990) has coined the rather unwieldy term "fragmegration" to describe this phenomenon, which he ascribes largely to the emergence of a "sovereignty-free" world in the midst of a "sovereignty- bound" one. Rosenau frames this "bifurcation" of world politics as a series of conceptual and practical "jailbreaks," as people acquire the knowledge and capabilities to break out of the political and social structures that have kept them imprisoned for some centuries.  Rosenau's theory—if it can be called that—is an essentially liberal one and, while he acknowledges the importance of economic factors in the split between the two worlds, he shies away from recognizing the central role of material and economic change and the ancillary processes of social innovation and reorganization in this phenomenon.

QuoteRather than being understood as some sort of atavistic or premodern phenomenon, cultural conflict should be seen as a modern (or even post-modern) response to fundamental social change. The unachievable dream of political theorists and practitioners is stability, now and forever; the undeniable truth is change, always and everywhere.  During periods of "normality," change is slower and more predictable; it can be managed, up to a point. Over the past few decades, we have been witness to more rapid and less predictable changes, brought about by globalization and social innovation. These changes have destabilized the political hierarchies that rule over social orders—even democratic ones—and provided opportunities for those who might seek greater power and wealth to do so.

QuoteToday, culture has become the language under which political action takes place, and elites operate accordingly. In all cases, it is the contractual basis of social order that is under challenge and being destroyed. When people find their prospects uncertain and dismal, they tend to go with those who can promise a better, more promising future. Cultural solidarity draws on such teleological scenarios and pie in the sky, by and by.

QuotePolanyi's argument was, however, somewhat more subtle than this. He claimed that there was, in effect, a structural mismatch between the emerging system of liberal capitalism and then-existing social values and social relations of production.

QuoteThe Concert of Europe was able to keep interstate peace, more or less, but it was hard pressed to address the domestic turmoil and disruption that followed social restructuring.

QuoteRather, it is that modern capitalism was made feasible only through massive, social innovation and reorganization (which are sometimes described as "strategies of accumulation") affecting Europe, North America, and much of the rest of the world. When the first industrial entrepreneurs discovered that they could not entice labour out of their homes and into the factories in exchange for a full day's pay, they found ways of rendering unviable the family and social structures that, in the towns and villages, had provided some degree of social support even in the midst of privation.

Quotethe intention of U.S. policy was to reproduce domestic American society (or, at least, its underlying structural conditions), as much as possible, the world over. The implicit reasoning behind this goal, although specious and faulty, was that stability and prosperity in the United States were made possible by capitalism, democracy, growth, freedom, and social integration. If such conditions could be replicated in other countries, everyone would become like the happy Americans.

QuoteLeft to its own devices, the information revolution might have gone nowhere. Just as in the absence of the impetus of markets and profits, the steam engine would have remained a curiosity with limited application, so were the dynamic of capitalism combined with political and economic instability required to really get this latest industrial revolution off the ground. That these elements were necessary to the new regime of accumulation (if not essential) is best seen in the trajectory and fate of the Soviet Union. The USSR was able to engineer the first steps of the transformation and acquire advanced military means comparable in most respects to the West's, but eventually it was unable to engage in the social innovation necessary to reorganize the productive process and maintain growth rates

QuoteWhat was ironic, perhaps, was that Buchanan and his colleagues blamed political "liberals," rather than hyperliberal capitalism, for the problems they saw destroying American society.  To have put the blame on the real cause would have been to reveal to the listening public that the new economic system is not—indeed, cannot be—fair to everyone, and that those who begin with advantages will virtually always retain them (Hirsch, 1995).  Admitting such a contradiction would be to repeat the fatal mistake of Mikhail Gorbachev, when he announced that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was no longer the vanguard of socialist truth: Attack the legitimacy of your social system's ideology, and there is no end to the destruction that might follow

QuoteJust as some did extremely well by the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, so will many benefit from this one. A global class of the better-off (numbering perhaps 1 billion, if that many) and a global class of the poor (as many as 8 to 10 billion) will emerge. Many members of the better-off class will reside in what today we call "developing countries"; a not considerable number of the poor will live in the "industrialized ones." If things work out, by the middle of the twenty-first century we might even see a global middle class that will provide bourgeois support for this new global order and, perhaps, demand some form of representative global democratization (see chapter 8). Then, again, we might not.

Quoteas countries lose sovereign control over their borders and the possibility of managing the movement of people, goods, and ideas, they seem to be focusing more closely on the new subjects of transnational sovereignty, the individuals, in the hope that keeping a watchful eye on such free subjects will serve also to discipline them (Gill, 1995; see also chapter 7).

More of the same

QuoteConsequently, we might behold the futures of global politics in both the European Union as well as in the world's chaotic places. As globalization works its way on self, state, and society, we may see the emergence of the "insecurity dilemma" at the social level, rather than between the black-box states of classical realist politics.

QuoteA proliferation of new identities— as states, as cultures, as ethnies, as individuals—indicate that fundamental units of global political interaction have been destabilized, thereby rendering problematic the finding of new anchorages on which to base stable political relations

QuoteTo make this new object "secure" implies different constructions of both threat and security than those with which we are familiar from the past fifty years. Under fluid conditions such as this, the very act of defining security becomes the subject of struggle, providing not only access to material resources and authority but also the opportunity to establish new boundaries of discourse and research (Thompson, 1979; Lipschutz, 1999a). Those who win the debate win more than just the prize, for they also get to mark those boundaries. Those who find themselves left outside have not only lost the game, they have been banished from politics, made outsiders. They may even become the new enemy.

QuoteAs the collapse of the Soviet Union indicated, even a materially powerful and evidently secure state can be undermined if the mental constructs supporting it come under sustained pressure, both domestic and international.

QuoteWhat, then, is the national security state (NSS)? The NSS is best understood as a particular type of institution whose origins are found in the logics of the Industrial Revolution and the Social Darwinist geopolitics of the late nineteenth century. Through these two epistemological frameworks, the consolidation of geographically contiguous territories and the integration of societies within those territories became the sine qua non of national power and survival. The founders of national security states were animated by two overriding motivations.  First, they directly correlated national power with the domination of resources, territory, people, and violence; second, they directly correlated national power with a state-directed project of industrialization, nationalism, and social welfare. The NSS was premised further on a world of external threats—almost always state-centred in origin — directed against national autonomy and territory, from which the nation must be defended.

QuoteGeneral Motors is not always good for the United States (or vice versa). Today, the policies that generate national military power may very well create individual insecurity, and the actions of individuals in the market may very well weaken the state.  While this trend began as long ago as the 1970s, the extent of the divergence between state and citizen only became really evident during the 1990s, as the supposed global threat posed by Communism receded and was replaced by more localized and inchoate ones.

QuoteConsequently, a new unit of analysis and action emerged: the Free World. Inside the borders of the Free World, all states would be united in pursuit of common goals based on individualism and the human propensity to "truck and barter." Outside would be those states whose mode of behaviour was "unnatural," spoken of in terms of "rotten apples" threatening the Free World's future (a point further developed in chapter 7). The survival and success of the Free World thus depended on creating and extending boundaries around a "natural community" (Stone, 1988) that had not, heretofore, existed. The survival and prosperity of the Free World on one side of the boundaries of containment came to rest upon keeping out the influences of the Soviet bloc on the other side of those boundaries. Indeed, the Free World could not have existed without the "Unfree World."

QuoteThe United States, pursuing liberal economic and political organization, focused on individual well-being at home and state power abroad. This made social discipline more difficult, because it was premised on a particular type of mental and material conformity that penalized aberrant thoughts and practices through social ridicule and rejection, rather than on an outright totalitarianism that rewarded dissidence with prison or exile.

QuoteThe impacts of this change are visible in efforts to rediscipline society. Thus, policy-makers struggle to find new threats and define new visions, strategies, and policies for making the world "more secure." People, losing faith in their leaders and the state, take things into their own hands. Gated communities proliferate in order to keep out the chaos. The privatization of security continues apace and becomes another realm of commodification. Conservative disciplining of liberals and gays mounts. And the most popular television and film "true-life" stories and newscasts inform us just how insecure each of us should really feel.

QuoteWhat are national security planners to do when, in succeeding beyond their wildest visions in making the country safe, they have also set the stage for domestic anarchy? The simple answer: find new sources of threat and insecurity, both internal and external.

QuoteThis loss of total coverage is problematic: In place of comprehensive threats, the "new" ones discussed or imagined by policy-makers, academics and strategists affect only selected groups and classes within states, with differential impacts that depend, to a significant degree, on an individual's economic, cultural, and social backgrounds.

QuoteHence, not only are there struggles over security among nations, there are also struggles over security among notions. Winning the right to define security provides not just access to resources but also the authority to articulate new definitions and discourses of security, thereby directing the policy that leads to real, material outcomes.

QuoteIn a cohesive, conceptually robust state, a broadly accepted definition of both national identity and the security speech acts needed to freeze that identity is developed and reinforced by each of these three [defense analysts/military, policy-makers/bureaucrats and politicians/social leaders] groups as a form of Gramscian hegemony.

QuoteThe failure of any particular discourse to establish its hegemony means that there can result discursive confusion and contestation over the meaning(s) of security among those who, for one reason or another, have a vested interest in a consensual construction.  This interest, or the expected benefits, may well be material and not just a matter of patriotic loyalty to nation; by defining security in a particular way, one serves to legitimate a particular set of policy responses.

QuoteBoundaries are always under challenge and they must always be re-established, not only on the ground but also in the mind. Here is where security is, ultimately, to be found; here is where insecurity is, ultimately, generated.  The marking of borders and boundaries is never truly finalized, never finally set in stone. Borders are meant to discipline, but they also offer the opportunity of being crossed or transgressed. Borders are lines on maps and markers on the ground, but border regions are rarely so neat. Borderlands are places where mixing occurs, or has occurred, or might occur. They are, in themselves, a contradiction to, a rejection of, the neatly drawn limits of the nation-state. Borderlands are thus a threat to the security supposedly established by the authorized borders precisely because they offer the possibility of people freely moving back and forth across lines without ever actually crossing borders.

Note to self: compare with role of boundaries in Trickster Makes This World

QuoteIt was the existence of the Other across the border that gave national security its power and authority; it is the disappearance of the border that has vanquished that power. Where Russia is now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no need to be secured.  France is fully capable of doing great damage to the United States, but that capability has no meaning in terms of U.S. security. In other words, if safety cannot be distinguished from danger, there is no border and, hence, no security problem.

QuoteSecuring the self and the state against change works both ways: it seeks to freeze lines on the ground and in the mind, and it keeps baleful influences out, but also imprisons those protected within the iron cage. I can do no better in ending this chapter than to quote James Der Derian (1995:34), who argues that "A safe life requires safe truths.  The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire for security." Surely we can do better than this.

QuoteIf threats are to retain their power to terrorize, therefore, they must be reimagined and fought, over and over, through words, through symbols and images, through languages and rhetorics.

QuoteMost contemporary discussions of strategy and battle are, therefore, not about "real" war. They are better understood as "discourses of war" meant, in the absence of an omnipotent and omnicompetent enemy, to terrorize and discipline both friend and foe, citizen and immigrant, alike.

QuoteDeterrence thus became a practice akin to telling ghost stories around the camp-fire: if one could scare oneself silly, perhaps others would be scared, as well (as Tom Leher put it, "If Brezhnev is scared, I'm scared"). But one would never want to become too scared, for to do so might be to lose self-control. . . .

QuoteThe classical image of war is one of a tightly controlled, well-executed pas de deux between two enemies, using the most advanced of weaponry, fighting along a well-defined front, each exerting maximum will. This is the idealized war, the AirLand Battle of NATO (whose imagined clarity, Clausewitz warned us, would prove wholly illusory if it came to pass), the conflict reimagined by Tom Clancy (1987) in his mind-numbing Red Storm Rising

QuoteFurthermore, rationality and irrationality, sanity and insanity might not even be the appropriate concepts to apply to this case. Assuming either rationality or irrationality (and nothing else) disregards questions of deep causality in explaining the onset of wars, ignores what is clearly a result of problematic histories of relations among and within states, and attributes events as they inexplicably occur to factors beyond anyone's control (e.g., faulty genes, chemical imbalances, or Comet Hale-Bopp).  Other causal processes simply drop out.

QuoteThe required publicity about the technology (although not about tactics or intelligence) illustrates an emerging paradox associated with disciplinary deterrence and warfare: Whereas countries once tried to keep their military capabilities a secret, so as not to alert or alarm real or potential enemies, it has now become common practice to reveal such capabilities, in order to spread fear and foster caution

QuoteBut post-modern war is not about the borders between states or even imaginary civilizations; as I proposed in chapter 3, it is about those difficult-to-see boundaries between and among individuals and groups. Who draws these lines? Who makes them significant? If they cannot be mapped, how can they be controlled?

QuoteThe reality is slightly more complicated, inasmuch as even properly functioning markets can foster maldistribution and relative scarcity.  As Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (1989; see also Sen 1994) have pointed out, not everyone starves during a famine—indeed, food is often quite plentiful. What crude market analyses don't take into account is that, even at market equilibrium, there may be those for whom prices are still too high. Those who have money can afford to buy, those who do not, starve. Scarcity is only relative in this instance, but some people (and countries) do go hungry.

QuoteThis is to say that sovereignty, whether individual or national, is about exclusion, autonomy, and keeping the Other out, both physically and mentally. It is also why uneven distribution is so central to international politics: it helps to perpetuate the hierarchy of power that, notwithstanding the acrobatics of neorealists, are central to international politics. That was the purpose of the princes' agreement at Westphalia; that is the point of the reification of methodological individualism today. Inside my boundary, I/we can act as we wish; outside of it, I/we can't. By redrawing or, in some circumstances, abolishing lines, we could change this premise, but that would mean sharing what we have with others and having less for ourselves.

QuoteFirst, in spite of long-standing evidence that Nature "respects no borders," the agreements signed at Stockholm in 1972, at Rio in 1992, and elsewhere during the intervening twenty years and since continue to reify the state as the sole appropriate agent of control, management, and development where environment is concerned.

Quotethe problem of unequal distribution will not go away; it will simply be shifted to those who lack the power to make trouble. Sustainability will thus come to be defined not by the justice of distribution but by the judgement of markets. Ecological interdependence will fall before wealth rather than force of arms, as the rich disempower the poor.

QuoteIn this and other recent works, both culture and identity have been invoked in essentialist terms, as factors that are as invariant as the earth on which they stand. States once came into conflict over raw materials (or so it is said; see Lipschutz, 1989; Westing, 1986); today they are liable to go to war over unfinished idea(l)s.  Straits, peninsulas, and archipelagos were once the objects of military conquest; today religious sanctuaries, languages, and national mythologies are the subjects of occupation and de(con)struction. The result appears to be a new type of geopolitics, one that invokes not the physical landforms occupied by states but the mental platforms occupied by ethnies, religions, and nations.

Some of this needs to go in the 5GW thread, I have realized.

Final section on After Authority:

QuoteMore to the point, not only are essentialist cultural explanations unhelpful, they are wrong. So-called ethnic and sectarian conflict are artefacts of changes within states driven, to no small degree, by forces associated with recent social transformations linked to global integration and external pressures for economic liberalization. Moreover, the fragmentation afflicting "weak" states, such as those in the Balkans, Central Asia, and Africa (Kaplan, 1996), is only the very visible tip of an iceberg that includes even those "strong" countries that are so prominent in the new global economy, including the United States.

QuoteMost of the violent conflicts underway around the world today are domestic and involve often-similar ethnic, religious, or class-based groups, struggling to impose their specific version of order on their specific societies.  Such social conflicts do appear to be contests for hearts, minds, and bodies, and combatants seem to feel no remorse in eliminating those whom they cannot convert—indeed, conversion is rarely an option.

QuoteThe crystallization of group identities is not a random occurrence; it is traceable to specific strategies, pursued by ethnic
entrepreneurs centrally concerned with the mobilization of group loyalties on behalf of collective interests defined in terms of kinship, region or ethnicity. . . . Clearly, one cannot overestimate the part played by individual actors in defining the nature of the threats posed to their respective communities, framing strategies designed to counter such threats, rallying support for their cause, bringing pressure to bear on key decision makers, and, in short, politicizing ethnoregional identities.

QuoteAs testified to by efforts to reassemble shattered states, such as Cambodia and Somalia, there may also be a sub-rosa fear that successful nonstate forms of political community could be disruptive of the current structure of international politics. In other words, for the time being, the only normatively acceptable form of political community at the international level is the state. A proliferation of clans, tribes, city-states, trading leagues, social movement organizations, transnational identity coalitions, diasporas, and so on could raise questions of legitimacy and representation that might very well undermine the status of existing states, not to mention well-established hierarchies of power and wealth.

QuoteThe end of the Soviet Union destroyed utterly and finally the conceptual border between the good of the Free World and the evil of the "bad bloc," thereby exposing the American people to all sorts of pernicious, malevolent, and immoral forces, beliefs, and tendencies

QuoteThe contemporary state no longer fulfils this moral role, and has not done so for many decades.  Contemporary threats to state and polity are almost wholly material: terrorists throw bombs, illegal immigrants take resources, diseases trigger illness. I argue to the contrary: the modern nation-state acts not only to protect its inhabitants from threatening material forces, it also acts to limit their exposure to noxious ideas by establishing boundaries that discipline domestic behaviour and beliefs. After all, what is a "terrorist" but someone with bad ideas? What is an "illegal" immigrant except someone who knowingly violates public norms? A state that cannot maintain such (b)orders becomes a prime candidate for disorder.

QuoteRather, the question is more properly understood as: Are the borders of our contemporary moral community to be national or global? If pernicious forces have free reign across formerly impermeable borders, how can the struggle stop at the water's edge?  And, if such miscreants threaten to penetrate the body politic with their black helicopters, Gurkha troops, and Soviet tanks, how can we not carry the culture war into the international realm (as Samuel Huntington and others have done)?

QuoteAs social institutions, markets are subject to both implicit and explicit regulations. The market is governed, first of all, by the command "Thou shalt not kill." Other rules follow. Walter Russell Mead (1995/96:14) makes a similar point about airports and air travel when he argues that, "Cut-throat competition between airlines coexists with common adherence to traffic and safety regulations without which airport operations would not be possible." So it is between states.

QuoteIn the United States, attacks on "liberals," right-wing violence against the federal government and the "New World Order," and conservative and religious fervour for "family values" (Bennett, 1998) can be understood as an attempt to reimpose a nationalistic moral frame on what some think is becoming a socially anarchic society (Lipschutz, 1998b; Rupert, 1997). The kulturkampf at home is paralleled by the transformation of state practice from military-based to discipline-based behaviour, especially where U.S. foreign policy is concerned (see chapter 4). A closer look suggests that the two are of a piece, as in the convergence of a draconian welfare policy with an increasingly vocal movement against immigrants—whatever their legal status—and their countries of origin.

QuoteTo restore its moral authority in times to come, the nation-state must redraw the boundaries of good and evil, replacing disorder with new (b)orders. The United States government is attempting to restore order at home and abroad in two ways. First, the notion of "democratization and enlargement," offered during the first Clinton administration, represents an attempt to expand the boundaries of the "good world" (see Clinton, 1997). Those who follow democracy and free markets subscribe to a moral order that makes the world safe for Goodness (which, in turn, supports the now-conventional wisdom that democracies never go to war with each other; but see Mansfield and Snyder, 1995). Second, as described in chapter 4, disciplinary deterrence is being directed against so-called rogue states, terrorists, and others of the "bad bloc," who are said to threaten the good world even though they possess only a fraction of the authority, influence, and destructive power of the latter.  Ordinary deterrence is aimed against any state with the capabilities to threaten or attack. Disciplinary deterrence is different. It is an act of national morality, not of national interests.

QuoteThe difficulty with disciplinary deterrence is that there is no there there, and it does not work very well. It is largely conducted against imagined enemies, with imagined capabilities and the worst of imagined intentions. Two men with explosives or cults with gas hardly pose a threat to the whole of the physical body politic; it is their ability to undermine faith in state authority that is so fearsome to those in power. And, as pointed out in earlier chapters, where "rogues" and other such enemies might choose to issue a challenge, or why they would do so, is not at all evident (see also Lipschutz, 1999b). But that these enemies represent the worst of all possible moral actors is hardly questioned by anyone. 

QuoteDisciplinary deterrence is not, however, limited to renegades outside of the United States; it has also been extended into the domestic arena. For most of the Cold War, the threat of Communist subversion, and the fear of being identified as a Pinko Comsymp in some police agency's files, were sufficient to keep U.S. citizens from straying too far from the Free World straight and narrow. Red baiting continued long after the Red Scares of the 1950s—one can even find it today, in the excoriation of so-called liberals (San Francisco Chronicle, 1997) and Marxist academics (Lind, 1991)—although the language of discipline and exclusion has become somewhat more sophisticated with the passage of time. Still, since the collapse of the Soviet Union it has been difficult for political and social elites to discipline an unruly polity; that things can get out of hand without strong guidance from above is the message of South Central (Los Angeles), Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge.

QuoteWhat is critical here is not political space, but political authority, in two senses: first, the ability to get things done, and second, recognition as the legitimate source of jurisdiction and action (as opposed to one's ability to apply force or coercion in the more conventionally understood sense). As John Ruggie (1989: 28) has pointed out, in a political system—even a relatively unsocialized one—who has "the right to act as a power [or authority] is at least as important as an actor's capability to force unwilling others to do its bidding" (emphasis added). In this neomedieval world, authority will arise more from the control of knowledge and the power that flows from that control than outright material capabilities. The power to coerce will, of course, remain important, but most people do not need to be coerced; they want to be convinced.

QuoteHere I would propose that the "organic intellectuals" that operate within these counter hegemonic social movements constitute a transnational cadre that could help to create the "double movement" discussed by Polanyi and Gill.

QuoteI do not refer here to populist opposition to globalization, as put forth by both the left and the right. Such movements seek to restore the primacy of the nation-state in the regulation of spheres of production and social life, although they have rather different ideas about the ends of such a restoration. Rather, I refer to more nuanced critiques of current modes of transnational regulation and their lack of representation, transparency, and accountability. Globalization offers a space for political organizing and activism of which these organic intellectuals and the mobilizers and members of nascent political communities are well-positioned to take advantage.

QuoteA deterritorialized political community would have to be based not on space, but on flows; not on where people live, but what links them together. That is, the identity between politics and people would not be rooted in a specific piece of reified "homeland" whose boundaries, fixed in the mind and on the ground, excluded all others.

Deconstruction: Theory and Practice

QuoteDeconstruction can be seen in part as a vigilant reaction against this tendency in structuralist thought to tame and domesticate its own best insights. Some of Jacques Derrida's most powerful essays are devoted to the task of dismantling a concept of 'structure' that serves to immobilize the play of meaning in a text and reduce it to a manageable compass.

QuoteThis is structuralism at its most conservative, an outlook that lends support to traditional ideas of the text as a bearer of stable (if complicated) meanings and the critic as a faithful seeker after truth in the text.

QuoteDeconstruction is avowedly 'post-structuralist' in its refusal to accept the idea of structure as in any sense given or objectively 'there' in a text. Above all, it questions the assumption – so crucial to Culler – that structures of meaning correspond to some deep-laid mental 'set' or pattern of response which determines the limits of intelligibility.

Quote'Kantianism without the transcendental subject' is a description often applied to structuralist thought by those who doubt its validity.  Culler's line of argument demonstrates the force of this slogan, showing itself very much akin to Kant's transcendental-idealist theory of mind and knowledge. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) set out to redeem philosophy from the radical scepticism of those, like Hume, who thought it impossible to arrive at any definite, self validating knowledge of the external world. They had tried and conspicuously failed to discover any necessary link between mind and reality, or 'truths of reason' and 'matters of fact'.  Thought seemed condemned to a prison house of solipsistic doubt, endlessly rehearsing its own suppositions but unable to connect them with the world at large. Sensory evidence was no more reliable than ideas like that of cause-and-effect, the 'logic' of which merely reflected our accustomed or common sense habits of thought.

QuoteKant saw an escape-route from this condition of deadlocked sceptical reason. It was, he agreed, impossible for consciousness to grasp or 'know' the world in the direct, unmediated form despaired of by Hume and the sceptics. Knowledge was a product of the human mind, the operations of which could only interpret the world, and not deliver it up in all its pristine reality. But these very operations, according to Kant, were so deeply vested in human understanding that they offered a new foundation for philosophy. Henceforth philosophy must concern itself not with a delusory quest for 'the real' but with precisely those deep regularities – or  a priori truths – that constitute human understanding.

QuoteMeanings are bound up, according to Saussure, in a system of relationship and difference that effectively determines our habits of thought and perception. Far from providing a 'window' on reality or (to vary the metaphor) a faithfully reflecting mirror, language brings along with it a whole intricate network of established significations. In his view, our knowledge of things is insensibly structured by the systems of code and convention which alone enable us to classify and organize the chaotic flux of experience. There is simply no access to knowledge except by way of language and other, related orders of representation. Reality is carved up in various ways according to the manifold patterns of sameness and difference which various languages provide. This basic  relativity of thought and meaning (a theme later taken up by the American linguists Sapir and Whorf) is the starting-point of structuralist theory.

QuoteInterpretation is a quest for order and intelligibility amongst the manifold possible patterns of sense which the text holds out to a fit reader. The role of a structuralist poetics is partly to explain how these powerful conventions come into play, and partly to draw a line between mere ingenuity and the proper, legitimate or 'competent' varieties of readerly response.

QuoteIn the early writing of Barthes, among others, the aim was a full-scale science of the text modelled on the linguistics of Saussure and the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. These ambitions were signalled by the widespread structuralist talk of criticism as a 'metalanguage' set up to articulate the codes and conventions of all (existing or possible) literary texts. Hence the various efforts to establish a universal 'grammar' of narrative, along with a typology of literary genres based on their predominating figures of language. This view of structuralism as a kind of master-code or analytic discourse upon language is taken by Barthes in his  Elements of Semiology (1967). Natural language, including the dimension of 'connotative' meaning, is subject to a metalinguistic description which operates in scientific terms and provides a higher-level or 'second-order' mode of understanding. It is evident, according to Barthes, that semiology must be such a metalanguage, 'since as a second-order system it takes over a first language (or language-object) which is the system under scrutiny; and this system-object is  signified through the meta-language of semiology' (Barthes 1967, p. 92). This tortuous explanation really comes down to the belief in structuralist method as a discourse able to master and explain all the varieties of language and culture.

I intend on reading this.  Thanks, Cain.

this is a great idea, cain..

(that and i like it to appear in my 'new replies' when you update.)

Coolio.

You guys may find the Deconstruction stuff interesting.  I sure as hell did, since I'm not up on post-1900 philosophy still, and this is kind of important in that general area.  Also, its linguistics and thus mercifully not more politics.  I'm kind of getting into the whole signifier/semiotics thing right now, though I concede Derrida may have also had some good points.

More Deconstruction:

QuoteThere are, however, signs that Barthes was not himself content with so rigid and reductive a programme. If semiology sets up as a second-order discourse unravelling the connotative systems of natural language, why should it then be immune to further operations at a yet higher level of analysis?

QuoteThe semiologist may seem to exercise 'the objective function of decipherer' in relation to a world which 'conceals or naturalizes' the meanings of its own dominant culture. But this apparent objectivity is made possible only by a habit of thought which willingly forgets or suppresses its own provisional status. To halt such a process by invoking some ultimate claim to truth is a tactic foreign to the deepest implications of structuralist thought. There is no final analysis, no metalinguistic method, which could possibly draw a rigorous line between its own operations and the language they work upon. Semiology has to recognize that the terms and concepts it employs are always bound up with the signifying process it sets out to analyse. Hence Barthes's insistence that structuralism is always an  activity, an open-ended practice of reading, rather than a 'method' convinced of its own right reason.

QuoteThe dream of total intelligibility, like 'structure' in its metalinguistic sense, belongs (he implies) to a stage of thinking that is self-blinded by its own conceptual metaphors. The element of rhetorical  play is present everywhere. Its effects in critical discourse may be ignored, but they are not effaced by the structuralist 'science' of semiotics.

QuoteThe apparent eccentricities of Barthes's later writing are mostly regarded as harmless whimsical diversions on the part of a critic who required some form of 'creative' escape from the exigencies of high-powered theory. This attitude, typical of Anglo-American criticism, draws a  firm line between the discipline of thinking about texts and the activity of writing which that discipline is supposed to renounce or ignore in its own performance. Criticism as 'answerable style' (in Geoffrey Hartman's phrase) is an idea that cuts right across the deep-grained assumptions of academic discourse. It is, as I shall argue, one of the most unsettling and radical departures of deconstructionist thought. A properly attentive reading of Barthes brings out the extent to which critical concepts are ceaselessly transformed or undone by the activity of self-conscious writing.

QuoteOne way of describing this challenge is to say that Derrida refuses to grant philosophy the kind of privileged status it has always claimed as the sovereign dispenser of reason. Derrida confronts this pre-emptive claim on its own chosen ground. He argues that philosophers have been able to impose their various systems of thought only by ignoring, or suppressing, the disruptive effects of language. His aim is always to draw out these effects by a critical reading which fastens on, and skilfully unpicks, the elements of metaphor and other figural devices at work in the texts of philosophy. Deconstruction in this, its most rigorous form acts as a constant reminder of the ways in which language deflects or complicates the philosopher's project. Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea – according to Derrida, the ruling illusion of Western metaphysics – that reason can somehow dispense with language and achieve a knowledge ideally unaffected by such mere linguistic foibles. Though philosophy strives to efface its textual character, the signs of that struggle are there to be read in its blind-spots of metaphor and other rhetorical strategies.

QuoteDerrida's attentions are therefore divided between 'literary' and 'philosophical' texts, a distinction which in practice he constantly breaks down and shows to be based on a deep but untenable prejudice. His readings of Mallarmé, Valéry, Genet and Sollers are every bit as rigorous as his essays on philosophers like Hegel and Husserl. Literary texts are not fenced off inside some specialized realm of figurative licence where rational commentary fears to tread. Unlike the New Critics, Derrida has no desire to establish a rigid demarcation of zones between literary language and critical discourse. On the contrary, he sets out to show that certain kinds of paradox are produced across all the varieties of discourse by a motivating impulse which runs so deep in Western thought that it respects none of the conventional boundaries.  Criticism, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, the whole modern gamut of 'human sciences' – all are at some point subjected to Derrida's relentless critique. This is the most important point to grasp about deconstruction. There is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its own prehistory and ruling metaphysic.

More Deconstruction

QuoteDeconstruction draws no line between the kind of close reading appropriate to a 'literary' text and the strategies required to draw out the subtler implications of critical language. Since all forms of writing run up against perplexities of meaning and intent, there is no longer any question of a privileged status for literature and a secondary, self-effacing role for the language of criticism.

QuoteDerrida's line of attack is to pick out such loaded metaphors and show how they work to support a whole powerful structure of presuppositions. If Saussure was impelled, like others before him, to relegate writing to a suspect or secondary status, then the mechanisms of that repression are there in his text and open to a deconstructive reading.

QuoteThe point will bear repeating: deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of categories which otherwise remain distinct and unaffected. It seeks to undo both a given order of priorities and the very system of conceptual opposition that makes that order possible

QuoteDeconstruction is therefore an activity of reading which remains closely tied to the texts it interrogates, and which can never set up independently as a method or system of operative concepts. Derrida maintains an extreme and exemplary scepticism when it comes to defining his own methodology. The deconstructive leverage supplied by a term like writing depends on its resistance to any kind of settled or definitive meaning. To call it a 'concept' is to fall straight away into the trap of imagining some worked-out scheme of hierarchical ideas in which 'writing' would occupy its own, privileged place.

QuoteThe  concept of structure is easily kidnapped by a tame methodology which treats it as a handy organizing theme and ignores its unsettling implications. Derrida perceives the same process at work in the structured economy of differential features which Saussure described as the precondition of language. Once the term is  fixed within a given explanatory system, it becomes (like 'structure') usable in ways that deny or suppress its radical insights.

QuoteHence Derrida's tactical recourse to a shifting battery of terms which cannot be reduced to any single, self-identical meaning. Différance is perhaps the most effective of these, since it sets up a disturbance at the level of the signifier (created by the anomalous spelling) which graphically resists such reduction.

QuoteDerrida replied characteristically by turning the question round to reveal its oversimplified terms of argument. If there is no possibility of breaking altogether with Western metaphysics, it is equally the case that every text belonging, however rootedly, to that tradition bears within itself the disruptive potential of a deconstructive reading. As Derrida puts it, 'in every proposition or in every system of semiotic research . . . metaphysical presuppositions coexist with critical motifs' (Derrida 1981, p. 36). Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce. The most rigorous reading, it follows, is one that holds itself provisionally open to further deconstruction of its own operative concepts.

QuoteNietzsche often seems to spell out in advance the programme and systematic ruses of deconstruction, adopting the same attitude of sceptical rigour and denying himself any secure resting-place in method or concept. Philosophers, he argued, were the self-condemned dupes of a 'truth' which preserved itself simply by effacing the metaphors, or figurative discourse, which brought it into being. If language is radically metaphorical, its meanings (as Saussure was later to show) caught up in an endless chain of relationship and difference, then thought is deluded in its search for a truth beyond the mazy detours of language. Only by suppressing its origins in metaphor had philosophy, from Plato to the present, maintained the sway of a tyrannizing reason which in effect denied any dealing with figural language.

QuoteDeconstruction begins with the same gesture of turning reason against itself to bring out its tacit dependence on another, repressed or unrecognised, level of meaning.

QuoteAlong with his compatriot and near-contemporary Karl Marx, he stands among the great demythologizing figures of modern thought. Between them Marx and Nietzsche stake out the main possibilities and rival claims of post-structuralist criticism.

QuoteFor Derrida, the language of dialectical materialism is shot through with metaphors disguised as concepts, themes that carry along with them a whole unrecognised baggage of presuppositions. It must henceforth be a question, Derrida says, of taking that language and investigating 'all the sediments deposited [in it] by the history of metaphysics' (see Derrida 1981, pp. 39–91).

QuoteElsewhere in Writing and Difference Derrida broaches the relation between text and politics, suggesting briefly that deconstruction offers 'the premises for a non-Marxist reading of philosophy as ideology'.

QuoteTo deconstruct a text in Nietzschean-Derridean terms is to arrive at a limit-point or deadlocked aporia of meaning which offers no hold for Marxist-historical understanding. The textual 'ideology' uncovered by Derrida's readings is a kind of aboriginal swerve into metaphor and figurative detour which language embraces through an error of thought unaccountable in Marxist terms.

QuoteThe end-point of deconstructive thought, as Derrida insists, is to recognize that there is no end to the interrogative play between text and text. Deconstruction can never have the final word because its insights are inevitably couched in a rhetoric which itself lies open to further deconstructive reading. Criticism can only be deluded in its claim to operate (as Eagleton puts it) 'outside the space of the text' on a plane of scientific knowledge. There is no metalanguage.

QuoteFoucault, like Nietzsche, adopts what he calls a 'dissociating view' of historical meaning, one that sets out to shatter 'the unity of man's being through which it was thought he could extend his sovereignty to the events of his past' (ibid., p. 154).

QuoteFoucault's Nietzschean rhetoric amounts to an activist rewriting of Derrida's text on Hegel. It sets out to create a maximum disturbance in the charmed circle of exchange where history, consciousness and meaning coincide in the mastery of knowledge. Foucault's critique would equally apply to a Marxist 'science' convinced of its power to escape the figurality of language and achieve a perspective atop all the conflicts of textual signification. It is no longer, he argues, 'a question of judging the past in the name of a truth which only we can possess in the present'. History writing on Nietzschean terms involves a surrender of the privileged claim to knowledge once entertained by a sovereign consciousness. It becomes a question, in Foucault's words, of 'risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge' (ibid., p. 164). Such is the effect of applying a Nietzschean or deconstructive rhetoric of tropes to the self-possessed categories of Marxist-structuralist thought.

QuoteThis is not to condemn critical theory, as some would suppose, to an endless play of self-occupied textual abstraction. Rather it is to recognize, with Foucault, that texts and interpretative strategies compete for domination in a field staked out by no single order of validating method. Foucault follows Nietzsche in deconstructing those systems of thought which mask their incessant will to power behind a semblance of objective knowledge. His analysis of these various 'discursive practices' constantly points to their being involved in a politics none the less real for its inextricably textual character. Edward Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), has offered a very practical example of how deconstruction can engage cultural history on its own textual ground and contest its claims to objectivity. The image of 'the Orient' constructed by generations of scholars, poets and historians is shown to be governed by an ethnocentric discourse secure in the power of its superior wisdom. Occidental reason is confirmed point for point in its mythography of oriental laziness, guile and 'exotic' irrationalism. To combat this discourse by exposing its ruses of metaphor is not to set up as a 'science' unmasking the confusions of ideology. It is an act of challenge which situates itself on rhetorical ground the better to meet and turn back the claims of a spurious objectivity.

QuoteThe zeal for deconstruction has not, on the other hand, always gone along with the kind of argumentative rigour Derrida calls for here. Indeed, its appeal for some critics rests very largely on the promise of an open-ended free play of style and speculative thought, untrammelled by 'rules' of any kind. This response has characterized much of what passes for American deconstructionist criticism, at least in its more publicized varieties. With the notable exception of Paul de Man – whose texts display an early-Derridean incisiveness and rigour – the Yale critics have mostly opted for deconstruction on its dizzy, exuberant side.

QuoteOn the other hand there have been serious attempts to grapple with deconstruction on alternative philosophic ground. These mostly start out from the view that scepticism is not (as even Bloom seems forced to admit) irrefutable on its own terms of argument. Indeed, it may turn out to be self-refuting if one asks the sceptic by what special privilege his or her own arguments are exempt from doubt or mistrust (see Abrams 1978). The deconstructors clearly expect that their texts will be read with care and attention, their arguments weighed and their conclusions discussed in a decently responsible manner. Yet how can this be squared with their own professed scepticism towards meaning, logic, truth and the very possibility of communication? Their case might seem open to what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in a slightly different context, has called the 'transcendental tu quoque'. That is, they demand that their texts be properly understood – or at least intelligently read – while ostensibly denying the power of language to encompass any such end.

 Interestingly I'm frequently finding points that I very much agree with and others I very much disagree with coming from the same book.

  Cool stuff to share Cain.  Thanks.

Critical Theory: An Introduction

QuoteCritical theory allows us to explore the cultural production and communication of meanings in precise and nuanced ways, and from a range of different perspectives. It questions the ways in which we might be used to making sense of artistic, historical or cultural artefacts and prompts us to reconsider our beliefs and expectations about the ways individuals interact with material things and with each other

QuoteLanguage is not a transparent medium through which ideas can pass between minds without alteration. Rather, as almost all of the essays and entries in this book acknowledge, it is a set of conventions that influence or even determine the sorts of ideas and experiences people are able to have. Language is cultural (some thinkers even claim it is the essence of culture), and therefore open to criticism and change. If linguistic meaning were naturally given, for example, why would there be more than one language? A word does not mean what it does 'naturally'; rather meanings arise on the basis of complex linguistic and cultural structures that differentiate between truth and falsity, reality and fantasy, and good and evil, and are inextricably tied up with value judgements and political questions, as well as with identity, experience, knowledge and desire.

QuoteStructuralism's understanding of the world, then, is that everything that constitutes it – us and the meanings, texts and rituals within which we participate – is not the work of God, or of the mysteries of nature, but rather an effect of the principles that structure us, the meanings we inhabit and so on. The idea is that the world without structures is meaningless – a random and chaotic continuum of possibilities. What structures do is to order that continuum, to organize it according to a certain set of principles, which enable us to make sense of it. In this way, structures make the world tangible to us, conceptually real, and hence meaningful.

QuoteIn order for the idea 'spinster' to become meaningful in language, the concept of 'women', as the other of 'men' in the duality 'women and men', would have to come first. The idea 'spinster' could not, in other words, exist without a corresponding idea of gender as male and female. But any meaning for 'spinster' is of course also dependent on the prior establishment of the concept of marriage, as well as a differential understanding of the status of 'women' and 'men' in relation to marriage. Indeed, in this example, meaning begins to seem to have a great deal more to do with value, and specifically cultural value, than the model of language as a naming system might suggest. The meaning of spinster is, after all, surely not inevitable, natural or true, but rather the product of a system of cultural values which are open to debate. If this is the case, then far from simply naming an objective reality, language would seem to play an important role in realizing reality, as well as its meaning for us within the linguistic communities we inhabit. If we did not have the linguistic term 'spinster', would we think of female existence in the ways that we do? It is certainly relatively easy to imagine a social community in which the concept of a spinster might have no meaning whatsoever – not necessarily because unmarried women do not exist, but rather because women are not simply valued, or thought of as meaningful, in relation to whether or not they are married to men.

QuoteAs I have already suggested, for Saussure language is not simply a system for naming a reality which pre-exists it. Turning that notion on its head, Saussure argued instead that language is in fact a primary structure – one that orders, and therefore is responsible for, everything that follows. If this is so, then it seems fairly straightforward that different languages will divide, shape and organize the phenomenal world in different ways. While this understanding of language allows us to see cultures other than 'our' own as relatively different, by implication it must also show us that the culture we claim as 'ours' is in turn neither natural nor inevitable. That is, it demands that we recognize as  structurally produced the culture which seems to us most obvious, most natural and most true. What Saussure's work gave to structuralism, then, was an account of language as a primary structure, a system of signs whose meanings are not obvious, but rather produced as an effect of the logic internal to the structural system that language is.

QuoteI could go on. It may be sufficient, however, to draw the following three conclusions from this example: (i) signs function to constitute meaning only within the terms of the system of which they are a part; (ii) while all sign systems function according to their own structural principles, they all function nonetheless like language; (iii) all forms of cultural text can therefore be understood as signifying systems, the meanings of which are not fixed for all time but, rather, are open to change.

Quotenarrative can be found in numerous aspects of life: not only in other forms of art (drama, poetry, film) but in the ways in which we construct notions of history, politics, race, religion, identity and time.  All of these things, regardless of their respective claims to truth, might be understood as stories that both explain and construct the ways in which the world is experienced. As Barthes famously said, 'narrative is international, trans-historical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself'.

QuoteThe sentence 'Walking dogs should be encouraged' has a single surface structure (plot) and two deep structures (stories). Accordingly, this single sentence can be read as an invocation to encourage dog owners to exercise their pets (story 1) or as a suggestion that perambulating dogs should be cheered on and applauded (story 2). Conversely, the sentences: 'The dog ate my homework' and 'My homework was eaten by the dog' have different surface structures (plots), i.e. they differ in their word order, but have the same deep structure (story). The meaning of both sentences is the same, despite the variation in its presentation.

QuoteDespite these legitimate calls for caution, the distinction between story and plot provides a useful way of approaching narratives. One of the implications of the split is the suggestion that story, which is only ever available as a paraphrase, is translatable from medium to medium, whilst plot appears to be text-specific. This is to say that an individual story can appear in numerous distinct texts and across a wide range of media: for example, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has appeared as a trilogy of novels (1954, 1954, 1955), an animated film (Ralph Bakshi dir. 1978), numerous computer games (1985–2004), a radio play (Brian Sibley, 1981) and, most recently, as Peter Jackson's highly successful trilogy of films (2001, 2002, 2003). Despite this variety of media and 'authors' there is a general consensus that the story of The Lord of the Rings is recognizable in each instance.

Quote'The term History, unites the objective with the subjective side, and denotes . . . not less what has happened, than the narration of what has happened' (Hegel 1991: 60). History is not discovered but constructed; in other words, facts do not speak for themselves – the historian selects and interprets facts. Accordingly, histories are always composed, created and situated narratives, and it follows that they should be approached as such.

QuoteAttempts to bring narratology into inherently political and ideological theories, such as feminism, gender and race, have met with mixed success.

QuoteWhat Marx demonstrated was that far from comprising an open and neutral environment the capitalist economy is first and foremost a power structure. The basis of this power structure is class oppression.

QuoteAs emerging enterprises create more advanced, diverse and cheaper products, then not only does this steadily reduce profit margins, it also begins to undermine the entire capitalist structure of property relations. An example of this would be the internet, where all kinds of copyright material and products (texts, music, pharmaceuticals, software and so on) can be obtained freely or at much reduced prices. Faced with this type of threat, the typical response of transnational corporations is to increase monopolization by buying up the smaller enterprises and actively stifle competition, innovation and development in order to protect markets and profits. So there is an inherent tension between the revolutionizing drives within capitalism (technological advances, etc.) and capitalism itself (a productive mode based on profit).

QuoteThe Czech Marxist Kautsky, for example, was to observe that by the early twentieth-century workers were far more interested in trade unionism and social democratic (party) politics than revolutionary communism. This has led writers such as Lichtheim (1974) to argue that Marx's view of inevitable revolution really only held credibility under the conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. As these conditions have been transformed through social reform/welfarism (not least as a result of trade union activity and social democratic politics) this view is neither relevant nor likely.

QuoteA central assertion was that capitalist society was moving to a new level of ideological sophistication through what Horkheimer called the 'culture industry'. Culture had replaced religion as the new 'opium of the masses' in framing a subtle order of conformism. According to Benjamin the emerging context was one in which the possibility of independent art forms was becoming more and more compromised by an ever expanding mass culture whose basic tendency is towards the banal and mediocre. And this tendency is insidiously political. Not only are cultural enterprises and artefacts increasingly managed and produced on a mass scale for consumption purposes but, at a deeper level, they feed into a self-perpetuating milieu of docility. Mainstream theatre, radio, television, internet and so on can be seen to be already in the service of a certain pacifying bourgeois culture. Indeed all such media may be said to be at its most ideological precisely when it aspires to this idea of neutral entertainment: that is to say, when it implicitly accepts, and consequently naturalizes, the power configuration of the capitalist status quo – thereby displacing and eviscerating all sense of critique and critical energy.

More Critical Theory:

QuoteIn a similar way, capitalism is a system that seemingly allows for all kinds of individual expression and innovation but only to the extent that it creates a kind of monotheistic attachment to the system itself. It creates a conformism through diversity (an e pluribus unum) in which more and more forms of individualistic 'improvisation' are accommodated on the basis of an underlying collectivist consumer culture.

QuoteThe legacy of the Frankfurt School has developed in two main and divergent ways. The first of these reflects an optimistic belief in the power of high culture to oppose and transcend the superficial materialism of the bourgeois ethos. Echoes of this approach can be found in the thought of Jürgen Habermas who exhibits a kind of Enlightenment-based faith in the civilizing influence of what he calls 'communicative rationality' and its perceived capacity for overcoming ideological distortion and social conflict.

QuoteIn stressing the extent of interconnectedness between culture and the economy in an overall configuration there has been a strong tendency in Marxist thought – and especially Marxist structuralism – to endow that configuration with an absolute centre: the functionalist logic of capital. With thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, for example, capitalism is generally affirmed as a totalizing structure that draws all the elements of socio-cultural life ('high' and 'low') together under its instrumentalist rationality. In consequence the popular classes become thoroughly incorporated into the capitalist system. Yet if social identity is subject to such a degree of structuralist closure then how can any form of political resistance ever arise? In effect we would seem to be presented with a simple inversion of Marx's position: instead of being pre-programmed to overthrow capitalism, the masses are doomed to conformist subordination within it.

QuoteWhile the view of the proletarian masses as avenging agents of social revolution is excessively optimistic, the pessimistic Frankfurt School view of the masses as docile Stepford workers is equally extreme. Gramsci rejects both determinism and fatalism and shows identification to be a historico-political matter without any final resolution.

QuoteObjects, practices and events can only be apprehended through the assignment of meaning, and this assignment is neither fixed nor neutral but always takes place within a historical framework. As Derrida puts it, 'there are only contexts without any absolute centre or anchorage' (Derrida 1988: 12).

QuoteDoes this mean that everything is in a constant state of liquidity where meanings change from one moment to the next? Evidently not. People can and do identify with all kinds of positions – the biblical account of the universe, political conspiracies, for and against genetic manipulation, pro-/anti-globalization, etc. – and produce all kinds of material to support their claims. But whether these achieve wider credibility is entirely another matter. And credibility is not the result of any naturalism or imperial measure but is always a human-contextual matter where interpretive collectives – scientists, academics, judges, journalists, policy-makers – broadly establish the nature of 'evidence', 'coherence', 'best practice' and so on. Such categories depend for their constitution on the specific discursive formation in question and the success of the latter depends, in turn, on its ability to exclude/repress other possible formations.

QuoteSecond, and perhaps more insidiously, the postmodern emphasis on difference is one that tends to assume a kind of level playing-field – all identities must be respected and considered equally without prioritizing one type of identity or social struggle over another. The effect of this, however, is to render real poverty, global hunger and social exclusion virtually invisible and/or abstract (such things happen 'elsewhere').  Thus what is overlooked is precisely this dimension of the necessary exception vis-à-vis the culture, or economy, of differences. Just as slavery showed the symptomatic truth (the embodied negativity) of Athenian democracy as a tyranny of citizens, so too today's abject multitude discloses the truth of postmodern capitalism as a tyranny of differences: a global differential inclusiveness that in order to function relies upon even deeper trenches of exclusion.

QuoteWhat Žižek affirms, by contrast, is a politics of the act. The act (which is derived from Lacan) refers to a radical break with an existing pattern of social existence in such a way that it opens up new possibilities for reconfiguring that social existence.

QuoteThe primary property of language is that it differentiates. We can confirm that vocabulary is not acquired simply by pointing to referents (things in the world) when we remember that later the child will go on to learn to use words such as 'justice' and 'honesty' [...] If abstract values are not learnt from referents in the world, what about words that name nothing material, but are crucial, even so, to the process of reasoning, such as 'because', 'although', and 'if'? There is nothing for them to correspond to.  Does language name ideas, then? Poststructuralism would say not. On the contrary, ideas come into sharp relief for us when we learn the meanings of the terms.

QuoteLanguage – or signifying practice – does not belong to individuals.  Instead, it already exists before we are born into a world where people reproduce it all round us. Though it constantly changes, these modifications prevail only to the degree that they are shared. In that sense, meanings belong to other people. Lacan calls language 'the Other'. If I opt to hijack it for purely private purposes, I must expect to be seen as psychotic.

QuoteThe debates about the meaning of a given text continue, but they are located where they belong: in the process of interpreting the text itself, and not in appeals to external authority. There can be no one single correct reading of a text, but there can still be misreadings, as a result of inattention, unfamiliarity with the signifiers, or failure to recognize resemblances or allusions to other texts.

QuoteThe little human animal, if we can imagine a child that is not already surrounded by signifying practices at birth, would be continuous with the organic world it inhabits, an undifferentiated part of it. But language, Lacan proposes, drawing on Saussure and, to a degree at least, anticipating Derrida, cuts off that direct relation to the world, in so far as the signifier interposes itself between us and our relation to things. The signifier, which differentiates and divides, offers a way to specify our wishes, but at the same time its advent divorces us from a direct apprehension of what Lacan calls 'the real'. The real is unnamed, unnameable, concealed in the shadows cast by the light language throws on the entities it denominates. The signifier names the referent in its absence; it thus relegates the real, obscures it, renders it missing from consciousness by taking its place.

QuoteThere is no escape, then, even in a world of undecidability, from choosing, and the possibilities, which have material implications, are understood at the level of the signifier. In the poststructuralist account, fiction foregrounds this, makes it explicit. Poststructuralism repudiates the view that fiction reflects the world: the signifier constructs an illusion of reality not its simulacrum. At the same time, however, fiction repeatedly confronts its readers with choices. Which suitor would you marry? Which suspect would you blame? Which account would you rely on? The fictional characters decide – and readers decide whether they are right or wrong. These decisions are not always straightforward. King Lear makes the wrong choice; so does Othello. But what about Hamlet?  Cultural criticism offers a 'safe' environment to practise making choices.

QuoteThis postmodern way of thinking – which many see as paradoxical – can be characterized as displaying a 'both/and' kind of logic. Making distinctions but not making choices (which would be an 'either/or' kind of logic) between the popular and the elite, the postmodern offered instead a model that would force us to consider equally both sides of this (or any other) binary opposition, and in effect to undo or to 'deconstruct' the seeming opposition between its two terms. There is an obvious parallel here with the theorizing of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and founder of the theory known as deconstruction. Demonstrating how every binary conceals within it an implied hierarchy of values, Derrida strove not to reverse but, more radically, to undo both the opposition and its implicit evaluation of one term as superior. In the process he made us rethink the relationship between not only the oral and the written (his main interest) but also such familiar binaries as high art/popular, white/black, male/female, and so on.

Good stuff, dude.

From Lt Col David Grossman - On Killing

QuoteWhen people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of  an animal). They are literally "scared out of their wits." The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.

QuoteAnother way to look at this is to make an analogy with AIDS. AIDS does not kill people; it simply destroys the immune system and makes the victim vulnerable to death by other factors. The "violence immune system" exists in the midbrain, and conditioning in the media creates an "acquired deficiency" in this immune system. With this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more vulnerable to violence-enabling factors, such as poverty, discrimination, drug addiction (which can provide powerful motives for crime in order to fulfil real or perceived needs), or guns and gangs (which can provide the means and "support structure" to commit violent acts).

QuoteIn Japan we see a powerful family and social structure; a homogeneous society with an intact, stable, and relatively homogeneous criminal structure (which has a surprisingly "positive" group and leadership influence, at least as far as sanctioning freelancers).

QuoteWith the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill. Others might respond, "Any man will kill in combat when he is faced with someone who is trying to kill him." And they would be even more wrong, for in this section we shall observe that throughout history the majority of men on the battlefield would not attempt to kill the enemy, even to save their own  lives or the lives of their friends.

QuoteThe fight-or-flight dichotomy is the appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission.

QuoteThe trauma of rape, like that of combat, involves minimal fear of death or injury; far more damaging is the impotence, shock, and horror in being so hated and despised as to be debased and abused by a fellow human being.

QuotePerhaps a deeper understanding of the power of the buffeting of hate can be obtained from a study of survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Even the briefest review of available literature reveals that these individuals did suffer from great, lifelong, psychological damage as a result of their experiences in concentration camps, even though they did not have any obligation or ability to kill their tormentors.  Among bombing victims, POWs under artillery fire, sailors in naval combat, and soldiers on patrols behind enemy lines we do not find any large-scale incidence of psychiatric casualties, but in such places as Dachau and Auschwitz they were the rule rather than the exception.

QuoteDuring strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them. And among the POWs who were subject to bombing (as we saw earlier) the bombs were not personal, and the guards were no threat to the POWs as long as they played by the rules. But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.

QuoteNumerous studies have concluded that men in combat are usually  motivated to fight not by ideology or hate or fear, but by group pressures and processes involving (1) regard for their comrades, (2) respect for their leaders, (3) concern for their own reputation with both, and (4) an urge to contribute to the success of the group.

QuoteTo be truly effective, soldiers must bond to their leader just as they must bond to their group. Shalit notes a 1973 Israeli study that shows that the primary factor in ensuring the will to fight is identification with the direct commanding officer. Compared with an established and respected leader, an unknown or discredited leader has much less chance of gaining compliance from soldiers in combat

QuoteIn addition to creating a sense of accountability, groups also enable killing through developing in their members a sense of anonymity that contributes further to violence. In some circumstances this process of group anonymity seems to facilitate a kind of atavistic killing hysteria that can also be seen in the animal kingdom. Kruck's 1972 research describes scenes from the animal kingdom that show that senseless and wanton killing does occur. These include the slaughter of gazelles by hyenas, in quantities way beyond their need or capacity to eat, or the destruction of gulls that could not fly on a stormy night and thus were "sitting ducks" for foxes that proceed to kill them beyond any possible need for food. Shalit points out that "such senseless violence in the animal world — as well as most of the violence in the human domain — is shown by groups rather than by individuals."

QuoteIn the same way that this process has traditionally enabled violence in police forces, it can also enable violence on the battlefield.  Alfred Vagts recognized this as a process in which enemies are to be deemed criminals in advance, guilty of starting the war; the business of locating the aggressor is to begin before or shortly after the outbreak of the war; the methods of conducting the war are to be branded as criminal; and victory is not to be a triumph of honour and bravery over honour and bravery but the climax of a police hunt for bloodthirsty wretches who have violated law, order, and everything else esteemed good and holy.

QuoteAs we have seen before, death from twenty thousand feet is strangely impersonal and psychologically impotent. But death up close and personal, visiting the manifest intensity of the enemy's Wind of Hate upon its victims, such death can be hideously effective at sapping the will of the enemy and ultimately achieving victory.

QuoteBy ensuring that their men participate in atrocities, totalitarian  leaders can also ensure that for these minions there is no possibility of reconciliation with the enemy. They are inextricably linked to the fate of their leader. Trapped in their logic and their guilt, those who commit atrocities see no alternatives other than total victory or total defeat in a great Gotterdammerung.

QuoteGroup absolution can work within a group of strangers (as in a firing-squad situation), but if an individual is bonded to the group, then peer pressure interacts with group absolution in such a way as to almost force atrocity participation. Thus it is extraordinarily difficult for a man who is bonded by links of mutual affection and interdependence to break away and openly refuse to participate in what the group is doing, even if it is killing innocent women and children.

QuoteThere is such a thing as a "natural soldier": the kind who derives his greatest satisfaction from male companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical obstacles. He doesn't want to kill people as such, but he will have no objections if it occurs within a moral framework that gives him justification — like war — and if it is the price of gaining admission to the kind of environment he craves. Whether such men are born or made, I do not know, but most of them end up in armies (and many move on again to become mercenaries, because regular army life in  peacetime is too routine and boring).

QuoteIn a way, the obedience-demanding authority, the killer, and his peers are all diffusing the responsibility among themselves. The authority is protected from the trauma of, and responsibility for, killing because others do the dirty work. The killer can rationalize that the responsibility really belongs to the authority and that his guilt is diffused among everyone who stands beside him and pulls the trigger with him. This diffusion of responsibility and group absolution of guilt is the basic psychological leverage that makes all firing squads and most atrocity situations function.

Foucault's Political Philosophy

QuoteThe episteme  is for Foucault the historical order that governs the production of knowledge across disciplines in a particular historical epoch by governing what counts as proper knowledge within scientific discourse (which is to say that the episteme does not necessarily apply to everyday discourses).

QuoteFoucault takes as his model DNA, the hidden, material code which determines what unfolds at the explicit level

QuoteAs Hubert Dreyfus (1987, xi) points out, Foucault in his work criticises the truth claims of the human sciences only, and thus not those of the natural sciences, though he is interested in understanding the "ritual" implicit in natural science

QuoteThe notion of  ideology  is one that Foucault generally refuses to invoke because of a presumed Marxist connotation that discourse is subordinate to more basically material forces.

QuoteFoucault's point here is that Marx is situated within the same episteme as thinkers before him, and hence does not represent a radically new way of thinking. However, this indicates no difference between Althusser and Foucault at the level of ontology, only a difference in how they relate their own ontological claims to Marx, with Althusser claiming that his philosophy is fundamentally rooted in Marx, whereas Foucault claims that Marx was working within an older framework of thought that we have now moved beyond.

QuoteNietzsche's Genealogy tells the story of the development of ethics as a means for the control of the strong by the weak—more generally, this exemplifies the use of supposedly non-political knowledge as a tool for taking power. Power and its ubiquity to life is a key theme of Nietzsche's philosophy, and it is this particular Nietzschean influence that is crucial to Foucault now.

QuoteThis notion that knowledge is invented has two implications. The first is that there are ulterior motives behind it, which are not the high ones often imputed to it, namely the urge to understand and explain the world. For Nietzsche, knowledge is rooted in non-human animal drives: for knowledge to be invented, it must have been invented by an animal which did not have knowledge, in order to further the struggle of animal existence, which for Nietzsche (TI "Skirmishes" §14) is a struggle for domination.

QuoteThe second implication is that, conversely, knowledge, while rooted in what came before, while an invention made by and out of things that were there before it, is in fact, "paradoxically" (EW3 7), something genuinely novel, an innovation: "Knowledge is the result of the instincts, but . . . it is not an instinct and is not directly derived from the instincts" (EW3 10). The novelty of knowledge means that it does not merely arise as the expression of experience of things in the world: "According to Nietzsche, there is no resemblance, no prior affinity between knowledge and the things that need to be known" (EW3 8). Knowledge is rather the attempt to impose order on an intrinsically chaotic world (EW3 9). It was never just an attempt to describe the way things are.

Quote"I repeat once again that by production of truth I mean not the production of true utterances but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent. "

QuoteFoucault's demand is that we stop expecting discourse or knowledge to conform to either our perception or to reality. Appearances are in themselves ineffable: we cannot describe them  completely accurately, for to represent them in their complexity in words would take an eternity and destroy the utility of speech, the reason that we were speaking in the first place (cf. Nietzsche TL I). Thus, violence towards things is necessary to discourse; the error here is to have ever thought that the purpose of speech was to represent transparently how things truly are, non-violently, since that is impossible.

QuoteI think we can see the episteme as similarly underdetermining what is said: it governs what may be declared to be true, in the sense of excluding an infinity of possible propositions, but the relation of words to things also plays a determining role in whether propositions are assented to or not, although of course the role of individual volition in producing utterances is also important. As Foucault puts it in Birth of the Clinic, there is "an excess of the signified over the signifier" (BC xviii). To put it in a crude formula: truth = reality ÷ episteme.

QuoteThus, words cannot correspond  to things, as in the classic philosophical theory of truth, but can only relate to them in an inevitably inadequate way through the rules of a given discourse or period.

QuoteDerrida shows that words do not in fact relate to things the way they were assumed to in Saussure's structural linguistics, but rather that the relation between words and things is more like the relation words have with one another: things are, like words, part of systems of reference/signification, which ultimately form a single network of signification encompassing both all words and all things. Words derive meaning from the relations both to other words and to things, which in turn have relations of signification to other things, so that all things are signifiers of signifiers, as well as themselves signified, rather than it simply being the words that signify and the things that are signified.

QuoteFoucault, on the other hand, sees all language as inherently violent, because language can never adequately respect reality, hence the dream of non-logocentric discourse merely veils the specific violence of Derrida's own work, as the theory of coherence did the violence of earlier discourse.  Derrida tries to eschew all violence, even that essential to discourse itself.   As Foucault has it, the "logophilia" of our rationalist culture belies a "logophobia" which is in fact so scared of discourse it tries to neuter it

QuoteIt is the antagonism inherent to nature that is the basis for the discontinuity of language with previously-existing reality. Missing from Derrida's picture is both the animal that existed before language who invented language, the instincts and drives of that animal that led to that invention and which continue to support it, and the senseless materiality of extralinguistic reality; Derrida (1976, 74–75) brackets such questions.

QuoteThis seems to contradict our epistemology, in that the notion of reality as chaotic seems impossible to square with a respect for scientific discoveries. As Descombes (1980, 116) puts it, "On the one hand, Foucault's approach is that of a positivist. . . . Yet, on the other hand, Foucault as a reader of Nietzsche does not believe in the positivist notion of  fact." Descombes (1980, 117) thus claims that Foucault's work amounts to nothing more than "a seductive construct, whose play of erudite cross-reference lends it an air of verisimilitude." The accusation here is the classic one of relativist paradox: the relativist says truth is relative, but then this statement is itself relative—so he cannot be sure of it. Happy positivism avoids this criticism, however, because it asserts the necessity of putting forward underdetermined statements in view of the impossibility of full determination. There is no need for provisos that this is not really how things are, since there can be no description which does cleave to how things actually are. "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting," as Foucault says (EW2 380).

Quote"When I say I am studying the "problematization" of madness, crime, or sexuality, it is not a way of denying the reality of such phenomena.  On the contrary, I have tried to show that it was precisely some real existent in the world which was the target of social regulation at a given moment. The question I raise is this one: How and why were very different things in the world gathered together, characterized, analyzed, and treated as, for example, "mental illness"? What are the elements which are relevant for a given "problematization"? And even if I won't say that what is characterized as "schizophrenia" corresponds to something real in the world, this has nothing to do with idealism. For I think there is a relation between the thing which is problematized and the process of problematization. The problematization is an "answer" to a concrete situation which is real."

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QuoteFoucault then rapidly becomes preoccupied with power. In 1971, in his famous televised conversation with Noam Chomsky in the Netherlands, Foucault (1974, 172) says that he thinks looking at the state or the class behind the state is insufficient to explaining what is going on at the level of power. On the 4th March 1972, Foucault makes the point that "we still perhaps do not know what power is. And Marx and Freud are perhaps not sufficient to help us understand this quite enigmatic thing called power."

QuoteIn Society Must Be Defended, Foucault produces a genealogy of the notion of power.  The traditional conceptions of power—at any rate the "juridical" and "liberal" conceptions of power coming from the Enlightenment—tend, according to Foucault, to treat power as a "commodity" (SD 13) or "attribute" (Deleuze 1988, 27) that could be possessed, hence focusing attention on the powerful individual, the one who "has" power. Foucault's basic move is to say that this approach to power, relating it to the individual, fails to comprehend what happens at the level of power itself.

QuoteFoucault (EW2 440) himself later noted that his ignorance of the work of the Frankfurt School was unfortunate insofar as knowledge of their work would have saved him many missteps, and that his ignorance of their work and of Max Weber's was simply due to the fact that they were unknown in France. Weber's work on power itself has significant similarities to Foucault's, particularly its uncannily similar terminology: "power," "domination," "resistance," and "discipline." Still, Foucault (RM 115–29) himself notes, had he known of the work of the Frankfurt School, he probably would simply have followed their approach, hence would not have produced the unique and highly-influential approach that he did.

QuoteElsewhere, Foucault criticises Marxists for reducing power to the state and to class, which is to say, because it too has power as a commodity held by a subject, albeit an institutional or corporate, abstract one, namely by the state and/or by a dominant class. Marxism is condemned because Marxism, like liberalism, fails to take power seriously as a level on which things happen.

QuoteI would extrapolate the following characteristics of power as composing Foucault's core anti-subjectivist conception of power; they are all found in both The Will to Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish:
  1. The impersonality, or subjectlessness, of power, meaning that it is not guided by the will of individual subjects (DP 26; SD 29; WK 94)
  2. The relationality of power, meaning that power is always a case of power relations between people, as opposed to a quantum possessed by people (DP 27; WK 94)
  3. The decentredness of power, meaning that it is not concentrated on a single individual or class (DP 27; PK 142; SD 27; WK 94)
  4. The multidirectionality of power, meaning that it does not flow only from the more to the less powerful, but rather "comes from below," even if it is nevertheless "nonegalitarian" (DP 27; PK 142; WK 94 [quoted])
  5. The strategic nature of power, meaning that it has a dynamic of its own, is "intentional" (DP 26; PK 142; WK 94 [quoted])

Quoteto say power is decentred is implied by its impersonality, since any centre, whether it be an individual or an elite, would be a subject; since power cannot be possessed, it can only be relational, residing in the interstices between individuals, since if it resided in individuals, they would possess it; if it is relational and decentred, then it must be multidirectional, because, since it does not have a centre, yet clearly must have form (if it is to be anything at all), it must be organised autonomously around its own tendencies and directionality, rather than those that individual subjects might have.

QuoteFoucault's additional stipulations are that power is:
coextensive with resistance (WK 95; PK 142)—this aspect we will leave aside for the moment, to deal with in Chapter 5, which is devoted  to the topic of resistance;
productive, producing positive effects (PK 94)—this aspect will be dealt with in a subsequent section of this chapter;
ubiquitous, being found in every kind of relationship, as a condition of the possibility of any kind of relationship (WK 94; PK 142)

QuoteFoucault's reconception of power is presented as a reaction and a solution to the problems of a long-dominant conception of power on the model of sovereignty, the model of the monarch reigning over his subjects, power of one person over another, and hence of one group over another, of the state over society. Famously, Foucault writes of there being a need to cut off the king's head in political theory (WK 88–89), to catch up with the actual political changes which were wrought by the literal cutting off of the King of France's head in 1793.

QuoteThis is not to imply that the power structure ultimately rests on consent: "Power is not a matter of consent" (EW3 340) for Foucault. Foucault's point is that the power of the sovereign, sovereignty itself, is produced by complex relations across society, regardless of the degree of consent—as we shall see, the overall logic of the strategic situation is divorced from the desires of individuals. While power indeed "comes from below," it still admits of radically inegalitarian relations (WK 94). While power was always decentred and multidirectional, it was not acephalous: in the monarch there used to be one point in the network which was enormously privileged, even though its predominance was far from total. It was not the case that the power of the monarch was simply an illusion that could be thrown off in an instant, but rather part of a real, entrenched network of power and of discourses which could only be changed through a great rupture

QuoteAs Thomas Lemke (1997, 100) points out, it was not just the monarchists, but also their opponents who bought into the monarchical conception of power. Indeed, the principle of having a supreme leader with a quasi-monarchical function is still ubiquitous in modern political societies, republics having presidents whose roles, though they may be ceremonial, seem somehow still to be requisite.

QuoteAs David Weberman (1995, 194) points out, all power is necessarily both productive and repressive: if we stop someone from doing one thing, they will do something else (unless we kill them), while to make someone do one thing is always to stop them from doing whatever else they might have done; as Weberman (195) puts it, "in getting us to do X, it is always at the same time (more or less) effective in getting us not to do Y."

QuoteFoucault says something slightly different here, however, namely that the conception of society that predominates is a hangover from an earlier social formation. Marxism in fact itself is guilty of retaining this conception of power—Foucault specifically accuses Marxist class analysis of being more germane to feudal power relations than present-day society

QuoteIn a society in which power was about negative sanctions, naturally a negative conception of power grew up. In the modern era, new technologies of power emerge, which, while they have the same general characteristics of all power, are more productive, in the sense that they allow for the close production of behaviours in both individuals and entire populations beyond what was possible before.

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QuoteIn the modern period, according to Foucault, sovereign power has been supplemented (though by no means replaced, at the limits of our society) by two new technologies, namely discipline and biopower, the former micropolitical, and the latter macropolitical. Discipline, the older of the two, is the technology by which men's bodies are controlled and trained in prisons, factories, schools, et cetera, the appearance of which is charted in Discipline and Punish: it is the technology of individuals. Biopower, operating at the entirely opposite level, is responsible for constituting the population (SD 245), hence the modern nation. The technology of discipline encompasses techniques of individual surveillance and dressage. Biopower involves techniques of mass surveillance, such as the census, and of mass control, such as health campaigns.  Because of the different levels at which these two modern technologies operate, they complement one another without conflict. By contrast, discipline and biopower are both in some contradiction with sovereign power, since they do not operate simply through violence, but by training bodies and keeping people alive respectively (SD 254).

QuoteSovereignty only operates insofar as the newer technologies do not. They are used together in tandem, but require a device to separate those who are subject to the lethal technology of sovereignty, namely criminals, proscribed ethnic groups, and foreigners, and those who must be "made to live" by biopower—for Foucault, this device is racism (SD 256; see also Kelly 2004a)

QuoteAs an example of a mobile technique of power, Foucault (RM 170) points to concentration camps in the twentieth century, which once invented were applied in vastly different scenarios by many different states.

QuoteThere is no knowledge without an apparatus of knowledge-production in which relations of power are invested, but there is also no apparatus invested by power relations which does not itself produce knowledge, discourse by which it understands and explains its own operation, which it uses to further its operation. In the modern prison, knowledges such as criminology and psychology form a condition of the prison's existence, and have the prison as a condition of their existence. Such discourses on the one hand are a necessary part of the prison's functioning, organising data necessary for the control of the prisoners (DP 126), and on the other perform specifically discursive functions, explaining the prison's function in terms of correcting criminal behaviour, thus justifying the prison to society at large, allowing the prison system to understand itself and even acting as a controlling discourse by which criminals come to understand their own behaviour, which then modifies said behaviour in regular ways (cf. DP 102–3).

QuotePower-knowledge is again an explicit corrective to Marxism, to the Marxist notion of ideology (Gordon 2004; O'Farrell 2004; cf. EW3 87), in which (non-Marxist) discourse is classically seen as a superstructural effect of, and cover for the machinations of, economically-based power.

QuotePower and discourse are not automatically allied nor automatically opposed, nor is either more basic than the other. While Foucault (PPC 106) criticises the human sciences for being riddled with power, he also allows that there are "psychological and sociological theories that are independent of power," and leaves the natural sciences out of his criticisms entirely. While his general thesis does imply that there is power at work in the natural sciences—and it would be naïve to deny that there is a lot of politics at work in science—scientific discourses are not determined by power in their intrinsic content in the same way as certain other discourses, because the things whereof they speak generally do not have a great deal of specific political import, and are hence compatible with many different political strategies.

QuoteWhen Foucault speaks of "the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (WK 100) too, he might as well speak of the tactical polyvalence of power relations: just as apparently contradictory discourses can in fact cohere at the level of a grander strategy (WK 101), so too can apparently contradictory power relations; just as discourses can circulate unchanged between general strategies (WK 102), so too can power relations. Thus, the description from The Archaeology of Knowledge of a system which is coherent despite the presence of incompatible parts (AK 66), discursive unities composed of many competing sub-theories, can be applied to power too.

Quotethe materiality of power, just like the materiality of discourse, is mitigated by the fact that neither is truly self-sufficient. Neither can exist without people, nor without a social, institutional framework which supports them.

QuoteFoucault, for his part, points out that power is not a substance. Power is not the same as other things, cannot be reduced to them, but neither can anything else be reduced to it. Against the misinterpretation of Foucault's view of what power is, Foucault describes power as "the form, differing from time to time, of a series of clashes which constitute the social body, clashes of the political, economic type, etc."

QuotePower is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

QuoteThe network of power relations and its strategies are emergent, regularly produced by the agents involved—although the now-familiar concept of emergence was not in Foucault's philosophical vocabulary. Emergent strategies of power loom large in Foucault's case studies of power, Discipline and Punish and The Will to Knowledge. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that what he calls the "carceral system" functions regularly to produce a relatively stable effect, namely the existence of "delinquency"—in short, prisons function to demarcate and perpetuate a criminal class, who themselves play a certain social role. This is of course certainly not the intention of anyone who is involved in the carceral system, not the intention of government, of the guards, of the wardens, of the prisoners, but it is nonetheless the net effect. One of the most interesting and paradoxical parts of Foucault's thesis in Discipline and Punish is that one essential piece of this system is in fact the prison reform movement which condemns the prisons precisely for producing delinquency, since it buttresses the institution of the prison by calling for its improvement, whereas, as Foucault reveals, the prison is itself is as an institutional form inextricably bound-up with delinquency (DP 264–70). The intentions of those whose stated purpose is to eradicate delinquency are part of the logic of power which produces it, as are those of the policemen trying to eradicate crime. This is the aforementioned "tactical polyvalence," which is the condition of the coherent strategy with its contradictory elements, elements which speak against one another while strategically cohering, like prison reformers and prison guards.

QuotePower therefore also lacks the type of directedness which is characteristic/constitutive of what is ordinarily called human intentionality, the type of relationship people have towards the world. Power has "aims and objectives," but these work ultimately towards a single purpose, namely the stability of the network of power relations itself: "power is an ensemble of mechanisms and procedures which have as their role or function and theme, even if they do not reach it, precisely securing power"

QuoteSociety is full of different forces, individual and corporate, struggling with one another. Sometimes there is cooperation towards shared goals. At other times there is open combat. The more powerful force may utterly destroy the weaker, or force it into subjugation, or it may itself be forced to compromise and reach a settlement with the weaker force in order to pursue other objectives, or out of exhaustion. Any settlement is inherently unstable: the forces will change, the same old forces will try again to gain the upper hand, but after such disturbances, new accommodations will be found. The net effect of all this gross struggle is the production of an ensemble of power relations whose strategies are those of enforcing the social settlement.

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QuotePower organises itself by itself: it must adapt and take account of what it finds, an ever-changing environment. Foucault is clear, however, that power should not be understood on the model of an organism (PK 206).  Power, unlike an organism, is not autopoietic (to use another term Foucault never did), or "self-producing": "these relations are not self-generating, are not self-subsisting, are not founded by themselves" (STP 4); (a strategy of) power is not a Luhmannian system. But neither does this mean that power's intentionality arises simply by accident: rather it is produced from elsewhere, by the contestation of forces, which is itself self-organising.

QuoteThe model Foucault chooses to employ instead of the organic model of autopoiesis used by Luhmann to understand social systems in understanding power is that of war: "power is war, the continuation of war by other means" (SD 15). Here Foucault reverses Clausewitz's famous dictum, that war is politics by other means, into the claim "that politics is war by other means" (SD 15). This is pure Nietzschean genealogy, reminiscent of Nietzsche's thesis that our present-day "civilised" society is the domination by slaves, rather than the absence of domination. It contradicts John Locke's (1689) formula that the state of nature is a state of peace which descends into a state of war, followed by the establishment of civil society, which ends it: for Foucault it is war from the outset, which never ceases, but rather becomes civil society. Foucault also pointedly distinguishes himself from Thomas Hobbes, who of course, unlike Locke, believes that the state of nature is already a state of war from the outset, because Foucault does not agree with the argument, common to Hobbes and Locke, that government ends the state of war.

QuoteWhile Hobbes readily concedes the continuation of a state of war in the present despite the existence of the Leviathan, this is in fact only to the extent that the Leviathan's dominance is not total. Foucault, on the other hand, self-consciously follows in the tradition of the left "political historicism" (SD 111) which sees war as "a permanent feature of social relations" (SD 110), something exemplified, not mitigated, by the state. The prime example of this is of course "class war," which does not need any kind of open conflict to exist, but is rather an entrenched antagonism.

QuoteNow, there is obviously a difference between such permanent antagonism and war  simpliciter. Actual, physical violence is the most obvious criterion for making such a distinction, yet it is in fact neither necessary nor sufficient to this distinction, since all states that have ever existed at some point or other employ violence in a regular way in their running, in "keeping the peace," and since wars themselves are not things which occur exclusively at the level of physical violence. We can thus see a continuum between war and politics: discourse and violence are always both present in either art; diplomacy and the knife are both tools of both war and politics.

QuoteWhen war starts, there is of course a kind of rupture in the international order, but power relations which cross the battle lines do not disappear entirely. Thus, we can see a certain kind of cooperation and mutuality between sides in even "total" conflicts. A war has a certain kind of semi-stable existence, which allows its incorporation into strategies of power, in which the war is presupposed in the strategic configuration of power relations on both sides of the battle lines, and in which a certain dynamic operates between the foes as the contest with one another for domination, just as individuals or groups do within society in peacetime. War is no more unidirectional than any other modality of power relations (it could not be, since the two are bound together): within the victor's camp there has always been vying for position, strategy, alliance, and also within the defeated people. Hence alliances, implicit or explicit, across the lines of battle between mutually supportive tendencies in the other camp have always existed too: the Allies wanted the plotters against Hitler to succeed and, even if the two groups were not in direct communication, the Allies formed an essential component of the renegades' plot to kill Hitler and rescue Germany, the Allies hoping to incite just such treachery within the ranks of the enemy.

QuoteIndeed, for Foucault, the peaceful state of society is an ossification of a previous state of war

QuoteFoucault, like the seventeenth-century political philosophers, posits a state of war, followed by the birth of civil society. Thus Foucault is genealogical in a sense which he shares with Locke as well as Nietzsche. For Foucault, however, unlike for the classical genealogists, including even Nietzsche to some extent, the establishment of civil society is a matter not of a compact between men to end war, nor of the forcible ending of war by a conquering leader, nor even of the cunning ruse against the warlike victors by the vanquished. It is rather a matter of a war which is self-organising, which, through the dynamic of the war itself forms civil society as a state of stabilisation, not by ending war with victory and thus peace, but by ossifying the battle lines and allowing for a new form of much more sophisticated and productive contention.

QuoteAll the lines of force, across, behind, between the battle lines, carry over into the peace, with everyone contending even in so-called civil peace against one another, and every individual riven by struggles between sub individual forces. The difference between war and civil peace is only a relative lack of open violence in the latter, with the contention between forces possibly boiling over into new war or revolution, which may in turn result in a new settlement. Indeed, from the inversion of Clausewitz, Foucault concludes that "the final decision can only come from war, or in other words a trial by strength in which weapons are the final judges" (SD 16). Foucault calls this schema "Nietzsche's hypothesis," and it is indeed thoroughly Nietzschean, in that it sees society as a relentless struggle of contending wills to power.

QuoteThis reality is at the heart of the thesis of Discipline and Punish: there is power wherever there is law, but the law neither describes nor prescribes what is happening at the level of power; the law is something flexible, which is applied very differently at different points, different times and different places (cf. DP 21–22). The law is something which does not do what it says it is doing: the net effect of a law which applies such-and-such penalties for such-and-such crimes cannot be discerned from the law itself.

Quote"What is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. Of course violence itself is terrible. But the deepest root of violence and its permanence come out of the form of the rationality we use. The idea has been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of violence. This is quite wrong. Between violence and rationality there is no incompatibility. My problem is not to put reason on trial, but to know what is this rationality so compatible with violence."

QuoteFoucault is still no pacifist, moreover, despite the above condemnation of violence. In 1983, provoked by a particular local manifestation of the early '80s pacifist movement, Foucault (DE2 1357) identifies the problem of pacifism with the problem of the concept of peace, which he calls "a dubious notion," and sets out the need for investigation along these lines.  Deleuze (1988, 70; emphasis in original) says that, for Foucault, violence is "a concomitance or consequence of force, but not a constituent element." This is to say that "force relations" will always produce violence, but violence is not part of what makes something a force relation—open violence is not required all the time, but it is sure to happen sometimes where power is concerned. Foucault stipulates in "The Subject and Power" that power and violence are quite different things, but that does not mean that you can have one without the other.

QuoteThe metaphor that in Foucault's later work largely displaces that of war is that of the game. In the early '70s, Foucault tends to insist on violence and war: power is violence, politics is warfare by other means, discourse is violence. In the late Foucault, the paradigm is the game: truth is a game (TS 15; EW1 281), power is a game (DE2 545; EW1 29).

And again:

QuoteThe essential difference is one of level: war occurs at a grand, societal level, whereas the game occurs at an interpersonal one. Note that the grand scale might be called a game, but should not be, since this plays into the hands of those politicians who do treat war like a game; and we can certainly describe friendships and other personal relations as strategic, but calling them "war" serves to diminish what is good in them, would sound paranoid.

QuoteStill, the model of war never really captured what Foucault was trying to do. War and strategy are models which suggest sovereignty, in that they suggest leadership. It is rather the Hobbesian war of all against all that most closely corresponds to Foucaultian power. A Freudian model would in fact do just as well, however: if archaeology looks at the "unconscious of knowledge" (OT x), then genealogy can be said to look at the political unconscious.

QuoteLike the psychic unconscious, discourses have their own unconscious, and so too does politics have its own unconscious, the strategies of power. The similarity to the unconscious mind is obvious: it has its own dynamic which is thoroughly concealed behind the explicit claims and interpretations associated with it, yet is nevertheless discoverable through an analysis of what is said at a level other than that of its explicit meaning.

QuoteAgainst the tendency to locate everything at the level of the masses and economics, Foucault claims that there is something highly specific going on at the level of government which is not reducible to what is going on below, that the state is not just the representation of struggles between subterranean forces.

QuoteBasically, power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or their mutual engagement than it is a question of "government." This word must be allowed the very broad meaning it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed—the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It covered not only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action for others.

QuoteFoucault's conception of power was always then one in which people related to one another, though also one in which the individuals involved in the games of power were themselves partly constituted by it, and the forces involved therefore operated at a "sub-individual" level.

QuoteThere is indeed, however, a further criterion for what counts as a power relation: in a 1984 interview, Foucault identifies a power relationship as "a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other" (EW1 292; emphasis added).

QuoteOn the side of the wielder of power, then, there must be some intention vis-à-vis the one who is to be affected. Otherwise there is no action upon an action, merely an action which affects another action, which any action whatever ultimately is. In the cases of communication and physical actions, they can affect others in such a way that power is involved, but also in such a way that it is not. If, in a blind rage perhaps, I shove someone out of my way and continue to walk, they may act to steady themselves, but this is completely irrespective of my intentions, which were just to get by. If I ask them to move, then it is power, since I act to try to make them act in turn. If I tell someone news that I do not know will affect them, and it does, profoundly, for reasons I could not have
known, this can hardly be power. But if, knowing this background, tell them the same news in the same nonchalant way, it can hardly not be power, hardly not be expected to provoke a response.

QuoteThus when Foucault talks of power, he is not talking about one person having power over another, the legal right, but of one person actually exercising power over another. This includes acting "on the field of possibilities" (EW3 341); if I remove someone's ability to do something, that too is power. The case of Locke's (1690) locked room, where someone is willingly in a room, which has then been locked unbeknownst to them, thus removing the possibility of their leaving, would be a case of power. What is not power, in Foucault's sense, is the mere possibility of acting on someone else's activity: my capacity to intimidate people into doing things is not power unless it is actualised in actual intimidation.

QuoteNow, it is easier to grasp the point that what we mean our actions to do, our own intentionality, does not necessarily, or even particularly often, coincide with the actual effects of those actions than it is to grasp that all our actions, averaged over society, all our actions put together, between them have an intentionality of their own, which is neither our intentionality, nor even some corporate sense of purpose, nor Rousseauian general will.

QuoteIn Foucaultian power, only  deliberate influence can concatenate into a network which exhibits strategic characteristics. Attempts of people to influence other people cohere together in a specific way. They take account of others' attempts to influence people, come together in alliances, are determined (in a sense) by other power relations. One power relation does not occur irrespective of other power relations.

Quoteif someone wants me to do things, and I want other people to do things, these various potential
power relations will play against each other, tending towards some kind of integration, either through the elimination of certain power relations, or compromises in which they attain compatibility. This compatibility is itself strategic: an overall strategy emerges for the purpose of integrating various power relations. The people who are fed up with crime exercise their power on their rulers to do something about it, the rulers exercise power directly by hiring underlings and having them build and staff prisons, by passing laws that direct police and the judiciary, these people follow their orders and exercise power on criminals. The net effect of this is nothing less than the regular and continuing production of a class of delinquents. This might seem bizarre in that it exceeds, and indeed apparently contradicts, the motives of the agents involved, but in fact it is simply the way in which all the power relations have been integrated productively. This can be seen in the way that the production of delinquency in fact serves a number of purposes, such as the purpose of capital in dividing the working class and demonising a certain element as the cause of problems, which in fact ensures the very stable situation which produces this very criminal layer. This network, (relatively) stable though it is, contains any number of power relations in which the intent behind the power relation is not realised: prisoners often do not respond as warders try to get them to, for example. And this is a regular part of prison functioning, providing the occasion for the regular occurrences of brutality and disorder which perform roles in the formation of the kind of individuals who are produced by prisons, in the confirmation of the beliefs of wardens, the public, in innumerable ways, despite that no-one wants this. The system is only, as I say, relatively stable, however, which means that often enough effects are produced which do not abide by the settlement that the system represents. But even within the stability of the system, apparent disorder occurs which is in fact a regular part and effect of the strategies of power, which appears to be resistance, and which is resistance from the perspective of local power relations, but is not from the perspective of the grand strategies of power.

QuotePower is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network.

Are these things cut and pasted, or are you actually typing them out?

Cut and paste.  They're ebook notes.  I do have IRL notes in IRL notebooks, but I have absolutely no inclination to transcribe them.

Fifty Key Thinkers In International Relations

Raymond Aron

QuoteA prudent approach to the theory and practice of politics lay in the acknowledgement of different of and often incompatible political values, and therefore in the availability of and competition between divergent interpretations/ideologies that privileged some at the expense of others. Particular interpretations could be analysed critically in terms of their internal consistency, as well as their compatibility with existing social and political structures, but it would be utopian to believe in the use of reason to transcend such competition.

QuoteIn principle, he defended Western, liberal capitalism against its leftist critics as the best means of
combining economic growth with some measure of political freedom and economic redistribution. While recognizing the fact of class conflict, he never believed in the idea that 'the working class' was either sufficiently homogeneous or motivated to revolt against the inequities of capitalist society. If capitalist societies could combine the search for profits with some measure of welfare and redistribution, he saw no reason why the conflict between workers and capitalists should be zero-sum. Indeed, he hoped that in the longer term such societies could moderate ideological competition, although he worried about the dominance of pressure groups in weakening the democratic process and depriving liberal states of sufficient 'steering capacity' in the interests of the society as a whole.

QuoteIn his most famous phrase, international relations is 'relations between political units, each of which claims the right to take justice into its own hands and to be the sole arbiter of the decision to fight or not to fight'.

QuoteIn the absence of a simple formula to predict state goals, the best one could do as a thinker, diplomat or strategist is to attempt an understanding of state aims and motives on the best evidence available.

QuoteAron points out, for example, that the 'excess capital' of France – which according to the theory would require overseas colonies to be invested in – usually went to South America and Russia rather than North Africa. Moreover, he suggested that there was no good reason why home markets should not expand indefinitely to absorb any 'excess production' of the advanced capitalist states. In contrast, he emphasized traditional interstate rivalry as the main 'cause' of war.

E.H. Carr

QuoteCarr engages in a sustained critique of the 'utopian' thinking that he argues dominated Western intellectual thought and diplomatic practice in the interwar years. He suggests that all human sciences, particularly when they are young, tend to be somewhat prescriptive, subordinating the analysis of facts to the desire to reform the world.

QuoteCarr argued that the faith and optimism concerning collective security, as well as the institution of the League of Nations, which was designed to implement it, was based on the erroneous assumption that the territorial and political status quo was satisfactory to all the major powers in the international system. In a world of separate sovereign states of unequal power, this was unlikely ever to be the case. Conflict among states, therefore, was not merely a consequence of a failure to understand one another, but an inevitable result of incompatible aspirations that could only be dealt with on the basis of negotiation in light of the balance of power, rather than by appealing to 'universal' principles of moral conduct.

QuoteThis approach would entail the need to substitute rhetoric with diplomacy, and to subordinate universal principles to the procedural ethics of compromise between status quo and revisionist states in the international system.

Quote"The process of give-and-take must apply to challenges to the existing order. Those who profit most by that order can in the long run only hope to maintain it by making sufficient concessions to make it tolerable to those who profit by it the least, and the responsibility for seeing that these changes take place as far as possible in an orderly way rests as much on the defenders as on the challengers."

QuoteAlthough he was a severe critic of utopian thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, he also acknowledged that realism without utopianism could descend into a cynical realpolitik: '[c]onsistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgement, and a ground for action'.

QuoteCarr was acutely aware of the dramatic changes in foreign affairs brought about since the French Revolution and the growth of democracy. Mass participation in the political process could not be sustained unless Western societies discovered new ways to manage the market and achieve forms of social democracy that required intervention in the market-place rather than naive nineteenth-century ideas derived from simplistic readings of Adam Smith. Notwithstanding his own somewhat naive view of Hitler in the late 1930s, he acknowledged that the Second World War was as much a product of revolutionary ideology as the clash of enduring national interests. Despite the horror of war, he argued that the experience of fascism and communism had contributed useful lessons to Western democracies, particularly the need for social planning and international intervention to tame the inequities of global capitalism.

QuoteFor those interested in the problems of nationalism at the end of the Cold War, Nationalism and After is still required reading, for many of its arguments and analyses are as relevant today as they were when Carr made them. In this book, he argues that the principle of national self-determination is no longer a recipe for freedom, but guarantees conflict insofar as its interpretation along ethnic lines is incompatible with the ethnic diversity of most states. Furthermore, twentieth-century nationalism is closely linked to the rise of public participation in the political system, which would lead to a dramatic rise in the number of 'nation-states' if the process were not managed. At the same time, there was a clear incompatibility between the value of national self-determination as an expression of freedom and the waning economic power of the nation-state to deliver either military or social security to its people. According to Carr, the solution was to create large multinational and regional organizations of states which could better co-ordinate their policies and sustain a commitment to social justice than either Soviet-style communism or American 'free enterprise'.

QuoteBut whatever its philosophical weakness, Carr's work reminds us that however we justify our commitment to values such as liberty or equality, they remain abstract and somewhat meaningless unless they are embodied in concrete political and economic arrangements, the reform of which is contingent on a complex historical process in which progress cannot be guaranteed.

Continued extracts from the same book.

Robert Gilpin

QuoteContrary to those who argued that the growth of economic interdependence was undermining the state and reducing the relevance of coercive military power to determine economic influence in world affairs, Gilpin argued that a liberal international trading order depended on the very factors it was alleged to be undermining, namely the presence of a powerful state to provide what have come to be called international 'public goods'.

QuoteMarkets cannot flourish in producing and distributing goods and services in the absence of a state to provide certain prerequisites. By definition, markets depend on the transfer, via an efficient price mechanism, of goods and services that can be bought and sold among private actors who exchange ownership rights. But markets themselves depend on the state to provide, via coercion, regulation and taxation, certain 'public goods' that markets themselves cannot generate. These include a legal infrastructure of property rights and laws to make contracts binding, a coercive infrastructure to ensure that laws are obeyed, and a stable medium of exchange (money) to ensure a standard of valuation for goods and services. Within the territorial borders of the state, governments provide such goods. Internationally, of course, there is no world state capable of replicating their provision on a global scale. Building on the work of Charles Kindleberger and E.H. Carr's analysis of the role of Great Britain in the international economy of the nineteenth century, Gilpin argues that stability and the 'liberalization' of international exchange depend on the existence of a 'hegemon' that is both able and willing to provide international 'public goods', such as law and order and a stable currency for financing trade.

QuoteGilpin's model of systemic change is based on a number of assumptions about states that he derives from microeconomic, rational choice theory. This is used to postulate a cyclical theory of change in the international system. It consists of five key propositions.

(1) An international system is stable (in a state of equilibrium) if no state believes it profitable to change the system.
(2) A state will attempt to change the international system if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs.
(3) A state will seek to change the international system through territorial, political and economic expansion until the marginal costs of further change are equal to or greater than the expected benefits.
(4) Once equilibrium between the costs and benefits of further change and expansion is reached, the tendency is for the economic costs of maintaining the status quo to rise faster than the economic
capacity to sustain the status quo.
(5) If the disequilibrium in the international system is not resolved, then the system will be changed, and a new equilibrium reflecting the redistribution of power will be established.

QuoteAs far as Gilpin is concerned, world history since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has been a period of systemic change within a state-centric system, and the stability or otherwise of the system
depends on the existence of a political and economic hegemon. But stability is difficult to sustain because economic and technological change is never evenly distributed among states. Hence over time there is an increasing gap between the status and prestige of particular states and the power they are able to deploy to safeguard their national interests. Despite the need for peaceful change in the system to manage the process of change, Gilpin grimly observes that, up to now, 'the principal mechanism of change...has been war, or what we shall call hegemonic war (i.e., a war that determines which state or states will be dominant and will govern the system)'. The factors that
lie behind change in the international system are largely environmental, and these structure the array of incentives that states have to try and change the system to their benefit, such as population shifts and the diffusion of military technology throughout the system.

QuoteGilpin argues that the decline of US hegemony is likely to usher in a period of 'new mercantilism', perhaps even the establishment of new trading blocs under the respective regional hegemonies of the United States, Germany and Japan.

John Herz

Quote"We live in an age where threats to the survival of all of us – nuclear super-armament, populations outrunning food supplies and energy resources, destruction of man's habitat – concern all nations and people, and thus must affect foreign policy-making as much as views of security."

QuoteHowever, in contrast to Hans Morgenthau and other 'classical realists' of the period, Herz does not trace the 'power factors' to permanent characteristics of human nature. He acknowledges that the latter has many dimensions – biological, metaphysical and even spiritual – that combine to determine human behaviour, and any adequate account must recognize human ethical properties.

QuoteInstead of appealing to metaphysics, Herz posits the existence of a 'security dilemma' as the key factor. It arises from the individual's consciousness that others may be seeking his or her destruction, so there is always some need for self-defence, which in turn may make others insecure. What is true among individuals is equally relevant to understanding group behaviour. In fact, Herz argues that the security dilemma is more acute among groups, for the simple reason that groups can develop means of self-defence that are far more destructive than those available to individuals. Moreover, insofar as individuals come to equate their own identity and worth with that of the group to which they belong, they may be prepared to sacrifice their life on behalf of the survival of the group. Thus, even if one makes the most optimistic assumptions about the nature and motives of individuals and groups, the security dilemma will persist as long as there remain groups that are not subordinate to a higher authority. In the modern world, these are sovereign states.

Quote"The very fact that technical developments of weapons and armaments in themselves wield such a tremendous impact has meant that they have almost come to dictate policies, instead of policies determining the type and choice of weapons, their use, amount of armaments, and so forth. In other words, instead of weapons serving policy, policy is becoming the mere servant of a weapon that more and more constitutes its own raison d'être."

QuoteHerz identifies three reasons for the continuation of territoriality as a marker of political differentiation. First, decolonization had led to a remarkable 'creation' of new states, and Herz admitted that he had not anticipated the speed with which 'old empires' had collapsed. Second, Herz admitted that the technological determinism of his earlier argument was in fact deterministic. He had not acknowledged the power of nationalism in sustaining the territorial state regardless of its military permeability in the nuclear age. Third, while Herz continued to lament the arms race between the two superpowers, he later claimed that the balance of terror was more robust than he had thought a decade earlier. In 1968, he argued that if the nuclear arms race was to be controlled in the future, a 'holding operation' was necessary. This would consist of a set of policies such as 'arms control, demarcation of bloc spheres, avoidance of nuclear proliferation...and reducing the role of the ideologies of communism and anticommunism'.

QuoteHerz does not think that the end of the Cold War justifies complacency in the analysis of international relations. The Cold War came to an end because one superpower could no longer sustain its competition with the West, on ideological or economic terms. It did not come to an end as a result of any policy-makers deciding to place the 'human' interest over the 'national' interest. Although the fear of nuclear war between the great powers has lessened, it has been replaced by new fears of nuclear proliferation, and the legacy of old images lives on. For example, the United States continues to evoke the legacy 'appeasement' in justifying its policies towards Iraq, and there is no indication that what Herz calls 'a survival ethic' has replaced what he disparages as 'regional parochial' ethics in international relations. In his retirement, Herz has dedicated himself to what he calls 'survival research', concerned less with descriptive and explanatory analyses of contemporary international relations than with urging us to abandon the images of international relations that make 'regional parochialism' possible.

Samuel Huntington

QuoteThe 'Clash of Civilizations' thesis holds that religion has emerged as one of the primary causes of
conflict, and that the erosion of the nation-state, coupled with the rising influence of Western secular power (via globalization), reflects the likelihood that religion will replace the nation-state as the primary source of conflict in world politics. Its theoretical framework is based on two (seismic) indicators: so-called 'fault lines' between and among various civilizations, including Islam, Western secularism, Hindu, Sikh and Eastern Orthodox religion; and so-called 'hotspots' that refer to isolated areas of conflict. Of the various fault lines he describes, perhaps the best known is the North–South line that runs longitudinally from Scandinavia down through the Balkans and into North Africa.

QuoteThis emergent shift from the nation-state to the civilization clash highlights two trends: the increasing decline of the nation-state; and the growing pressures between Western and Islamic civilization, where wars will increasingly be fought and launched in the name of civilization, and where the pervasive influence of globalization will continue to fuel many of these clashes.

George Kennan

QuoteIn the late 1940s, Kennan argued that international stability depended on a recreation of a multipolar order that had been destroyed by world war. In particular, he advocated that the United States should use its enormous economic strength to help restore Europe and Japan as great powers, so that the burden of containing the Soviet threat could be shared rather than borne alone by a country that Kennan suspected was incapable of behaving in a moderate fashion abroad.

QuoteFirst, the United States enjoyed a nuclear monopoly in the 1940s that inspired Truman and some of his advisers to believe that nuclear weapons could be used to intimidate Stalin and achieve concrete concessions to American demands. Second, in the absence of any firm means of predicting Soviet foreign policy, the Truman administration relied heavily on the alleged 'lessons of history' of the 1930s, namely the self-defeating nature of 'appeasement' in the face of authoritarian aggression. Although the Marshall Plan was consistent with Kennan's emphasis on economic aid, he was aghast at the language used in the formulation of the 'Truman Doctrine' in 1947, which appeared to commit the United States to an open-ended support of any regimes confronted with 'internal subversion' supported by the Soviet Union. Third, the United States was very eager to cement Germany in a Western alliance, and this required the presence of American troops on German soil as part of what was to become (in 1949) NATO. Finally, Kennan underestimated the degree of volatility in American public opinion. As Barnet puts it, '[the Truman administration] had run into trouble when they tried to present a nuanced view of the situation in Europe, and a consensus swiftly developed in the administration that scaring the hell out of the American people...was essential for combating the isolationist mood'.

QuoteMuch of Kennan's writing is concerned with the question of whether the United States is capable of behaving like a 'traditional' European great power. In his essays and lectures, particularly in the volume American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, he bemoaned what he liked to call American's tendency to adopt 'a legalistic-moralistic approach to international politics'. This was inevitable in a democracy like the United States, but it interfered with a cool calculation of the national interest on the basis of long-term trends in the balance of power rather than short-term fluctuations. A moral reaction is a short-term phenomenon when the public perceives the national interest to be at stake. Having no intensive knowledge of the situation, and lacking accurate facts even more than officialdom, citizens often have no option but to express their concerns in crude and moral terms. As a reliable guide to the conduct of foreign affairs, however, such reactions may have disastrous longer-term effects. For example, Kennan argued that the so-called 'fall of China' in 1949 did not represent a golden opportunity for the Soviet Union to cement a communist alliance against the West, but instead represented a major challenge to the Soviet Union as the leader of the communist movement.

Quote"the position of Moscow as the 'third Rome' of international communism is essential to the carefully cultivated Soviet image of self. Take it away, and the whole contrived history of Soviet Communism, its whole rationale and sense of legitimacy, is threatened. Moscow must oppose China with real desperation, because China threatens the intactness of its own sense of identity."

I'm going to say this, Cain. You're either one of the greatest minds alive (which I think is possibly true) or everyone one else is incredibly stupid (which is a less likely but also possibly true). And, for the record, lest anyone thinks otherwise, I ain't trying to kiss your ass.

I look forward to seeing more of your notes.

Thank you, but transcribing the (relevant and/or interesting) thoughts of others is hardly a decent test for intelligence.  Comphrehension, maybe...

Still makes you smarter then most (and shows a lot more effort into reading a book then I would ever put in, that's for sure). Besides, it takes a brain to sum up something complex (or anything, really), and isn't that what notes are?

I have scanned over these and intend to read them in more detail later. It looks like they could be really useful; thankyou for putting them here Cain  :D

Well, the notes are ripped from the ebook text themselves.  So in reality I'm only selecting those sections which look important, interesting or warrant further investigation.

Mu, that was exactly what I hoped for with this.  I'm often reading so many things I don't have the time to follow up on everything with a hint of potential.

When i set out reading a book i always start taking notes and then forget after the first few pages...

I might try and actually take notes on the next thing i read.  :)

Let me copy them ;)

I don't really read enough non-fiction books to take notes.

The Borderline Simpleton,
Too dumb to read real books.

OK

I read so much zen literature and ancient Japanese and Chinese texts that it is probably bad for me  :) I will try making notes on some of them.

Also i read lots of particle / theoretical physics books

Let me just deflate Mu's ego, one sec...

Okay. Continue.

Stephen Krasner

QuoteAt the end of his autobiographical reflections on his career thus far, Stephen Krasner urges students 'to resist succumbing to the fashion of the moment and to try to develop a mode of inquiry that does lend itself to some form of empirical validation, even if such validation can never be fully compelling'.

QuoteAlong with the work of Kenneth Waltz and Robert Gilpin, his contribution to the study of international political economy has helped to entice some liberal scholars (such as Robert Keohane) to present their own work as a modification of structural realism rather than a direct challenge to its core assumptions.

QuoteOn the basis of his careful analysis of the empirical data, Krasner then makes a number of bold propositions and explains them by appealing to the continuing importance of the realist approach. He argues that periods of openness in the world economy correlate with periods in which one state is clearly predominant. In the nineteenth century it was Great Britain. In the period 1945–60, it was the United States. Consequently, the degree of openness is itself dependent on the distribution of power among states. Economic 'interdependence' is subordinate to the political and economic balance of power among states, not the other way round.

QuoteA powerful state with a technological advantage over other states will desire an open trading system as it seeks new export markets. Furthermore, large, powerful states are less exposed to the international economy than small ones, so what Krasner called 'the opportunity costs of closure' will be lower too. In addition, they are less vulnerable to changes from abroad and can use this power to maintain their access to overseas markets. On the other hand, if power is more evenly distributed among states, they are less likely to support an open trading system. The less economically developed states will try to avoid the political danger of becoming vulnerable to
pressure from others, while states whose hegemony may be declining fear a loss of power to their rivals, and find it hard to resist domestic pressures for protection from cheap imports. A crucial factor in Krasner's argument is his claim that states do not always privilege wealth over other goals. Political power and social stability are also crucial, and this means that, although open trade may well provide absolute gains for all states that engage in it, some states will gain more than others. What is rational for the collective good of states is not necessarily the case for individual states.

QuoteWhat emerges from this study is that the American national interest in the international commodity markets has three components, ranked in order of increasing importance: stimulating economic competition; ensuring security of supply; and promoting broader foreign policy goals, such as general material interests and ideological objectives. His claim is that while smaller states focus on
preserving their territorial and political integrity and their narrow economic interests, only great powers will try to remake the world in their own image.

QuoteKrasner concludes that US decision-makers were often willing to protect the interests of American corporations, but they reserved the large-scale use of force for ideological reasons. This explains the use of force against Vietnam, an area of negligible economic importance to the United States, and the reluctance to use force during the oil crises of the 1970s, which threatened the oil supply to the entire capitalist world.

QuoteThe national interest is a term that has been used very vaguely both by defenders of realism as well as its critics. For Krasner, it refers to 'an empirically validated set of transitively ordered objectives that did not disproportionately benefit any particular group in a society'.

QuoteRegimes are principles and rules that regulate the interaction of states and other actors across a range of issue-areas, and they impart a degree of 'governance' to the international system.

Hans Morgenthau

QuoteIn contrast to what he claims is the dominant liberal belief in progress, based on an optimistic set of assumptions regarding human nature, Morgenthau asserts the more traditional metaphysical and religious conception of 'fallen man'. All politics is a struggle for power because what he calls 'political man' is an innately selfish creature with an insatiable urge to dominate others. Human nature has three dimensions: biological, rational and spiritual. Although Morgenthau acknowledges that all three combine to determine human behaviour in different contexts, he focuses on the 'will-to-power' as the defining characteristic of politics, distinguishing it from economics (the rational pursuit of wealth) and religion (the spiritual realm of morality). Since the defining character of politics is the use of power to dominate others, morality and reason are subordinate virtues in politics, mere instruments for attaining and justifying power.

QuoteOn the basis of his interpretation of the historical evidence, Morgenthau argues that all foreign policies tend to conform to, and reflect, one of three patterns of activity: maintaining the balance of power, imperialism and what he calls the politics of prestige (impressing other states with the extent of one's power).

QuoteIn the past, when peace depended on a stable balance among five or six great powers in Europe, the loose alliance structure among them induced caution and prudence in the foreign policy of each. The bipolarity of the second half of the twentieth century had robbed diplomacy of a necessary flexibility, and it resembled a zero-sum game in which marginal shifts in power could lead to war. Second, there was no great power to act as a buffer between the superpowers, and Morgenthau argued that this had been a key ingredient of European politics in the past when Britain could act as a neutral 'arbiter' in continental conflicts. Third, in the era of decolonization, territorial compensation was no longer available to maintain the central balance. In the past, the territorial division and distribution of colonies and lesser powers in Europe (such as Poland) had been an important technique for negotiating concessions in European diplomacy. Finally, the application of new technologies of transport, communication and war had transformed the twentieth century into an era of what Morgenthau called 'total mechanisation, total war, and total domination'.

QuoteAlthough the struggle for power was kept within barely tolerable limits by the mutual deterrence provided by nuclear weapons, he had no faith in their ability to maintain the peace. Since weapons were not the source of instability in the Cold War, neither could they be a cure.

QuoteHe believed that American foreign policy was continually plagued by four main flaws (legalism, utopianism, sentimentalism and isolationism) that arise from the fortuitous geographical, historical and diplomatic separation of the USA from the European balance of power. If the USA were to play a constructive role in stabilizing the new balance of power after 1945, it would have to rid itself of these preconceptions and engage in a sober analysis of the new balance of power and the concomitant requirement to promote the national interest. In particular, Morgenthau was eager to demolish the 'moralistic' assumptions that he argued had characterized the diplomacy of Woodrow Wilson after the First World War. Instead, he urged a return to the 'realistic' diplomacy of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century, when the USA recognized and acted on behalf of the national interest – to prevent France or Britain from establishing sufficient power in Europe to threaten the security of the USA.

QuoteSecond, as Kenneth Waltz and others have pointed out, there is an important 'level-of-analysis' problem in Morgenthau's work. It is never clear whether his pessimism about the nature of international politics derives from his metaphysical assumptions about 'human nature' or the anarchical nature of the international system per se. Insofar as human nature is the source of power politics among states, this is to commit the ecological fallacy in reverse – the analysis of individual behaviour used uncritically to explain group behaviour. As Waltz points out, one cannot explain both war and peace by arguing that humans are wicked.

Kenneth Waltz

QuoteIn marked contrast to all those scholars who were arguing that international relations was undergoing a radical transformation as a result of growing interdependence in the international economy as well as the limitations of force in the nuclear age, Kenneth Waltz reaffirmed the salience of the state as the main actor in international politics and castigated his opponents' arguments as reductionist and non-falsifiable.

QuoteHe defines the international political structure by two criteria. The first is a principle of arrangement by which states relate to one another. The interstate system is a self-help, or anarchical, one. This principle, he argues, is constant over time, and severely constrains the degree to which a division of labour can take place between states. They are, as Waltz puts it, functionally undifferentiated. Multiple sovereignty therefore limits the scope for interdependence among states. While anarchy is a constant, the second criterion of the structure, the distribution of capabilities, varies among states. States are similar in the tasks they face, although not in their abilities to perform them. The empirical referent for this latter variable is the number of great powers that dominate the system. Given the small number of such states, and Waltz suggests that no more than eight have ever been consequential, international politics 'can be studied in terms of the logic of small number systems'. He argues that this logic can be understood without making any untestable and vague assumptions about whether and to what extent states seek to pursue power. 'Balance-of-power politics prevail whenever two, and only two, conditions are met: that the order be anarchic, and that it be populated by units wishing to survive.'

QuoteHaving isolated the structure, Waltz then argues that a bipolar structure dominated by two great powers is more stable than a multipolar structure dominated by three or more great powers. It is more likely to endure without system-wide wars. Again, in contrast to earlier realists who were concerned about the ideological confrontation of the superpowers in a nuclear era, Waltz claims that there are striking differences between multipolarity and bipolarity in terms of strategic behaviour. Under multipolarity, states rely on alliances to maintain their security. This is inherently unstable, since 'there are too many powers to permit any of them to draw clear and fixed lines between allies and adversaries'.

QuoteSome of his critics have argued that the 'stability' of the Cold War had much more to do with nuclear weapons (a 'unit level' phenomenon) than bipolarity. Just because the superpowers were more powerful than other states in the system did not mean that they were equally as powerful as each other and had become successfully 'socialized' to the prevailing structure. Again, the explanatory and predictive power of Waltz's theory was compromised by the difficulty of separating levels of analysis and determining the content of each.

QuoteIn particular, he argues that in the absence of effective countervailing pressures, the United States is likely to become increasingly unilateral in seeking to secure its foreign policy interests, and in so doing to rely on its military preponderance to secure any vision of a new world order.

Karl W. Deutsch

QuoteDeutsch is perhaps best known for his work on the social prerequisites and dynamics of nationalism and regional integration, as well as his rigorous application of behavioural methods to study processes of social mobilization at the domestic and international levels. Social mobilization refers to a process of change which affects substantial parts of the population in countries that are undergoing rapid modernization. He was concerned to develop empirical quantitative indicators of such change, so that propositions regarding its political consequences could be tested for their validity across time and space.

QuoteHe proposed a model of nationalism based on the idea that it was fuelled by the need for the state to manage processes of mobilization that were, by definition, quite traumatic for citizens who were both uprooted from old settings, habits and commitments, and mobilized into new patterns of group membership and organizational behaviour

QuoteSocial mobilization, when it emerges on a large scale, tends to politicize increasing numbers of citizens and increases the range of human needs that the state must respond to.

QuoteDeutsch also studied the international conditions that might affect whether a state would channel its citizens' energies towards the outside world. In this context, he was a pioneer in the study of regional integration, and he introduced greater complexity into the usually sharp dichotomy between hierarchical authority relations at the domestic level and anarchical struggles for power and security at the international level.

QuoteHe made a clear distinction between amalgamation and integration. An amalgamated community has one supreme decision-making centre, but it does not follow that its opposite is mere anarchy.  Deutsch pointed out that it is possible to have a number of legally sovereign states that relate to each other in the form of a 'pluralistic security community' and that are confident that the chances of force being used to resolve conflicts between them are extremely low. In other words, they are sufficiently 'integrated' to resemble an amalgamated security community without the need to transfer sovereignty to a supranational level. He argued that the anarchy/hierarchy distinction should not be thought of as a dichotomy, but rather as a spectrum.

QuoteOf crucial significance to this project is Deutsch's idea of the 'transaction–integration balance'. The growth of transactions among people does not automatically lead to greater integration. Consistent with his earlier work on social mobilization, Deutsch pointed out that 'it is the volume of transactions, political, cultural, or economic, which throws a burden upon the institutions for peaceful adjustment or change among the participating populations'.

QuoteThere are also several fundamental assumptions or criteria that are relevant to the emergence of a security community. For example, whatever regional organization exists, it must possess sufficient institutional maturity to generate the diplomatic techniques deployed to diffuse problems and crises. Furthermore, such maturity must have been accompanied by the mutual willingness among member states to resolve their differences at the organizational level. Indeed, mutually benign expectations of member states must be clearly matched by a discernible pattern of interaction or reciprocity. And finally, states in a security community must have a common perception of threat regarding external actors.

QuoteA good example of the use of such analysis can be found in his article (co-authored by J. David Singer) on balance-of-power systems in world politics. Here he employed sophisticated mathematical techniques to help determine the stability of international systems composed of varying numbers of great powers, and concluded that a multipolar system composed of at least five great powers was historically more stable than those that contained fewer great powers but were prone to structural instability. This is because, on the basis of chance alone, a four-to-one coalition rather than a three-to-two coalition is likely to occur at some point, and such overwhelming strength in one coalition of great powers is likely to lead to the destruction of the system. The analysis explicitly modelled the impact of arms races upon the stability of the international system, and is a good illustration of the benefits of quantitative data when used by scholars who are also sophisticated historians in their own right. However, Deutsch did not believe that international stability was best studied in terms of varying numbers of great powers, since such static analysis precluded attention to the more significant processes of interaction among states which could not be either reduced to, or managed by, conservative diplomatic techniques and a strong emphasis on military deterrence. As he put it, 'dependable coordination cannot be built by deterrence and bargaining alone. A world of deterrent powers, a world of bargaining powers will, as a total system, be ungovernable.'

Michael Doyle

QuotePrior to the publication of Ways of War and Peace, Doyle was best known for his work on nineteenth-century European imperialism, as well as for his rigorous examination of the alleged connection between the prevalence of liberal democracy within states and the absence of war between them. In 1986, he published Empires, a fully multicausal analysis of European imperialism. The latter, he argues, has been poorly defined within the literature, making it difficult to generate testable hypotheses on the causes of this elusive phenomenon. Doyle defines imperialism as 'a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another'. A comprehensive explanation of empire, therefore, should demonstrate the nature of such effective control, explain the motives for seeking control, and explain either the submission or ineffective resistance of the peripheral society. Any theory intended to describe and explain imperial relationships should, he argues, take into account four factors: the interests and capabilities of the metropole; the capabilities and interests of the periphery; the dynamics of transnational forces; and the nature of international systemic relations. Transnational forces are the means through which the imperial power affects the periphery. These may be military, trade, missionary or some combination of all three. International systemic relations refer to the balance of power among imperial states.

QuoteIn particular, three characteristics separate imperial states, or those with imperial potential, from states liable to imperial rule. Size and wealth, interestingly enough, are not the key factors, although these may affect the struggle between imperial states and have an effect on the scope of empire. More important are political centralization, unity and differentiation. Thus, a highly centralized, unified, differentiated state, such as England, is likely to overwhelm decentralized, fragmented, less differentiated states with which it comes into contact, resulting in imperialism even when the target states – such as China and India – are larger and even wealthier in aggregate terms.

QuoteHe notes that European powers generally preferred informal rule where at all possible, as a less expensive way of obtaining the trading rights they valued. Yet trade required security, law enforcement and adjudication of interests between representatives of the imperial power and members of the peripheral states. Where the latter were weakly differentiated tribes of people, the peripheral state could not perform these tasks. The imperial state was then drawn, sometimes reluctantly, to exercise direct rule and undertake the necessary services itself through consular authority. State-making in the periphery was thus a consequence of imperial activity.

QuoteEmpires is a fine example of the way Doyle engages with classical international theory. First, he reads the conventional theorists on the issue, re-presenting their arguments with due regard to the particular contexts within which they were arguing. Next, he extracts from their work a set of empirical generalizations. Third, he carefully examines the evidence to see how well classical theories stand up under the test of time.

QuoteTo simplify greatly, if the explanation for the separate peace between liberal states is due to their liberalism, it is tempting to argue that relations between liberal and non-liberal states cannot be peaceful, for the latter are, in a sense, at war with their own people. Lacking internal legitimacy, non-liberal states will be more willing (other things being equal) to engage in aggression against other states when it is in the interests of their leaders to do so. Doyle does not argue that this is the case, merely that liberal states, such as the United States, may act on this presupposition, and therefore be unwilling to accord non-liberal states the same degree of respect that they give to other liberal states.

Quote"A pluralistic model of world politics is not a contradiction to theoretical knowledge, but a basis for it. We as thinking human beings need not be, and for the most part are not, singular selves. Our modern identities are pluralistic, found in individual identity, nation, and class, as well as religion, race, and gender. We cannot escape multiplicities entering into our policy choices, nor, if we want to be true to ourselves, should we try to."

I am posting in this thread.
Thanks Cain.

More IR theory droppings:

Francis Fukuyama

QuoteBy the phrase 'end of history', Fukuyama is referring to the history of thought about legitimate first principles governing political and social organization. His argument is primarily a normative one. At the end of the twentieth century, the combination of liberal democracy and capitalism has proved superior to any alternative political/economic system, and the reason lies in its ability to satisfy the basic drives of human nature. The latter is composed of two fundamental desires. One is the desire for material goods and wealth and the other (more fundamental) desire is for recognition of our worth as human beings by those around us. Capitalism is the best economic system for maximizing the production of goods and services and for exploiting scientific technology to generate wealth. However, economic growth is only part of the story. Fukuyama appeals to Hegel's concept of recognition to account for the superiority of liberal democracy over its rivals in the political arena. While economic growth can be promoted under a variety of political regimes, including fascist ones, only liberal democracies can meet the fundamental human need for recognition, political freedom and equality. It was Hegel who contended that the end of history would arrive when humans had achieved the kind of civilization that satisfied their fundamental longings.

Quote"Liberalism pacifies and de-politicises the aristocratic world of mastery by turning politics into economics. Liberalism pacifies the masterful thymos of the first man and replaces it with the slavish thymos of the last man. Instead of superiority and dominance, society strives for equality. Those who still long for dominance have the capitalist pursuit of wealth as their outlet."

QuoteIn a series of lectures delivered in Paris in the 1940s, Kojève argued that the welfare state had solved the problems of capitalism identified by Marx. Thus, capitalism has managed to suppress its own internal contradictions. Furthermore, it not only provides material prosperity, but also homogenizes ideas and values, thus undermining the clash of ideology between states, thereby reducing the threat of war. Hegel did not believe that the end of war within states could be replicated at the international level. Kojève and Fukuyama argue that while wars will not disappear, the homogenization of values among the great powers will promote peace among the most powerful states, and these are the ones that matter in a long-term historical perspective.

QuoteDespite the victory of liberal democracy as a normative model over its rivals, Fukuyama is concerned that the subordination of megalothymia to isothymia may be also the pursuit of equality at the expense of the pursuit of excellence. If there is too much equality, and no great issues to struggle for, people may revolt at the very system that has brought them peace and security. We cannot subsist merely on equal rights and material comfort alone, and those that satisfy themselves with these become what Nietzsche called 'last men' or, as C.S. Lewis put it, 'men without chests'. At the end of the book, Fukuyama sounds a note of warning. Unless there are ways to express megalothymia in those societies lucky enough to have reached the 'end of history' (and according to his own statistics, less than one-third of all states have arrived thus far), liberal democracy may atrophy and die. At one point Fukuyama argues that perhaps Japan may offer an alternative to American liberal democracy and combine a successful economy with social bonds strong enough to withstand the fragmentary forces of liberal democracy. Many Asian societies, he claims, have 'paid lip service to Western principles of liberal democracy, accepting the form while modifying the content to accommodate Asian cultural traditions'.

QuoteGlobalization is a blanket term that conveys the limits to state power arising from the myriad dynamics of a global economy in which the state seems to be relatively powerless to manage its domestic economy. In particular, the integration of global capital, much of it speculative, tends to subordinate domestic politics to the demand for flexibility, efficiency and competitiveness on a global playing field that is anything but level

QuoteConsequently, as governments become less accountable to those they claim to represent over a broader range of issues, so the spectrum of democratic choice before citizens narrows considerably. To the extent that economic globalization and political fragmentation are operating at different levels of social, political and economic organization, one could plausibly accept much of Fukuyama's philosophical assumptions and reach opposite conclusions to the ones that he draws. On the reasonable assumption that global capitalism is exacerbating economic inequality both within and between states while simultaneously denying them a redistributive capacity to moderate its impact, the 'struggle for recognition' may take reactive forms such as ethnic nationalism.

QuoteTo some extent, there is continuity between the two books. The underlying paradox of liberalism is the same. If you universalize liberal individualism, extending its premises to all spheres of life, liberal institutions (including the market) will eventually malfunction and then liberal democratic society will itself decay.

QuoteIn his view, the long and sustained pattern of state downsizing or market liberalization (in which the market and civil society were expected to promote democracy) has had mixed results. While it has spurred growth development, it has weakened civil society and stripped the state's capacity to promote security and order. Some might say that this critical examination weakens his earlier
thesis and downplays the benefits achieved from neoliberalization. On the other hand, Fukuyama is willing to concede that stronger regulations must be implemented in order to control the effects of capital flows and to promote peace and order within states.

Ernst Haas

QuoteHaas defined integration as 'the process whereby political actors in several distinct national settings are persuaded to shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities towards a new and larger centre, whose institutions possess or demand jurisdiction over the pre-existing national states'.  He argued that such a process was easier to achieve in a regional context such as Western Europe, particularly in light of its history and shared democratic values in the postwar era.

QuoteUnless there is a concerted attempt to develop democratic procedures of decision-making to secure the legitimacy and accountability of regional organizations staffed by technical experts and bureaucrats, a dangerous gap can develop between national citizens and regional organizations. This gap can then be exploited by political parties that are still nationally based, and used to attack incumbent governments at election time. The problems of moving towards greater monetary and political union in the contemporary European Union cast some doubt on the effectiveness, let alone the legitimacy, of automatic 'integration by stealth'.

Stanley Hoffman

Quote"like Aron, I tend naturally to think 'against' Utopians who tempt me into demonstrating (gleefully) that their recipes are worthless. Crass realists provoke me into trying to show that they have overlooked some exits."

Quote"Power at a nation's disposal ought to be used in full awareness of the external conditions that define which uses are productive and which are not, as well as of the domestic predispositions and institutions that channel national energies in certain directions or inhibit the country from applying them in other ways."

QuoteIn this book, he argues that the contemporary international system (in the 1960s) is characterized by revolutionary dynamism, qualified or muted bipolarity, and ideological clashes. He distinguishes between three related levels of the system, each of which exhibits different structural attributes. Most fundamentally, the system is bipolar in terms of the nuclear destruction the superpowers can unleash, but the very restraints imposed by the nuclear stalemate have given the nation-state a new lease on life and have allowed, on a second systemic level, the emergence of political polycentricism. This, in turn, has encouraged the trend towards nuclear proliferation, which lends a multipolar attribute to the third 'systemic' level.

QuoteThe complexity of the world is especially challenging to the United States because of a debilitating set of attitudes that stem from the American 'national style' (a function of America's past and principles) and American governmental institutions. The major institutional problem is the dispersal of power among and within the governmental structure and bureaucracy. Deficiencies in foreign policy 'style' are reflected in legalism, reliance on formulas, short-range planning and the conflict between quietism and activism.

QuoteHoffmann argues against overly relying on military force as an instrument of policy, but he recognizes that, in its absence, revolutionary forces are likely to undermine international order. In short, the book is an appeal for the United States to adapt to an increasingly 'multihierarchical' international system and to allow Eastern and Western Europe to emerge from the Cold War as part of a united political entity.

QuoteHoffmann argues that Kissinger's diplomacy was based on the illusion that the United States could enjoy primacy and world order, whereas for Hoffmann sees a tradeoff between them. He urges (once again) US policy-makers to conduct their rivalry with the Soviet Union at benign levels of parity and to abandon any attempt to achieve world order on the basis of imperial control.

QuoteIn the angriest essay in the book, Hoffmann ridicules Reagan for his dangerous attempt to recreate a global containment strategy that once again reduces the world to an ideological and military confrontation between the superpowers, and for his dubious claim that the United States had merely lost the will to employ its power. In 1983, Hoffmann argued that Reagan's nostalgia for the world of the 1950s would result in another dead end – alienated allies, a spiralling arms race and an obstinate Soviet Union.

Quote"The structure of the international milieu which limits possibilities for moral action, the conflicts of value systems which result in very sharp disagreements on conceptions of human rights and on priorities, the difficulties of assessment and evaluation are all manifest here and lead repeatedly to failure, or to confrontation, or to distorted uses of the human rights issues for purposes of political warfare at home or abroad."

QuoteDespite these problems, Hoffmann argues that the United States would not be true to its conception of itself if it did not promote the pursuit of human rights, and he endorses a policy of liberal internationalism. At the same time he warns that such a policy must coexist with the realization that emphasizing political and civil human rights at the expense of economic and social rights can often appear as neocolonialism in another guise.

Quote"the tension between morality and politics will always remain – because morality is always at war not only with egotistical or asocial interests, but also with the will to power and domination. In the world of international relations, it's going to be an uphill struggle. Albert Camus wanted us to imagine a happy Sisyphus. In international affairs, this simply is not possible."

Quote from: Mu on March 03, 2009, 01:24:47 PM
OK

I read so much zen literature and ancient Japanese and Chinese texts that it is probably bad for me  :) I will try making notes on some of them.

Also i read lots of particle / theoretical physics books

DO IT!

We should start NOTEGASM: A COLLECTIVE NOTEBOOK

I have a bunch of Aesthetics notes people might find interesting.

I can set up a blog easily enough.  With gmail accounts, its easy for multiple people to use.  If that sounds cool, I'll go ahead and sort out the details.

Anyway, more notes:

Robert O. Keohane

QuoteThe basic argument of the book is that, in a world of interdependence, the realist 'paradigm' is of limited use in helping us to understand the dynamics of international regimes, that is, the rules of the game governing decision-making and operations in international relations on particular problems, like money, or between specified countries, like the United States and Canada.

QuoteKeohane and Nye begin by constructing two theoretical models, realism and complex interdependence. The former portrays international relations as a struggle for power. It is based on three core assumptions: states are coherent units and are the most important political actors; force is a usable and effective instrument of policy; and there exists a hierarchy of issues in world politics dominated by questions of military security. In contrast, under conditions of complex interdependence: actors other than states participate; there is no clear hierarchy of issues; and force is ineffective. Under these conditions, outcomes will be determined by the distribution of resources and 'vulnerabilities' within particular issue-areas, they will be unrelated to the distribution of military power, and transnational relations will be crucial factors in the decision-making process, including international bureaucratic coalitions and non-governmental institutions.

QuoteThey demonstrate that some issues and conflicts conform more to the assumptions of the complex interdependence model than to realism, and reinforce the need to focus on particular 'sensitivities' and 'vulnerabilities' of actors in specific issue-areas. They also argue that under conditions of complex interdependence, which they expect to become stronger in the future, it is difficult for democratic states to devise and pursue rational foreign policies.

QuoteTextbooks were written and courses were taught that portrayed the field as divided between realism, complex interdependence and radical Marxism. Each paradigm seemed to have its own agenda of issues, identification of key actors and theoretical models. And yet, between 1977 and the publication of After Hegemony in 1984, Keohane abandoned his attempt to portray 'complex interdependence' as a rival model to realism.

QuoteFor example, in his study on US raw materials policy, Krasner demonstrated the ability of the United States to pursue a consistent 'national interest' against the demands of domestic interest groups. He also showed a link between hegemonic power and the degree of complex interdependence in international trade.

QuoteKeohane tries to determine how the international system might evolve towards stable configurations of co-operation in spite of the decline of American power relative to Japan and Europe since 1945. The theory of co-operation is based on the functional utility of 'regimes'– principles, rules, norms around which state expectations and behaviour converge in a given issue-area – that assert the long-term, rational self-interest of states in perpetuating co-operation despite shifts in the underlying balance of power. He argues that such regimes are established primarily to deal with political market failure. They lower the cost of international transactions by delimiting permissible and impermissible transactions, by combining transactions through issue linkage, thereby enabling states to assemble packages of agreements, and by reducing uncertainty.

QuoteIn short, the maintenance of institutionalized co-operation among states does not depend on the perpetuation of the hegemonic conditions that are necessary to set regimes in place.

QuoteHis answer is that, yes, power and self-interest are important, but writers such as Waltz, Gilpin and other structural realists exaggerate the degree to which the international system is anarchical. It is not. Despite the absence of a formal, legal hierarchy of authority at the international level, informal elements of governance exist in the form of regimes and 'institutions', 'related complexes of rules and norms, identifiable in space and time'. They help states to overcome problems of collective action and market failures. In international relations, transaction costs are high and property rights are often ill-defined. States may not co-operate because they fear that others can renege on deals, or because they may not be able to monitor others' behaviour. Institutions can be of great help in overcoming such problems. They allow the principle of reciprocity to function more efficiently by providing information about others' preferences, intentions and behaviour. Thus, they allow states to move closer to the Pareto frontier. By altering the systemic environment, institutions facilitate changes in state strategies so that rational, self-interested states can continue to co-operate reliably over time.

QuoteIn After Hegemony, he suggested that his systemic theory of international co-operation needed to be supplemented by a theory of learning within states, and we may expect the next stage of Keohane's research to fill this important gap in the literature.

Richard Rosecrance

QuoteDespite the key exceptions of the (then) Soviet Union and the United States, trade had replaced territorial expansion and military might, he argued, as the key to international prestige, power and wealth. The balance of trade was supplanting the balance of power. What appeared to be a novel proposition in the mid-1980s has, with the end of the Cold War, become more broadly accepted.

QuoteRosecrance established his reputation in the field in the 1960s and early 1970s for his work on systems theory. He combined his extensive historical knowledge of European statecraft since the eighteenth century with formal explanatory models to explain state behaviour and the stability of different historical systems.

QuoteIn his first book, Rosecrance divides the history from 1740 to the present (circa early 1960s) into nine historical systems. In general, he uses the outbreak of war to delimit the end of one system and the beginning of another. Unlike those who use the term 'system' to refer to a continuous process of political relations at the international level, Rosecrance refers to what might be called the 'diplomatic constellations' or the patterns of power and diplomatic relations that characterize a given historical period. Major changes in these patterns, often accompanied by conflict, indicate the development of a new system. On average, each system lasts only for a couple of decades.

QuoteThese are the direction which elite groups give to foreign policy (and the compatibility of direction and objectives between states), the degree of control of elites over foreign policy within their respective states, and the resources ('persuasive skills, the quantity of mobilizable resources and the speed of mobilization') which can be used in support of foreign policy. Of these determinants, he argues that the second is most crucial in explaining systemic stability. Four of the nine systems were in 'disequilibrium' when there were major changes in the security of tenure of national elites, suggesting that the latter often attempt to solidify support by aggressive behaviour in the international system. However, in the final analysis, the stability of any particular system depends most on the fourth determinant, the capacity of the environment to absorb or placate the objectives of states. In turn, capacity can be analysed in terms of the interplay between regulative forces (direct preventative action against disruptive policies) and more passive environmental factors.

QuoteRosecrance's argument in the 1960s and early 1970s is a direct challenge to structural realism, according to which the international system can be treated as an entity separable from the interactions of the states within it, rather than a network of relations among sub-system actors. According to Rosecrance, it is not possible to isolate domestic from foreign policy in evaluating systemic stability. System-wide action is brought into play only in response to policy initiatives of member states. In Action and Reaction, Rosecrance leaves little doubt that he believes the chief causes of foreign policy behaviour lie within domestic political systems. Serious international instability and upheaval arise from the inability of the existing international system to cope with the disturbances from domestic causes.

QuoteSimilarly, the upsurge of nationalism and the wars of national unification, which destabilized mid-nineteenth-century Europe and led to the final collapse of the Concert of Europe, arose from the successful attempts of conservative elites to outbid their liberal opponents in domestic struggles for political power. The liberals had used democracy to rally the people against conservative rule, but the conservatives won back support by appealing to nationalism, thereby combining traditionalism and democracy. The environmental capacity of the system in Europe was limited by the absence of open territory, and the result was a great deal of unregulated conflict.

Quote"The future study of international politics will have to take account of the failure of [each]. Power and [the number of great powers] are sufficient criteria neither of international politics nor international stability. Instead, international politics exists on a continuum that ranges from Waltz's extreme structural formulation at one end, in which all units are homogeneous, to an extreme formulation at the other, in which all units are heterogeneous. Neither is sufficient by itself and neither, like the model of pure competition in formal economics, applies consistently. Most cases exist toward the middle of a continuum."

QuoteFive years later, Rosecrance published his most well known book, The Rise of the Trading State. In it he rejects 'monistic' explanatory frameworks for the study of international relations. Instead, he proposes a 'dualistic' approach, suggesting that the international system is characterized by the presence of two worlds, the 'military–political world' and the 'trading world'.

QuoteThe reasons for this switch are very simple, and can be understood on the basis of rational choice. In the nuclear era, the costs of territorial expansion and military defence are rising exponentially, while the benefits are declining. Since the Second World War, the benefits of trade have risen in comparison with the costs, and those states (such as Japan) that understand the advantages of trade are benefiting at the expense of states such as the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, as war has become more costly and dangerous, domestic support for militarism and high defence expenditure has declined. Finally, since 1945, the previous trend towards fewer states in the international system has been reversed. From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century, the number of states in Europe had shrunk from about 500 to fewer than 25. But after the Second World War, when European empires finally collapsed and decolonization proceeded apace, the number of states in the world grew to about 150 by the mid-1960s. After the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are at present 192 member states in the United Nations, and that number may be closer to 200 in the mid-part of the twenty-first century. In this context, the importance of trade between states becomes crucial for their continued survival.

QuoteAny coalition of states can be sustained only on the basis of three principles: 'involvement of all, ideological agreement, and renunciation of war and territorial expansion, giving liberal democratic and economic development first priority'. In the absence of agreement on such principles, the benign consequences of the new system may not materialize, and Rosecrance is aware that there is an inherent tension between the demands of commercial liberalism in the 1990s and the prospects for democratic liberalism.

I've been reading P. Rabinow's The Foucault Reader & found this to be interesting.  (I have a secret admirer at work & he drops books (mostly good ones) off in my office when I'm not around - Lucky me! - I think I know who he is too.)  I know you were talking about Foucault a page back I think?  Found this interview here, it's also in the book. 

QuotePolemics, Politics and Problematizations

This interview took place in order for Foucault to answer questions frequently asked by American audiences.
It was conducted by Paul Rabinow in May 1984, just before Foucault's death.
Translation by Lydia Davis, volume 1 "Ethics" of "Essential Works of Foucault", The New Press 1997.

...

P.R. You have recently been talking about a "history of problematics". What is a history of problematics ?

M.F. For a long time, I have been trying to see if it would be possible to describe the history of thought as distinct both from the history of ideas (by which I mean the analysis of systems of representation) and from the history of mentalities (by which I mean the analysis of attitudes and types of action [schémas de comportement]). It seemed to me there was one element that was capable of describing the history of thought—this was what one could call the problems or, more exactly, problematizations. What distinguishes thought is that it is something quite different from the set of representations that underlies a certain behavior; it is also quite different from the domain of attitudes that can determine this behavior. Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.

To say that the study of thought is the analysis of a freedom does not mean one is dealing with a formal system that has reference only to itself. Actually, for a domain of action, a behavior, to enter the field of thought, it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a certain number of difficulties around it. These elements result from social, economic, or political processes. But here, their only role is that of instigation. They can exist and perform their action for a very long time, before there is effective problematization by thought. And when thought intervenes, it doesn't assume a unique form that is the direct result or the necessary expression of these difficulties; it is an original or specific response—often taking many forms, sometimes even contradictory in its different aspects—to these difficulties, which are defined for it by a situation or a context, and which hold true as a possible question.

To one single set of difficulties, several responses can be made. And most of the time different responses actually are proposed. But what must be understood is what makes them simultaneously possible: it is the point in which their simultaneity is rooted; it is the soil that can nourish them all in their diversity and sometimes in spite of their contradictions. To the different difficulties encountered by the practice regarding mental illness in the eighteen century, diverse solutions were proposed: Tuke's and Pinel's are examples. In the same way, a whole group of solutions was proposed for the difficulties encountered in the second half of the eighteenth century by penal practice. Or again, to take a very remote example, the diverse schools of philosophy of the Hellenistic period proposed different solutions to the difficulties of traditional sexual ethics.

But the work of a history of thought would be to rediscover at the root of these diverse solutions the general form of problematization that has made them possible—even in their very opposition; or what has made possible the transformation of the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general problem for which one proposes diverse practical solutions. It is problematization that responds to these difficulties, but by doing something quite other than expressing them or manifesting them: in connection with them, it develops the conditions in which possible responses can be given; it defines the elements that will constitute what the different solutions attempt to respond to. This development of a given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of thought.

It is clear how far one is from an analysis in terms of deconstruction (any confusion between these two methods would be unwise). Rather, it is a question of a movement of critical analysis in which one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed; but also how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematization. And it then appears that any new solution which might be added to the others would arise from current problematization, modifying only several of the postulates or principles on which one bases the responses that one gives. The work of philosophical and historical reflection is put back into the field of the work of thought only on condition that one clearly grasps problematization not as an arrangement of representations but as a work of thought.

http://www.foucault.info/foucault/interview.html

Even more IR theory

Friedrich Kratochwil

QuoteThus, rather than embracing some of the scientific assumptions of rationalism, Kratochwil has elected to focus on the epistemological limits and problems of rationalism and, to a lesser extent, middle-ground constructivism. It is for this reason that many have come to regard his critique of rationalism as radical or deconstructionist. Both labels, however, are not entirely fair. In fact, Kratochwil's approach is far less combative or uncompromisingly contested than it is discursive in nature. Indeed, his open-ended critique is neither deconstructionist nor post-Nietzschean, but partakes of immanent social theory rooted in the emancipatory project and its attendant guiding principles of rationality, history, justice and liberty. It would therefore be more reasonable to conclude that Kratochwil would agree most with Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit's critical assessment of the compatibility between critical theory and constructivism: that constructivism can and should be reconciled with critical theory.

QuoteIn short, Kratochwil's approach might best be summed up as follows: to ensure that we maintain an open-ended dialogue about what constitutes social knowledge or what reproduces social life in international relations. There is, in other words, a tendency within the social sciences to objectify thoughts, ideas and interests. Kratochwil's overarching mission is to expose and interrogate these tendencies within constructivism itself, and within other international relations theories. If, then, Robert Keohane can be considered the principal gatekeeper of much of mainstream and alternative international relations theory, then Kratochwil might well be considered the gate-breaker, though not in the Nietzschean sense of value-breaker. By gate-breaker, we are referring to his aim of constructing reflexive self-understandings of international relations, that is, an open-ended approach that eliminates the ontological (or structural) constraints on our understanding of the world. Keeping an open mind in this sense is much like keeping the gates open, or eliminating the need for a gatekeeper to impose his or her own preferences as to what counts as practical knowledge in the discipline.

QuoteFirst and foremost, social critical theory opposes positivist formulations of knowledge, that is, the idea that scientific knowledge of our social world is acquired through objective and positivist methods based on the separation of fact and value, or the objectification of facts for hypothesis-testing and explanation (of social behaviour). Second, critical social theory holds that concepts
and theory can never be fixed per se. Rather, concepts remain contingent on our social experience and social change. As already noted, it is this notion of contingency, or the irreducibility of facts and social experience to any fixed construct (hegemony), that places Kratochwil either before or beyond middle-ground constructivism.

QuoteYet the most significant problem with Wendt's theory, as Kratochwil suggests, is that the variables of coercion, calculation and belief, and their grounding in three corresponding cultures (Hobbes, Locke and Kant), usher in what he calls a new orthodoxy, in which culture and ideas are reducible to material resources.

QuoteHe claims that reasoning about international rules and norms should represent a more open-ended and practically oriented approach. As Kratochwil puts it: 'practical reasoning not only deals with issues of action but also investigates the formal properties of arguments which satisfy neither the conditions of induction nor those of deduction.' Practical reasoning does not assume that knowledge can be reduced to ontology, and ontology to reason. Instead, the logical and contextual meanings of actions reflect the choices and reasons we make and the desire we hold to play by the rules. The important point to consider here is that knowledge can never attain some fixed and autonomous position in our social experience.

QuoteIf, then, there is one predominant theme in Kratochwil's work, it is that facts, structures, values are not autonomous, given units or entities.

QuoteAgain, for Kratochwil the recurring question in international relations is this: why do we treat structures and facts as autonomous and fixed in the first place? And how does immanent social theory explain the limits and problems of theorizing about our globalizing world?

QuoteIn fact, as Kratochwil suggests, actors acquire their knowledge through their particular surroundings or social contexts: they act and form their own choices from their particular cultural understandings of the world. In this sense, international relations concepts such as anarchy, sovereignty and international norms represent the political and social means of understanding and describing this dynamic. As he states: 'Precisely because social reality is not simply out there but is made by the actors, the concepts we use are part of a vocabulary that is deeply imbricated with our political projects.'

QuoteIn short, we must be self-conscious of the social order we are assuming, or are tying to establish. As mentioned above, practical reasoning calls into question the very idea that scientific knowledge can produce objective results. Because sentiment and emotions reflect loyalties to something, they must be accounted for in the process of understanding the exchange of ideas between and among actors. As Kratochwil states: 'Here both a mistaken scientism and legalism have blinded us to the fact that issues of justice...depend on shared sentiments of resentment, as well as those of compassion. Similarly "trust" and the "pride" one feels when a (common) undertaking has succeeded, as well as sentiments of "loyalty" are important resources for solving collective problems'.

QuoteHistory instead reflects a complex process in which forgetting about events often constitutes the reason for investigating our past. As he explains, 'social theory cannot be disengaged from history since history not only incorporates the politics of things but historical reflection is...the precondition for a proper appreciation of action and agency'.

QuoteIt may be fair to say that Kratochwil would remain critical of any approach that builds on a given or assumed social order.

Nicholas Onuf

QuoteThe metaphorical dividing line between the state of nature and the hierarchical political state also serves, for many, as the demarcation between the organizing principles of the disciplines of international relations and political science/political theory. The state of nature is equivalent to anarchy and the recurrence of similar patterns of violence and distrust, while the political state allows for hierarchy, normative theory and history. Martin Wight famously used this distinction to explain 'why there is no international theory'.

QuoteFor Nicholas Onuf, however, the Hobbesian construction of the 'state of nature' is where many of our problems begin. For Onuf, there is no pre-social human endeavour; we are always, already deeply embedded in social practices, and the problem with much social theory is that it is (micro-)founded on a conception of autonomous individuals that is essentially pre-social. Onuf describes the forms of social theory committed to an atomistic, rational, maximizing individual as operating within the paradigm of liberalism, and argues 'anarchy is liberalism carried to its logical extreme: the only limits on rational conduct are those imposed by material conditions'.  Onuf's description of liberalism, then, subsumes theories of (neo)liberalism and (neo)realism within international relations. Due to the impoverished form of social theory resulting from this asocial foundation, Onuf rejects liberalism and offers 'constructivism' in its place.

Quote"The reconstruction of international relations requires that the discipline be stripped of its current pretensions. If this is taken as abandonment of international relations (the discipline as it is) and the possibility of international theory (theory peculiar to international relations), then I agree. I do not agree that it means giving up on international relations as well. Rather it honors their importance and thus their place in the operative paradigm of political society. More than any other matters of politics, international relations are the subject of this book only because I have thought more about them. Such is the legacy of my discipline."

QuoteClearly, for Onuf there is no strong distinction to be made between a discipline of international relations and other forms of political theory.

QuoteOnuf, drawing on the political theorist J.G.A. Pocock, argues that our contemporary understanding of anarchy is of much more recent origin. Essentially, Onuf argues that it was only with the rise of democratic regimes, and the attendant needs for legitimacy of the ruler, that our contemporary understanding of order inside the state evolved. And it was this conception of order inside the state that anarchy would be negatively defined against. Thus, with the birth of legal principles of rule inside the state, the lack of such legal principles outside the state gave rise to our contemporary accounts of anarchy. Before the rise of modern liberal political theory, the justification for order and authority was dependent on religious and other principles, and the 'problem of anarchy' was not anything like the contemporary account.

Quote"In the Middle Ages the order–authority problem simply did not exist. The affairs of man obtained their order from a higher, authoritative order. Authority attested to the fact of higher order and assured mundane order. That order was imperfectly realized in human affairs cast no doubt on the perfection of its source or even the legitimacy of its less than perfect agents. It is this openly anti-empirical quality of medieval thought that lent itself to secular challenges and in due course invited the scientific revolution. International legal doctrine reflects the long decline of the medieval world view. Secular challenges to the premise of a higher order eventually prevailed, perhaps too thoroughly, by denying the existence of order at any level."

QuoteOnuf argues that agents (people) and structures (recurrent forms of social institutions) mutually constitute each other. This is a seemingly simple but very important point in understanding Onuf's argument. Against the asocial and micro-founded, broadly construed liberalism that he is attacking, Onuf argues that structures matter. No individual is ever free of, or precedes, the social structures in which they live.

QuoteNeither agents nor structures are ontologically prior or privileged in Onuf's formulation. They mutually constitute each other.

QuoteSocial practices are defined by rules – indeed, rules are in some sense the condition of existence for social interaction. Onuf uses Searle's speech act theory to identify three types of rule. The first is 'assertive', where a claim is made about the world in the manner of 'this is that type of thing' or 'X is Y'. The second is 'directive', where an agent is directed to do something, as in 'do this now'. The third type of rule is 'commisive' or 'commitment' rules, where agents commit themselves to performing some act, as in 'I will do that'.

QuoteOnuf is convincing in his argument that anarchy, as conceptually deployed in international relations theory, is a thoroughly modern construct. Onuf's argument about rules and rule constituting order suggests that he might be open to the English School's interest in how order occurs under anarchy.

QuoteThe starting point of poststructural research is the notion that 'what dominates (society) is the practice of language'.  Discourse in Anglo-Saxon scholarship is commonly associated with language, but there are many other linguistic and non-linguistic forms of discourse. When Onuf says 'constructivism begins with deeds. Deeds done, acts taken, words spoken – These are all that facts are', Onuf does not know it, but he is in fact working with Lacan and Foucault's notion of discourse. Indeed, replace the Lacanian schemata with Onuf's rule and the language becomes almost identical.

QuoteConsistent with arguments made in World of Our Making, Onuf claims that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the triumph of the liberal individual, and the liberal state, in legal thought and political theory, obscuring the legacy of republican thought. Onuf traces republicanism back to the Greeks, and argues that republican thought evolved around the notion of community and the common good. By exploring the history of republican thought, Onuf is able to demonstrate that important areas of international relations, such as sovereignty, humanitarian intervention and the democratic peace, have been deeply influenced by republican thought. Of course, what makes republicanism attractive to Onuf is how the individual and the community constitute each other. In a claim about how society is constituted, we can see how Onuf's understanding of agents and structures animates all of his work. 'Individuals make societies through their deeds, and societies constitute individuals'.

I just copied this to .txt, so today when I finally replace my e-reader I will have it on the go.

Christian Reus-Smit

QuoteRisse, for instance, argued that rationalism, and to a lesser extent, constructivism, required a discursive framework to explain the behavioural outcomes in international politics. For him, decision-making bodies in international institutions were not simply about strategy-making or strategic action, but rather, reasoned argumentation that explained why actors learned to trust and agree with one another. The starting point for this latter process was moral persuasion, or a common knowledge rooted in empathy and the motivation to agree with one another. Christian Reus-Smit's constructivist approach is, in many ways, similar to this communicative approach, but in other ways it is arguably a more substantive application of Habermas's ideas, which interweaves differing perspectives into a conception of historical change and social interaction in international relations.

QuoteOne of the key arguments in a co-authored article (with Richard Price), 'Dangerous liaisons? Critical international theory and constructivism', is that constructivism, in spite of its engagement with the mainstream 'on issues of interpretation and evidence, generalizations, alternative explanations and variation and comparability', remains compatible with critical international theory. In fact, constructivism and critical theory, they point out, arose from the same tradition of social theory (Marxism) and thus share similar methodological objectives of assessing the social origins of practice and human agency. Bridging constructivism with critical theory, therefore, is not unreasonable, but in fact remains an overlooked task of integrating critical strands of thought in international relations theory and, in this case, of explaining the evolution of international structures and norms.

QuoteHe argues that while each of these societies of states was governed by differing institutionalized practices and values, the differing governing norms show how values and beliefs are constitutive of evolving political structures, or what he calls 'constitutional structures'. Tracing the evolution of norms and rules in this manner shows just how norms and rules have been shaped by changing social and political forces and values. Yet most constructivist approaches assume that norms, rules and institutionalized practices are constitutive of, and constituted by, given values and beliefs of agents. For Reus-Smit, the very constitutivity of norms and institutional practices is part of a discursive and historical process that, if framed properly, can address why some norms have become new standards of legitimacy. Indeed, as he explains, constructivists have 'failed to pay sufficient attention to the discursive mechanisms that link intersubjective ideas of legitimate and rightful state action to constitutional fundamental institutions'.

QuoteThe question, then, is not simply how norms and moral principles regulate and constitute state identity and power, but how they have emerged out of negotiations, agreements within international institutions such as international law and diplomacy.

QuoteSince institutions provide a forum for discussion and deliberation, they involve ethical and moral claims to truth, or reasons that are compelling enough to persuade others that new rules and norms need to be institutionalized. Legitimization is thus a discursive process in which the struggle to reach reasonable consensus presupposes the recognition of a fair and just authority to implement such rules. It is in this way that moral persuasion helps to explain the constitutivity of values.

John Gerard Ruggie

QuoteRuggie's early work has to be understood in the context of the American debate between neorealism and neoliberalism and of the rise of hegemonic stability theory as a partial compromise between the two sides.

QuoteIn his critique of Waltzian neorealism, Ruggie argues that its rigid separation of 'levels of analysis', particularly between domestic, transnational and structural levels, is a barrier to understanding the complexities of change in the international system. He claims that both the medieval and the modern system are characterized by anarchy, but one could hardly claim much continuity between the two eras. The momentous change from one era to another can only be understood by examining how the very principles of differentiation among political units (the shift from heteronomy to anarchy) took place

QuoteIn other words, neorealism is far too static an approach. By separating the structure of the international system from processes among and within the units (states) that make up the system, it is unable to incorporate and thereby explain (let alone predict) change of the system.

Quote"There is an extraordinarily impoverished mindset at work here, one that is able to visualise long-term challenges to the system of states only in terms of entities that are institutionally substitutable for the state. Since global markets and transnationalised corporate structures (not to mention communications satellites) are not in the business of replacing states, they are assumed to entail no potential for fundamental international change. The theoretical or historical warrant for that premise has never been mooted, let alone defended."

QuoteIn the early 1980s, Ruggie argued that multilateralism was crucial to the stability of relations among states in the West after the Second World War. An extended period of co-operation and economic growth among states in Europe, the Americas, Japan and parts of Southeast Asia was made possible by the multilateral institutions set up at Bretton Woods.

QuoteThree apparent aims define his social constructivist project: to stress the functionality of collective intentionality, or its 'deontic' function of creating rights and responsibilities'; to show how social constructivism, which he calls a 'theoretically informed approach', provides a realistic explanation of action by demonstrating how actors interpret their collective situation; and to show that social constructivism offers a 'non-causal' explanatory account of international relations. In drawing on the sociology of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Ruggie argues that an alternative explanatory approach is needed to avoid the ontological limits of the methodological individualism of (neo-)utilitarianism. Social constructivism, in his view, offers a worthy alternative approach by focusing on the material and ideational factors that shape and explain social action. In sum, Ruggie's constructivist project might be best characterized in the following way: to define the analytical parameters of a social epistemology in international relations theory, so that international relations theorists can explain how actors acquire their knowledge, and how this social knowledge constitutes, and is constituted by, the rules and obligations of the international system.

Alexander Wendt

QuoteAlexander Wendt's work is invaluable for those who think that something is always wrong with the conduct of international relations, and that statespersons need instruction from social scientists in how to put it right. He reminds us of the need to take our subject matter seriously, not as a set of 'things to be explained' by reference to some independent 'causes' at a different level of analysis, but as a set of phenomena that cannot be adequately accounted for independently of their interpretation by the agents involved. In the study of international relations, he believes, understanding the tacit knowledge of those we study is of crucial importance.

QuoteMany students of international relations claim that the broader our empirical reference, the more abstract must our theories become, appealing less to the 'intersubjective' meanings among the participants in those empirical processes and more to the play of large structural forces. Wendt has devoted his research to criticizing this claim as at best one-sided, and at worst counter-productive. For if it is the case that 'agents' can do little to change the 'structures' that allegedly determine their behaviour, there is not much point in instructing them in the first place!

QuoteThe phrases 'how things really are' and 'how things really work' are ontological creeds. The basic belief system of neorealists and neoliberals is rooted in a realist ontology. States exist in an anarchical international system, and the study of collective action among them 'takes self-interested actors as constant and exogenously given, [focusing] on the selective incentives that might induce them to cooperate'. In addition to this commitment to the subject matter of international relations theory, neorealists and neoliberals practice an objectivist epistemology, which refers to the relationship between the inquirer and the object of inquiry. If there is a real world operating according to natural laws, then the inquirer must behave in ways that put questions directly to nature, so to speak, and allow the real world to answer back directly. The inquirer must stand behind a thick wall of one-way glass, observing the real world rationally. Objectivity is the 'Archimedean point' (Archimedes is said to have boasted that, given a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the Earth) that permits the inquirer to discover the way states behave without altering them in any way. But how can this be done, given the possibility of inquirer bias? The positivist answer is to recommend the use of a manipulative methodology that controls for bias, and empirical
methods that specify in advance the kind of evidence necessary to support or falsify empirical hypotheses.

QuoteConstructivism is a structural theory of the international system that makes the following core claims: (1) states are the principal units of analysis for international political theory; (2) the key structures in the states system are intersubjective, rather than material; and (3) state identities and interests are in important part constructed by these social structures, rather than given exogenously to the system by human nature or domestic politics.

QuoteAlthough neorealists and neoliberals claim that they can explain the primary sources of conflict and co-operation in international relations on the implicit structure of anarchy, without a detailed social theory of state interests, they cannot. For example, we know that 'cooperation under anarchy' is possible in a world of positive-sum interactions, but not in a world of zero-sum interactions. The former is more likely to exist than the latter when state actors define their interests to include those of other states, that is, if they are other-regarding rather than strictly self-regarding. There is a great deal of literature exploring the internal logic of state strategies within these contexts, particularly using sophisticated game theory. But the literature cannot explain the sources of the precise game under consideration because its implicit model of the international system lacks a theory of state preferences and action.

QuoteDrawing inspiration from, among others, Anthony Giddens in sociology and Roy Bhaskar in the philosophy of science, Wendt believes that students of international relations should adopt the main principles of 'structuration' theory. Agents (state actors) do not exist independently of the structures around them, but at the same time those structures do not exist independently of their reproduction (and possible transformation) by the agents. Hence the importance of paying attention to this co-constitution of agents and structures, which means refusing to overlook the way in which states interpret the meaning of what they do in favour of some underlying structural dynamic.

QuotePerhaps his most radical substantive argument is that we should give as much priority to the dominant representations of international relations in understanding state conduct as the distribution of material forces among states, whether they be military, political or economic. What matters, according to Wendt, are not the raw facts of material distributions of one kind or another, but their interpretation and signification by the actors themselves. Students of international relations tend to study behavioural outcomes associated with different distributions of power among states throughout history. Wendt argues that attempts to deduce patterns of stability and peace from this kind of analysis is inadequate in the absence of any theoretical examination of how states understand the nature and identity of threats from other states.

Robert Cox

Quote"Theory is always for someone and for some purpose."

QuoteNature cannot be seen as it 'really is' or 'really works' except through a value window. Since values enter into every inquiry, the question immediately arises as to what values, and whose values, shall govern. If the findings of studies can vary depending on the values chosen, then the choice of a particular value system tends to empower and enfranchise certain individuals and groups while disempowering and disenfranchising others. Inquiry thereby becomes a political act.

QuoteTheir concern with the phenomenon of 'false consciousness' discloses a belief in the possibility of 'true consciousness', and it is the self-appointed task of critical theorists to reveal the material and social forces that prevent people from achieving their 'real' interests in a world that manipulates their desires and limits their potential. The task of critical inquiry is, by definition, to raise people to a level of 'true' consciousness.

QuoteThe basic assumption of the book is that forces of production create the material base for social relations, generating the capacity to exercise power in institutions, but power and production are related dialectically. Power, in turn, determines how production takes place and is organized.

QuoteIn the first, Cox distinguishes between no fewer than 12 'patterns' of production relations, which he calls 'modes of social relations of production'. They include subsistence, peasant–lord, primitive labour market, household, self-employment, enterprise labour market, bipartist, enterprise corporatist, tripartist, state corporatist, communal and central planning. Each of these 'modes' is explored as a self-contained structure with its own developmental potential and ideational/institutional perspective. Social relations of production arise in three analytically distinct ways: the accumulated social power that determines the nature of production; the structure of authority that is shaped by the internal dynamics of the production process; and the distributive consequences of production. Cox demonstrates how these aspects of social relations are related to each other in a dialectical manner, and he is particularly interested in the ways in which contradictions and conflicts arise between them in particular historical phases.

QuoteDespite his panoramic survey of these patterns of production relations, Cox quickly focuses on two basic modes of development, which he calls capitalist and redistributive. Development is associated with, and made possible by, the generation of an economic surplus within a mode of social relations. Simple reproduction, in which the mode is merely reconstituted over successive production cycles, cannot produce meaningful development. Both capitalist and redistributive forms of development accumulate in order to grow, and both may organize production in similar ways to generate a surplus for further development. But the mechanisms and underlying rationale for accumulation in the two modes are different. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit in the market, while in redistributive societies what is produced is determined by political decision-making.

QuoteCox argues that any meaningful comparison between capitalist and redistributive modes of development must be located in a global context, taking into account the relations among states within which these two modes are concentrated.

Quote"States create the conditions in which particular modes of social relations achieve dominance over coexisting modes, they structure either purposively or by inadvertence the dominant–subordinate linkages of the accumulation process...each state is constrained by its position and its relative power in the world order, which places limits on its will and its ability to change production relations."

QuoteGramsci challenged the reductionist conception of the state as exclusively a 'class' state, an instrument of ruling-class coercion and domination. He insisted on the 'educative' role of the state, its significance in constructing those alliances that could win support from different social strata, and its role in providing cultural and moral 'leadership'. Although the economic structure may be, in the last instance, determinative, Gramsci gave much greater autonomy to the effects of the actual conduct of the struggle for leadership, across a wide front and on a variety of sites and institutions. He argued that the role of the Communist Party was to engage and lead in a broad, multifaceted struggle for 'hegemony'. A shift in socialist political strategy was necessary, away from an outright frontal assault on the state to the winning of strategic positions on a number of fronts. Socialist struggle was conceived as a 'war of position' in the first instance against the forces of capitalist hegemony in civil society and culture.

QuoteDrawing on the work of Karl Polanyi, Cox focuses on what he terms 'the internationalization of the state'. By this, Cox refers to the process whereby national institutions, policies and practices become adjusted to the evolving structures and dynamics of a world economy of capitalist production. Cox identifies three dimensions of this process. First, 'there is a process of interstate consensus formation regarding the needs or requirements of the world economy that takes place within a common ideological framework'. Second, participation in the negotiation of this consensus is hierarchical. Third, 'the internal structures of states are adjusted so that each can best transform the global consensus into national policy and practice'.

QuoteHe believes that our era of 'hyper-liberal globalizing capitalism' is the site of some major contradictions and struggles: between the rhetoric of democracy and the 'democratic deficit' caused by the internationalization of the state; between the growing demands for international protection of the environment and the surrender of state authority to international corporate finance and business; and between the rhetoric of victory in the Cold War over socialism and the accelerating inequality both within and between states.

Andre Gunder Frank

QuoteIn his work on Latin America in the 1960s, Frank, along with other radical scholars such as Rudolfo Stavenhagen and Fernando Cardoso, turned much of the conventional wisdom on its head. He argued that the Parsonian dualisms were exaggerated and that there was no empirical evidence to back up Rostow's claims concerning the stages of growth. Indeed, he claimed that 'underdevelopment', far from being a characteristic of countries and regions insufficiently integrated into the global economy, was in fact a consequence of their incorporation into what later became known as the capitalist world system.

QuoteThus, in order to understand the process of 'underdevelopment', we must see it as an epiphenomenal manifestation of the expansion of capitalism. Contrary to the modernization paradigm, capitalism is the disease rather than the cure. As for economic aid as a means to establish some of the preconditions for 'take-off', Frank argued the opposite. He argued that satellite states were in fact net exporters of capital to metropolitan countries, which exploited the satellites while pretending that their economic policies were 'aiding' them.

Quote"The upshot of all these theoretical and political reflections...was that continued participation in the world capitalist system could only mean continued development of underdevelopment. That is, there would be neither equity, nor efficiency, nor economic development. The political conclusions, therefore, were to de-link from the system externally and to transit to self-reliant socialism internally (or some undefined international socialist cooperation) in order to make in- or non-dependent economic development possible."

QuoteIn the transition from mercantilism to industrialization, Frank argues that the triumph of the commercial revolution was a product of colonial conquest as well as the hugely profitable slave trade. This was the centre of two trade triangles, the Atlantic and the Oriental, joined together by the role that Europe (and Britain in particular) played in each. Thus, the industrial revolution was not simply a European phenomenon, for it also involved substantial transfers of colonial precious metals and raw materials to certain countries that comprised the funds later invested as capital with the onset of industrial and manufacturing capitalism. Thus, an accumulating position in the various triangular trades was critical in deciding whether a country would become a developing or an underdeveloping one in the course of the next 200 years.

QuoteStagnation and crisis were, he argued, the consequence of the limitations of productive forces, which over time tended to run up against decreasing returns to scale. The ensuing depressions led to a predominance of 'internal' pressures within individual countries to reorganize production: the successful, such as England, managed to establish their dominance over other countries in the next phase of the economic cycle. Frank argued that the United States became a developing rather than an underdeveloping country for two main reasons. On the one hand, it benefited from a substantial mercantile accumulation of money through its key position in the Atlantic trade triangle of the eighteenth century. On the other, the colonizing power, Britain, treated its colony with benign neglect, allowing local yeoman farming to develop and generate surplus funds to finance further growth. By contrast, Frank devoted a great deal of attention to British colonial policies in India. There, he stressed the way in which the British exploited peasants via the taxation system, and organized production almost exclusively for the export of raw materials and the import of British manufactured goods.

Needs moar Wendt.

Stephen Gill

QuoteOne of Gill's first contributions to the field was The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems, and Policies (with David Law, 1988), a survey of international political economy that uniquely, for its time, gave serious attention to the entire theoretical spectrum of the field, including variants of Marxism and game theory, as well as making novel arguments about the structural power of capital. These structural arguments moved away from one-dimensional notions of Dahlian 'A has power over B' to recognize the structural power provided by capital's increasing ability to play one country off of another (provided by the increasing mobility of capital and finance).

QuoteGill investigates the Trilateral Commission not as a site of secret power or conspiratorial global dominance, but as a site of elite consensus-building around economic and foreign policy, precisely the sort of place one would expect to see the ideological work of hegemony being undertaken.

QuoteWhat was unique about the Trilateral Commission was its formation as a concerted attempt to promote co-operation around a transnational liberalism over and against the more state-centric realism of the Nixon–Kissinger years. Gill argued that the Trilateral Commission was comprised of 'organic intellectuals' who endorsed a broadly transnational liberalism and dialectically both reflected and helped reconcile some of the emerging conflicts around domestic versus international capitalist class fractions.

QuoteGill borrows 'capillary power' and 'panopticism' from Foucault. Capillary power refers to Foucault's claim that power is best understood through its constitution of subjects and observed through micropractices, the quotidian stuff of everyday life. Panopticism refers to Foucault's discussion of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's prison design where inmates would feel they were being watched at all times but could not observe who may or may not be watching them. Foucault used the Panopticon as a metaphor for how subjects are disciplined by internalizing 'the gaze', the sense that they are potentially observed at all times, thus disciplining themselves.

QuoteDisciplinary neo-liberalism is institutionalized at the macro-level of power in the quasi-legal restructuring of state and international political forms: the 'new constitutionalism'. This discourse of global economic governance is reflected in the policies of the Bretton Woods organizations (e.g. IMF and World Bank conditionality that mandates changes in the forms of state and economic policy) and quasi-constitutional regional arrangements such as NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and Maastricht, and the multilateral regulatory framework of the new World Trade Organization. It is reflected in the global trend towards independent central banks, with macroeconomic policy prioritizing the 'fight against inflation'.

QuoteWith regard to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in particular, Gill is one of many scholars who have charged that a kind of market fundamentalism pervades their decision-making process, and that structural adjustment programmes seem designed, through 'conditionality', to punish states that have strayed from neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Defenders of the IMF would argue that one should not 'shoot the messenger', that less developed countries with balance-of-payment problems got themselves in trouble first, and that they are always free to decline help from the IMF. However, it is the concept of the 'structural power of capital' provided by Gill that would answer conditionality is something not merely desired by the IMF, but looked to as a seal of approval by private investors upon whom most less developed countries are dependent. Similar arguments could be made with relation to multilateral trade deals, the World Trade Organization or the independence of central banks. Attempts to 'democratize' these sites by providing more democratic accountability,
transparency and/or democratic selection of leadership would most assuredly bump up against the structural power of capital and its ability to 'strike' or exit a country or region that seems unable to ensconce these institutions away from democratic decision-making.

QuoteSo for Gill, market civilization refers to the microlevel instantiations of neoliberal ideology, the way in which neoliberal values of the individual, property, privatization and hierarchy become pervasive globally. Examples include, echoing Karl Polanyi, the increasing commodification of areas of social life such as healthcare, health insurance, religion, leisure, the patenting of human genes and other life forms.

QuoteGill is most vulnerable to the mainstream of the discipline on methodological grounds. Although much of his work has an empirical element, he is most certainly not engaged in attempting to falsify his hypotheses. For example, Gill's argument about the importance of councils such as the Trilateral Commission in the formation of a transnational capitalist class can only be suggestive, as it falls outside the demarcation criteria provided by Popper as a testable proposition.

QuoteIn Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Gill devotes an entire chapter to questions of epistemology and ontology, and directly addresses the mainstream of the discipline. He approvingly cites Gramsci's rejection of positivism in favour of a dialectical analysis and claims, 'similar and quite fundamental criticisms can be made of the explanatory usefulness of the prevailing positivist approaches to the study of International Political Economy, such as its ahistorical nature; its lack of a dynamic, dialectical quality; the narrowness and incompleteness of its abstractions which are confined, almost tautologically, to the relations between theoretical abstractions (i.e. unitary rational actors called states); the tendency to extreme parsimony in explanation relative to the infinite complexity of its object of analysis, that is the international system'.

Antonio Gramsci

QuoteGramsci's critique of these logics, and the simplest conceptual entry to his thought, rests within his concept of hegemony. Of course, hegemony is a familiar term for international relations scholars. Whether in the arguments about the necessity of a hegemonic power within 'hegemonic stability theory', or simply a referent for a preponderance of military and economic power in a global or regional system, hegemony is a common term. For Gramsci, hegemony meant something much more complex, which encompasses these meanings but goes far beyond them. Hegemony is arguably 'the central organizing concept' of The Prison Notebooks.  For Gramsci, hegemony is the ability of a dominant class to secure consent from the dominated, its ability to exercise 'intellectual and moral leadership', to convince the dominated their interests are the same as those of the dominant class. To understand his use of hegemony, it is critical to recognize that Gramsci's theorization of the capitalist state encompasses both the political state apparatus, which can use coercion if necessary to achieve the interests of the dominant class, and civil society (the sphere of the putatively 'private', including the economy, religion, parties, clubs and other non-state institutions), wherein much of the work of eliciting consent to domination occurs.

QuoteFor Gramsci, civil society was more than just the sphere of 'egoistic' self-seeking and private behaviour. It was a vital site of popular contestation that offered the possibility of transcending the apparent public–private divisions of modern capitalism. Gramsci used the term 'historic bloc' to refer to the particular constellation of forces that utilizes hegemony, and theorized that for advanced capitalist countries, it would be necessary to develop a counter-hegemony in order to secure power for the dominated. That is, power was not located in the state apparatus, but instead in the extended state that includes civil society, and revolution could not be achieved merely by seizing the reins of the state apparatus. Hegemony is produced and reproduced through a historic bloc, the reach of which extends throughout society.

QuoteGramsci rejected this form of 'economism' in favour of recognizing the interplay of base and superstructure, or perhaps more accurately, he rejected the base!superstructure metaphor entirely in favour of the more complex notion of hegemony. By doing so, Gramsci helped fashion an open-ended form of historical materialism (or Marxism), which rejected economic determinism and teleological forms of historicism, and identified the previously marginalized (in the sense of epiphenomenal) terrain of culture and ideology as a site of vital struggle.

QuoteGiven his interest in culture and ideology as critical sites of political struggle, it is not surprising that Gramsci would reject simplistic notions of 'false consciousness', where the dominated are simply unaware of their true interests, and instead argue that 'all men are philosophers', in that each is situated in a particular historical setting and makes sense of a complex world through recourse to 'common sense'. For Gramsci, common sense does not have the same connotation as 'good sense', but rather represents a kind of fragmentary and often contradictory amalgam of popular, religious and cultural beliefs. Common sense functions like a world view that, although fragmentary and not systematic, reflects hegemonic ideology. Gramsci argued that in order to challenge the hegemony represented in common sense, a counter-hegemonic project 'must be a criticism of "common sense", basing itself initially, however, on common sense in order to demonstrate that "everyone" is a philosopher and that it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's individual life, but of renovating and making "critical" an already existing activity'. Thus, Gramsci finds within each individual elements of both hegemonic ideology and the capacity to utilize their common sense in order to engage in critical reflection upon that ideology.

QuoteOne of the most recent and direct attacks on the legitimacy of Gramscian international relations was offered by Germain and Kenny in the Review of International Studies. They argue that Gramsci's conceptual inventory was developed by analysis of particular state conditions that are not easily appropriated for a different historical epoch; that the key Gramscian international relations step of theorizing global hegemony and global civil society (begun by Cox) is entirely inappropriate given Gramsci's analysis of a particular state and civil society; and that Gramsci's complex theoretical and conceptual works cannot be taken up cavalierly by contemporary scholars without historicizing them. A later issue of Review of International Studies features rebuttals by Rupert and Craig Murphy, but the most extensive and rigorous rejection of Germain and Kenny's critique was offered by Adam David Morton in Review of International Political Economy. In a compelling defence of a careful use of Gramsci's ideas 'in and beyond their context', Morton develops an immanent critique of the Germain and Kenny position by emphasizing three points: there is no privileged singular reading of Gramsci, but there is also not a limitless or infinite number of readings; only an 'austere historicism' would shackle ideas to the immediate context in which they are produced; and Gramsci's own works reveal that a Gramscian perspective requires us to think both 'in and beyond' the context of an idea's provenance. Morton carefully marshals a considerable amount of evidence to make the case that Germain and Kenny's own critique of Gramscian international relations fails on Gramscian terms.

Jürgen Habermas

QuoteAccording to Habermas, strategic action and its constitutive elements of calculation and design remain in constant tension with the ethical and moral claims to truth. Validating these claims (moral, truth, ethical, strategic) requires us to persuade others that our opinions and ideas are worth considering and instituting. Such claims, often couched in terms 'universal pragmatics', are based on the speech act, which refers to our doing something in what we say.

QuoteThe performativity of speech acts is a crucial element of what Habermas refers to as 'the struggle to reach consensus'. As Habermas insists, 'the very medium of mutual understanding abides in a peculiar half-transcendence. So long as participants maintain their performative attitudes, the language actually in use remains at their backs'. Yet one of the problems with Habermas's consensus theory, as Thomas McCarthy notes, is that it fails to deal adequately with the difference between an utterance that is true, and one in which rational consensus dictates that a statement is true.

QuoteIn his essay on 'Citizenship and national identity', Habermas argued that immigration and economic globalization had begun to challenge the constitutional patriotism of national polities. The erosion of national identity raised the question of whether the political loyalties of domestic polities could provide the basis for solidarity at the transnational level. In his later writings on the EU constitution, Habermas would argue that an EU constitution – one modelled after the framework of the US constitution – could foster the needed solidarity and identity to promote an EU polity.

QuoteOn the one hand, globalization has engendered many benefits and opportunities for social movements and citizens to channel their demands to higher political authorities. On the other hand, the political and legal institutions of the global community, while forming a novel network of global justice, still lack developed legitimization processes to foster the needed loyalties and commitments for global citizenship. It is crucial to stress, therefore, that Habermas's ambivalence stems from his own convictions concerning the strong nationalist loyalties to the constitutional state. As already noted, constitutional patriotism, or the evolution of loyalties of national citizens to their constitutional frameworks, has not materialized in any strong form at the global level (and to a lesser extent the transnational, EU level). The development of global citizenship takes time, of course, and requires stronger enforcement mechanisms to interlink democratic procedures with democratic solidarity. For cosmopolitan nationalists, for instance, this idea requires us to take more seriously the dynamics of national communities when formulating the possibilities of solidarity at the global level.

QuoteThomas Risse, for instance, has argued that communicative action theory explains how international agreements and institutional norms are shaped by reasoned argumentation.  Communicative action, as he explains, involves empathy and ethical and moral claims, which, in turn, constitute a common knowledge (or anarchy as lifeworld) of actors that helps to explain behavioural outcomes. In this manner, strategy/power offers one mode of explanation, while reasoned argumentation offers another to assess these outcomes. Risse's application of Habermas's theory is arguably the most concrete and effective application to international politics of Habermas's ideas.