From Distant Object To Close Subject:: The Concept of Culture in Political Science

st053 book Page 279 Saturday, December 10, 2005 5:44 PM
■ From Distant Object to Close Subject:

The Concept of Culture in Political
Science
RONALD STADE
ABSTRACT
The relationship between researchers and their objects of study has varied and contin-
ues to vary across time and disciplinary traditions. A key element in such variations is
the degree of reflexivity involved in the process of knowledge production. To what
extent are researchers aware of how they themselves produce knowledge? This ques-
tion is discussed in the context of political science. It is suggested that the various
forms the study of culture has taken in political science can serve as an indicator of
different levels of reflexivity or modes of engagement. Three influential conceptuali-
zations of “culture” in political science are presented as examples: political culture
theory, civilizational theory, and constructivism. Toward the end, the case is made for
a cosmopolitan engagement with culture and examples from political science of this
type of engagement are introduced.
Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
Concepts
The above quote from Nietzsche continues with him stating that just as no leaf ever
wholly equals another, the concept “leaf” itself is formed through an arbitrary ab-
straction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions. The
result is the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which
would be “leaf,” some sort of original form, in relation to which actually existing
leaves seem like incorrect, unreliable, and unfaithful copies. If we replace the word
“leaf” with the concept of “state” we immediately realize how Nietzsche’s reflections
can be connected to political morphology (i.e. political science). The problem of the
state as concept and the state as reality might be (and most frequently is) interpreted
in terms of the relationship between theory and empirical data. Such an interpreta-
tion, however, is misleading, at least with regard to Nietzsche’s inquiry. Nietzsche in-
stead points to the very condition of conceptualization and theorization: by naming
something, we choose which differences we take into account and which we ignore.
The concept “state” can thus be used for societies which are run like family business-
■ Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift 2005, årg 107 nr 3 s 279-300

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es, as well as for vast, not very integrated stretches of land like the Democratic Re-
public of the Congo. The same concept is used for countries as large and powerful as
the United States and as tiny and marginal like Liechtenstein. Which differences do
we ignore when we refer to all these societies and territories with the same concept?
On which grounds do we stress one or another difference, for example when we dif-
ferentiate between “sovereign” and “non-sovereign” nations?
The solution to the conceptual dilemma is not to invent a new concept for each
thing, phenomenon, and imagination – even if this would be in line with an altogether
consistent correspondence theory. Rather, Nietzsche’s observations require us to
take seriously the process of knowledge production and conceptualization in general.
Each field of study needs researchers who are committed to this exercise of taking
conceptualization seriously. To what degree such researchers are marginalized in
their field of study, however, varies between disciplines and academic departments.
In this regard, it is not difficult to notice a difference between such social scientific
fields as, say, economics and social anthropology. Whereas reflexive theories like
hermeneutics and poststructuralism became mainstreamed in anthropology, they
continue to be largely invisible in economics. In political science, the situation can be
described as being closer to that of economics than that of anthropology. The relative
lack of reflexivity in some academic quarters can be measured by how topics like cul-
ture, meaning, interpretation, and knowledge production are treated. These are the
topics on which the reflexive movement turns. A rather stringent method of examin-
ing the level of self-reflection and self-critique in a social science is to consider how a
topos like culture is being conceptualized. Roughly speaking, culture can be concep-
tualized in three ways: (1) distantly, that is, as an object to be explained; (2) paternal-
istically, that is, as an already known entity; and (3) cosmopolitanly, that is, as an un-
known which holds the potential of widening one’s horizon and modes of under-
standing.1 Cosmopolitan conceptualizations of culture entail the direct engagement
with subjective meanings and world views. Just as cosmopolitanism in general, this
kind of engagement exists in tension with rationalist research strategies and truth
claims. Rather than to, for example, categorize populations and measure attitudes,
cosmopolitan conceptualizations of culture are encounters and dialogues with a
Someone. Cosmopolitan conceptualizations are engagements with a You, not with
an It. At the end of my discussion, I will get back to the tripartite criterion of distant,
paternalistic, and cosmopolitan conceptualizations of culture and try to determine
whether conceptualizations in political science correspond to any or all of the three
modes of understanding culture. I will also name a number of what I consider to be
examples of cosmopolitan conceptualizations of culture in political science.
In order to abide by the theme of academic reflexivity, let me insert a brief note on
my own engagements with political science. Professionally, I am an “anthropologist
plus.” In my case, the plus stands for peace and conflict studies, a field I have been
working in for the past few years. My engagement with political science, and in partic-
ular the field of international relations, however, precedes my work in peace and con-
1 The three modes of conceptualizing culture are inspired by Martin Buber’s and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s dis-
tinctions between I-It and I-Thou relationships.
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flict studies. The engagement with political science has been one of inquisitiveness
■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

and critical deliberation over the last decade or so. In several professional settings, I
have worked (and still work) closely with political scientists. Some political scientists
I consider good friends. Intellectually, my engagements with political science exhibit
some of the features of anthropological fieldwork. As a semantic and social field, pol-
itical science is not really different from any old tribe. There are the rituals, the dress
codes, the speech patterns, the conceptualizations and world views, and so on. More
than anything, it has been the latter, the conceptualizations and world views, that
caught my attention and turned me into something of an ethnographer of political
science (the fact that one is likely to find considerably more neckties and sophisticat-
ed jewellery among political scientists than among anthropologists, though telling,
seems less important, at least in the current context). Ethnography is always written
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from somewhere, which means that the difference between the observer and the ob-
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served is intrinsic to the very genre of ethnography. At the same time, enough bridg-
ing of that difference is needed to be able to grasp others’ concepts and world views.
Long gone, however, are the days when anthropologists assumed the role of spokes-
person for some tribe or people. Today, the notion of “critical engagement with” has
largely replaced that of “giving voice to.” While my observations would appear to be
in line with the “critical engagement” (as well as, one can wish, the type of cosmopol-
itan engagement described above) approach, I can only hope that members of the
tribe of political scientists do not feel misrepresented or mistreated by what is to fol-
low.
In order to create a sense of how “culture” has been and is being conceptualized, I
will begin by sketching a preliminary history of the culture concept. This is mostly
meant to prepare the ground for further discussion. Thereafter, one separate section
is devoted to each of the three more influential conceptualizations of “culture” in
political science: political culture theory, civilizational theory, and constructivism.2 In
the concluding part, I correlate these political-scientific concepts of culture to the
three modes of understanding “culture” mentioned above. Finally, I propose how to
arrive at a more cosmopolitan concept of culture in political science and the social
sciences in general, and also provide examples of such conceptualizations in contem-
porary political science.
A few words on why I focus on just three usages of the culture concept in political
science. Apart from their having had some influence on mainstream debates in polit-
ical science (see footnote 2), the examples of political culture theory, civilizational
theory, and constructivism are not picked randomly. It is in these three theoretical ap-
proaches that we find a conceptualization of culture that grants culture the analytical
status of chief cause behind events, structures, and actions. While other schools of
2 By “influential” I mean the following: influence can be defined by two criteria; on the one hand, to what
extent an approach generates scholarly debate in a particular field of study (the more of debate it generates, the
more influential it is); and, on the other, whether or not it is being mainstreamed in the process of generating
debate (the more it is becoming part of the paradigmatic mainstream in a particular field of study, the more
influential it is). This is obviously a working definition. If one considers the ongoing debate about the validity
of describing the theoretical history of International Relations in terms of three (or four) major, classical
debates, the precariousness of such a definition suggests itself.
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thought in political science – the English school is an example that comes to mind –
may take heed of cultural aspects in their theoretical models, culture is not considered
the most, or even a, central factor. The same can be said about poststructuralist, post-
colonialist, and feminist approaches in political science. Not only have they failed to
dislodge mainstream conceptualizations of politics, they also, more often than not,
take power, rather than culture, to be the basic explanatory variable. In Gramscian
and Foucauldian approaches we may, for instance, find a great deal of culture-speak,
but the underlying structure of hegemony, governmentality, discourse, power-knowl-
edge, and so forth, is one of power hierarchies. (In an eighteenth-century-style pam-
phlet, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins composed this couplet with regard to Michel
Foucault: “Power, power, everywhere and how the signs do shrink/Power, power
everywhere and nothing else to think”; Sahlins 1993a:20.)3 This, it seems, makes for a
poor concept of culture. Culture, however, is a polysemous concept with a rich histo-
ry, to which we now turn.
The concept of culture

A commonplace when discussing the concept of culture is to refer to Kroeber and
Kluckhohn’s (1952) estimation that some 156 definitions of the word were in use in
the 1950s and to Raymond Williams’ (1983) suggestion that culture is “one of the two
or three most complicated words in the English language.” These two references are
usually deployed to convey the complexity of the culture concept. Less frequently we
are told what kind of definitions Kroeber, Kluckhohn, and Williams identified, and
how these definitions have shaped, and continue to shape, the usages of the concept.
Considering the currency and political force of the culture concept, it may indeed be
worth to rehearse, at least in broad outline, the conceptual history of this particular
topos.
The English word “culture” is rooted in the Latin verb colere, to inhabit, to dwell, to
care for, to grow (in the sense of “cultivate”).4 The derived words cultus and cultura re-
fer only to the latter two meanings of the verb “colere.” The Greek were well aware
of what today would be labeled “cultural differences,” for example when they distin-
guished Hellenes from barbarians. Yet, they had no word for culture in the modern
or anthropological sense. The Greek concept of paideía, which sometimes has served
as an equivalent of culture, ought rather be translated as education, refinement. In
Latin, expressions like cultura and cultus (as in cultura agri and cultus agrorum) were used
as metaphors for the cultivation of human qualities. In Greek, at times, the opposite
metaphorization was employed, so that one could speak of the paideía (“education”)
of plants. In both cases, the notion of cultivation was being metaphorically trans-
ferred between the realms of agriculture and human refinement, which gave the con-
cept of culture its specific meaning. When Seneca and Cicero write about cultus animi,
that is, the cultivation of the (human) spirit, they make use of this metaphorical rela-
3 For critiques of power functionalism, see, apart from Sahlins 1993a, e.g., Spencer 1997.
4 The history of the culture concept in Latin, Greek, and German is explored in Fisch 1978. My own recoun-
ting of this history is indebted to this source.
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tionship. (Similar transferences appear in expressions like cultus philosophiae, cultus litter-

arum, cultus iustitiae, and so forth, which became common in late antiquity.)
The association between the concept of culture and the notion of cultivation in a
figurative sense exists in other languages as well. Hindi knows two words, sudhara och
sabhyata, both of which connote the concept of culture in the sense of cultivating the
human character (the expression “Indian culture” or “Indian civilization,” bharatîya
sabhyata of course, has these days become a political slogan for Hindu fundamental-
ists). Both words, sudhâra and sabhyatâ, contain references to improvement and re-
finement. We have here something of a functional equivalent to the Greek concept of
paideía. In Chinese, someone who had an excellent command of the language and
who mastered the art of writing was called wén huà ren, a “cultured” person. In Japa-
nese, the corresponding expression was bunkajin. Subsequently, both words came to
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mean ”intellectual” – which, since the 1960s, is not necessarily a positively charged
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word in either China or Japan (or, for that matter, anywhere else). The word for cul-
ture, in Chinese wén huà, in Japanese bunka, is rooted in concepts that have to do with
language and writing. Thus, there existed in China and Japan the idea that he or she
who educates him- or herself becomes a cultivated human being. Contemporary Jap-
anese exhibits a great variety of Japanized, transvocalized English words and expres-
sions – everything from mizeraburu “miserable,” to bigguban, “new economy,” the
term referring to the structural reform of the financial system or “big bang.” Similar-
ly, the English word “culture” has entered the Japanese language as karuchaa, as in
karuchaashokku, “culture shock.” Whether or not to use this kind of loan word (gairai-
go) is a matter of style and context, and thus itself a matter of cultural meanings.
There exists, however, no continuity between the antique concept of culture and
the modern use of the same concept (which does not mean that family resemblances
are entirely missing). In medieval Latin, we find only two usages of the culture con-
cept: one, in the form of “cultus”, that becomes increasingly charged with the mean-
ing of “(religious) ritual”, and which therefore probably should be translated as “ven-
eration”; and another, “cultura”, that refers back to the original meaning of agricul-
ture, tillage, and cultivation. It is not before the twelfth century’s scientific renais-
sance, and then only rarely, that we again come across the metaphorical use of the
culture concept. At the same time, the Latin words cultus and cultura are being ab-
sorbed into the European vernaculars, in which they undergo the same semantic
transformations as in Latin.
What today would be termed “cultural differences” were discussed in terms of cus-
toms, language, laws, and so on, in the Middle Ages and in early modernity. Semantic
equivalents of the modern culture concept were not in common use. Someone like
Regino of Prüm (dead in 915) considered the differences between various peoples to
284
be differences in descent, customs, language, and laws (”diversae nationes populo-
rum inter se discrepant genere, moribus, lingua, legibus”). Cultural differences were
interpreted and debated during the European colonization of the New World in quite
similar terms. One way of denoting different groups of people was to use the con-
cepts of gens and natio, what today might be called “ethnicity”. What now are consid-
ered cultural traits could be ascribed to different peoples in terms of collective identi-
ty.
Only with the rise of modern historical consciousness did culture – or, as it was fre-
quently called in a number of European languages, civilization – become the kind of
noun we readily recognize from contemporary debates about cultural differences. It
was the notion of civilizational progress that gave rise to the modern concept of cul-
ture. The metaphor of individual human cultivation was transfered to the context of
historical development, which, before such a transfer could take place, had to be dis-
associated from its purely theological connotations. This movement occurred in the
eighteenth century. Its beginnings are closely associated with the name of Johann
Gottfried von Herder, in whose Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-
1791) we find the first systematic application of the concept of culture in the sense of
what subsequently would be considered “national cultures”. Culture is now some-
thing which a certain people “has” and by which the same people is characterized. As
was common in Herder’s days, cultural differences in general, and the distinct histor-
ical developments of various cultures and peoples in particular, were thought to be
caused by climatic variations across the globe. At the same time, Herder pointed out
that cultural differences continued to exist because of the power of tradition. Indeed,
the semantic nexus of culture, tradition, customs, habits, and so on, would eventually
become quite commonsensical. The identification of particular cultures would draw
its substance from this semantic nexus.
From Herder it is not far to early anthropological speculations about the evolution
of human cultures. The evolutionary view of culture is contained, in a nutshell, in the
title of one of Lewis Henry Morgan’s works: Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of
Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). These were taken to
be the evolutionary stages through which human culture had moved. The fact that,
despite evolution, so to speak, differences between cultures still existed, was ex-
plained as the contemporaneity of, on the one hand, civilization and, on the other, the
relicts of savagery and barbarism. As in subsequent paradigms, such as moderniza-
tion theory, non-Western cultures were considered left-overs or remains from earlier
stages of evolution.
With the arrival of systematic ethnographic study of various cultures, the notion of
non-Western cultures as mere relicts was abandoned. To this contributed the disen-
chantment with the image of Western civilization’s supremacy that followed upon
World War I. The taken-for-granted idea of Europe’s cultural superiority met with
fairly widespread skepticism. This allowed for romantic notions about “simple cul-
tures” and more “authentic” ways of life to become popular. The discipline of an-
thropology, which had just been institutionalized and professionalized, turned on the
key concepts of “cultures” (in the plural) and “societies”, both of which were consid-
ered to be highly integrated, functional structures. At the same time, a number of re-
285
nowned anthropologists contributed deliberately to the kind of cultural critique that

fed off the romanticization of exotic cultures (Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa
is one of many examples).
It is this concept of culture, or, rather, cultures (plural), which has spread far be-
yond anthropology. “Cultures” is probably one of the most political concepts in
common use at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As will become evident fur-
ther down, this culture concept of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century an-
thropology has been resuscitated in political science. Another development that con-
nects political-science conceptualizations of culture with early anthropology is the ad-
vance of political culture theory during the 1950s.
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Political cultur e theor y
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The first theorists of political culture in political science borrowed their analytical
framework from the same source, namely Talcott Parsons, as anthropologists like
Clifford Geertz. Like Geertz and his colleagues, they also reacted against the sort of
national character studies that had been produced by anthropologists like Mead
(1942), Ruth Benedict (1946), and Geoffrey Gorer (1948, 1955; Gorer and Rickman
1949). Unlike Geertz, however, they nevertheless adopted a perspective very similar
to that of the anthropological culture and personality school from which had origi-
nated the national character studies.5 The similarity in perspective has to do with as-
sumptions about the continuity between individual behavior and cultural patterns
and between the micro- and macro-levels of analysis. Before discussing these as-
sumptions we may want to remember where political culture theory came from and
where it was headed.
The canon of political science usually registers Gabriel Almond as the pioneer of
political culture theory. When Almond wrote about “Comparative Political Systems”
(1956), he distinguished between four types of political systems: the Anglo-Ameri-
can, the preindustrial, the totalitarian, and the continental European. Of these, he de-
picted the Anglo-American as the norm, in comparison to which he found all the oth-
ers wanting – which was entirely in line with the atmosphere of modernization think-
ing and Cold War ideologizing that, at the time, dominated public culture in the Unit-
ed States. Only Americans, and possibly the British, understood politics correctly as a
market place of sorts, in which the goal was to arrive at compromises. Subsequently,
Almond, together with Sydney Verba, published the landmark, The Civic Culture: Polit-
ical Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (1963), in which the authors, on the one
hand, tried to make plausible the Schumpeterian thesis that democracy works best
when elites compete for votes among a largely lethargic populace, and, on the other,
that political evolution has produced a number of distinct mixtures of traditional and
modern political cultures. As in Almond’s first publication on the topic of political
cultures, the United States and Britain are portrayed as the most developed and bal-
anced political culture in a sample of five democracies.
5 Actually, a number of political scientists subsequently embraced the anthropological culture and personality
tradition.
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Three features stand out in the Almond-Verba concept of political culture: first, it
is tightly modeled on what Talcott Parsons called social structure, which Parsons
(1964:230) considered to be “a system of patterned relationships of actors in their ca-
pacity as playing roles relative to one another”, second, its empirical foundation con-
sists of nothing more than superficially conducted opinion polls; third, it was devel-
oped in the context of a very well-funded U.S. Social Science Research Council
project amidst Cold War campaigns to demonstrate the inferiority of Communism.
The reliance on Parsons meant that Almond and Verba’s political culture concept
refered to systems rather than to processes or cases. Early on, Stein Rokkan, in his
1964 review of The Civic Culture, questioned the treatment of political cultures as ho-
mogeneous systems in which there are direct links between individual and nation.
This echoes the critique that was directed at the culture and personality school and its
notion of “modal personality”, which was defined as a certain personality structure
that occurs most frequently within a society. To be sure, there were differences be-
tween Almond and Verba, on the one hand, and the culture and personality school,
on the other. Whereas Ralph Linton, Cora DuBois, and others who developed the
idea of modal personalities, made their argument in terms of deep personality struc-
tures, Almond and Verba rejected psychoanalytically informed theories.6 Joining up,
as they did, with the behaviorist movement, they thought it more scientifically pru-
dent to study values and orientations as overtly articulated opinions. On the other
hand, a closer look at the Almond-Verba political culture concept reveals that it has a
similar function as that of the modal personality concept. It too is supposed to medi-
ate between the macro-level of nationally defined culture and the micro-level of indi-
vidual action.7
Little surprise then that Rokkan (1964:677) in his review asked why Almond and
Verba, in their study, had not at least allowed for such internal differences as could be
attributed to region, class, creed, and political affiliation. As Carole Pateman (1971)
pointed out, this flaw may not at all have been coincidental since it served the end of
idealizing Anglo-American political culture with its purportedly perfect mix of active
citizens (the minority) and parochial apolitical sleepwalkers (the majority).
A more severe criticism concerned the basic assumption contained in the Almond-
Verba political culture concept, namely that political culture caused a certain form of
government, such as democracy, to evolve. Why, asked the critics, should it not be
the other way around? Could democracy not have caused civic culture?8 This criti-
6 Among the classics of psychological anthropology, one can mention Kardiner and Linton 1939, Linton 1945,
DuBois 1960, and Hsu 1961.
7 One could also elaborate further on the differences and similarities between psychological anthropology (a
synonym for the culture and personality school), on the one hand, and Almond and Verba’s link to political
psychology and cultural psychology, on the other. There is, for instance, more continuity than discontinuity
between the Office of Strategic Services’ psychological profiling of Adolf Hitler and anthropologists’ studies
of national character. It can be argued that the Almond-Verba concept of political culture has the same under-
pinnings as these psychological approaches in that all of them aim at identifying traits. Both psychological
anthropology and political culture theory thus belong to the genre of trait psychology. The continued impor-
tance of trait-psychological assumptions can be gleaned from the fact that, decades of critiques of trait psyc-
hology notwithstanding, few American presidents or secretaries of state have met with chiefs of state without
first having been provided with a psychological profile of their counterpart.
287
cism gets to the core of the matter. It challenges the idea that culture is something

more than mere ideology or a reflection of material circumstances. Neither Almond
and Verba nor others who had made political culture theory their own, were able to
counter this critique convincingly. The reason is quite patent. Political culture theory
lacked the sort of profound conceptualization of culture that took into consideration
key epistemological and ontological issues. First and foremost of such issues is the
question of how culture, as an analytical category, is connected to action, events, and
institutions. Only if this fundamental problem of the relationship between word and
world is addressed in earnest, can one hope to award to culture the kind of central an-
alytical importance which political culture theory attempted to do.
Political culture theory, while no flash in the pan, nevertheless had a rather short
career in political science. The concept of political culture spread rapidly, generating
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considerable debate in political science over a short period of time, whereupon inter-
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est in it declined fairly quickly – at least among political scientists. “The systematic
study of politics and culture [was] moribund”, writes David Laitin (1986:171). Robert
Putnam (1976:103), with considerably more pathos, complained that “values and be-
liefs [were] discarded from political analysis as froth on the mouth of madmen or
froth on the waves of history.”
This may not be an entirely acurate description. While the concept of political cul-
ture was waning in political science, it was waxing in neighboring disciplines, such as
political history. American historians like Bernard Bailyn, author of The Ideological Or-
igins of the American Revolution (1967) and The Origin of American Politics (1968), Daniel
Walker Howe, who wrote The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979), and Jean
Baker, author of Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-
Nineteenth Century (1983), seized the concept of political culture and turned it into an
instrument for semiotic analysis. Bailyn and his students refered explicitly to Geertz
and his contention that cultures need to be understood from the inside and that only
thick descriptions of cultural systems can count as valid representations of local
knowledge. The concept of thick description, Geertz borrowed from Gilbert Ryle,
whose illustration of what such a description entails he also uses. To quote directly
from Ryle (1971):
Two boys fairly swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the first boy
this is only an involuntary twitch; but the other is winking conspiratorially to an
accomplice. At the lowest or the thinnest level of description the two contrac-
tions of the eyelids may be exactly alike. From a cinematograph-film of the two
faces there might be no telling which contraction, if either, was a wink, or
which, if either, were a mere twitch. Yet there remains the immense but unpho-
tographable difference between a twitch and a wink. For to wink is to try to sig-
nal to someone in particular, without the cognisance of others, a definite
message according to an already understood code.
It is this “immense but unphotographable difference” that constitutes cultural mean-
ing, which, in its various local renditions, we can understand only if we learn “the
8 See, for instance, Muller and Seligson (1994) for a formulation of this criticism.
288
code” – or, rather, the system of codes and symbols that, according to Geertz, is cul-
ture. Being able to understand another culture is like “grasping a proverb, catching an
allusion, or seeing a joke” (Geertz 1974). To become culturally competent is to un-
derstand how other people make sense of the world, which is not the same as con-
ducting an opinion poll.
Despite their both having roots in Parsonian sociology, a profound distinction sep-
arates the Almond-Verba concept of political culture from the Geertzian culture con-
cept. Moving from Almond and Verba to Geertz is a move from methodological in-
dividualism to methodological holism. According to Geertz, culture is made up of
public and shared symbols. That is, culture consists of meanings that are not private
but public (a statement that resonates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum that there is
no private language). Culture is social and therefore intelligible, and vice versa. The
concept of political culture that was drafted by historians of American politics closely
followed the Geertzian theory of culture.
Eventually, political culture theory made a comeback in political science (of course,
there will always be those who argue that it never went away – but see Laitin’s and
Putnam’s comments above). Most notably, the second generation of political culture
theorists picked up where Almond and Verba had left off. In particular, they breathed
fresh life into such cultural variables as social trust and civic community, which Al-
mond and Verba already had operationalized. At the same time, they have managed
to pump up political culture theory to world-historical and civilizational dimensions.
Civilizational theory
Four names stand out in the renaissance of political culture theory, Samuel Hunting-
ton, Ronald Inglehart, Robert Putnam, and David Laitin. Of these, two, Huntington
and Inglehart, have worked hardest at converting the concept of political culture into
one of clashes between civilizations. Since his landmark publication, Making Democra-
cy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1992), Putnam has turned his attention to the
political culture of the United States. Laitin, who started out by studying political cul-
ture in Africa and now focuses on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, tries
to combine rational choice theory with political culture theory. This can be said to
have resulted in two things: on the one hand, Laitin’s instrumentalization of Geertz’
culture concept demonstrates the shortcomings of Geertz’s model; on the other, it
reduces culture to preferences and choices (involving such things as equilibrium se-
lections and tipping games).9 Both Geertz’ model and the game-theoretical interpre-
tation of the culture concept start from a common assumption: cultural values and
beliefs are shared equally among the members of a cultural community. If they were
not, the problem arises what exactly constitutes a culture or cultural system, and, in
the case of Laitin, what precisely it is people choose between.
Be that as it may, Putnam and Laitin have contributed only marginally to the blow-
ing-up of political culture theory to the size of civilizational theory. This has been ac-
complished mainly by Inglehart and Huntington. Inglehart’s pet project is the so-
9 For a brief outline of Laitin’s position, see Laitin 1997.

289
called World Values Survey, which grew out of the European Values Survey that was

published for the first time in 1981. The 1995-1998 World Values Survey question-
naire contains questions like, “If someone said that individuals should have the
chance to enjoy complete sexual freedom without being restricted, would you tend to
agree or disagree?” and “How important is God in your life? Please use this scale to
indicate – 10 means very important and 1 means not at all important.” Aside from the
absurdity of such questions – one can wonder what “complete sexual freedom”
means in any circumstance? And what could I possibly have meant if I had answered
the second question with, say, “3” or “6”? – Inglehart’s quantifications of cultural val-
ues has led him to draw conclusions about civilizational conflicts. Inglehart identifies
clashes between civilizations with regard to a number of cultural values: the societal
role of religious authorities, political attitudes, and, most importantly, according to
TO
Inglehart, gender equality and sexual liberation (which is why the question about
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“complete sexual freedom” is far from marginal in this context).
Now, Inglehart’s surveys, of course, are altogether outshone by Huntington’s
clash-of-civiliztions thesis in the realm of public and scholarly debate. When Ingle-
hart subsequently criticizes Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996), he does not
question the existence of discrete cultural entities called civilizations, or whether cul-
tural differences matter in geopolitical perspective. What Inglehart claims is instead
that Huntington’s focus on core political values leads him astray. The most conse-
quential cultural differences have to do with gender equality and sexual liberation, not
with what people think about representative democracy, argues Inglehart (Norris and
Inglehart 2002). Quips Inglehart: “The cultural gulf separating Islam from the West
involves Eros far more than Demos” (Norris and Inglehart 2002:236).
It could be argued that Inglehart misrepresents Huntington’s civilizational theory.
Working backward from Huntington’s conclusions about strengthening Western civ-
ilization as to be able to withstand the onslaught of the modern-day Huns (that is, the
Muslim and Confucian civilizations which Huntington identifies as the West’s major
enemies), one arrives at the same assortment of core values with which Inglehart op-
erates. Huntington, like Inglehart, believes that civilizations are path-dependent, per-
tinacious constellations that are organized around core values. To quote Huntington
(1993:25):
Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture,
tradition and, most importantly, religion. The people of different civilizations
have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and
the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as
well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities,
liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product
of centuries. They will not soon disappear.
What Inglehart has called the “sexual clash of civilizations” (Inglehart and Norris
2003:65) would seem to be part and parcel of this definition of civilizational differ-
ences.
Furthermore, just like Inglehart, and wholly in the spirit of modernization theory,
Huntington (1993:22) holds that “major differences in political and economic devel-
290
opment among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures.” The con-
gruences between the civilizational theories of Inglehart and Huntington thus far
outweigh whatever differences there may exist between them. That the one has come
into being with the aid of copious and, one can guess, costly surveys and the other on
the basis of armchair speculations about what divides one culture from the other
seems to speak more to the dubious design of the World Values Survey question-
naires than to Huntington being in a state of satori. The most significant difference
between the civilizational theories of Inglehart and Huntington derives from the lat-
ter’s greater awareness of the need for mediating concepts that connect values and
geopolitics. While Inglehart offers little in the way of a schema that makes us under-
stand how durable cultural values can produce civilizational conflicts, Huntington
makes use of the notions of contrastive identity and “kin-country syndrome”. It is be-
cause “[w]e know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only
when we know whom we are against” (Huntington 1996:21), and because people ral-
ly behind “their” civilization, that cultural values have geopolitical ramifications, ac-
cording to Huntington.
It stands to reason that Huntington would be criticized on the same grounds as Al-
mond and Verba. Why does he not at least consider such internal differences as could
be attributed to region, gender, class, and political affiliation? The question is whether
breaking up civilizations into smaller units solves the problem of treating popula-
tions, religions, territories, and cultures as if they were homogeneous. It is one thing
to descry patterns of cultural differences, be they related to differences in cultural
competence (which includes what commonsensically is refered to as “cultivation”,
Bildung, culture, 教養 [kyouyou], and so on; and which Pierre Bourdieu misleadingly
called “cultural capital”), or in historical context, or in conditions and circumstances
of living. It is a whole other thing to believe that one can divide culture into neat lots,
Westerners to the left, Muslims to the right. If one goes even further, as does Hunt-
ington, and draws a thick black line across a map to indicate the border between
Western Christianity, on one side, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other
(Huntington 1993:30), one is guilty of committing simplification to the point of de-
ception.
With Huntington, civilizational theory has moved (far) beyond political culture the-
ory’s methodological individualism. If political culture theory homes in on the rela-
tionship between the individual and his or her environment (or structure of opportu-
nities), Huntington’s civilizational theory only acknowledges what in Mary Douglas
and Aaron Wildavsky’s grid-group culture theory is termed “hierarchist” sociality.
That is, social actors are not only highly, or even entirely, integrated in a sociocultural
system, they also abide completely by all societal rules and share all cultural values. In
comparison with Huntington’s one-dimensional human, Douglas and Wildavsky’s
ideal-typical individuals at least come with four or five alternative cultural character-
istics. According to the grid-group schema, people and their social environments can
be classified along two dimensions of sociality: one of regulation or prescription
(“grid”); the other of incorporation into a bounded group (“group”).10
10 Douglas 1982:190-192.
291
Grid-group analysis can be mentioned as yet another cultural theory in political sci-

ence, although its immediate impact on mainstream debates in political science have
been rather limited. Indirectly, however, grid-group thinking has been part of most
conceptualizations of culture in political science ever since the first wave of political
culture theory. Today, the grid-group complex is discussed in terms of norms and
identity – two keywords in International Relations constructivism.
Constructivism
By now, constructivism can be considered one of three dominating paradigms in In-
ternational Relations (IR). (The other two are neorealism and neoliberalism.) IR, for
all intents and purposes, must be regarded as a subdiscipline of political science. As
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opposed to another subdiscipline of political science, to wit comparative politics, IR
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has been about the development of theories that by and large disregard ideological
and domestic differences between states, and that therefore could be viewed as sys-
temic, structural, and universal. The institutionalization of IR began in 1919 with the
establishment of the first department of international politics and the Woodrow Wil-
son chair of international politics at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth.
The purpose was to study the international system and to contribute to the develop-
ment of the League of Nations in order to prevent another global war. Today, this
type of international studies would probably be refered to as peace and conflict stud-
ies. The fourth Woodrow Wilson professor and head of the department, Edward
Hallett Carr, would be the one to introduce to IR the notion of international anarchy,
that is, the view that world politics is a self-help system in which each nation must
fend for itself, which in reality often may entail agreeing to compromises rather than
going to war.
What Carr objected to most strongly was the, at the time rather widespread, idea
that the First World War had been caused by the involved parties failing to under-
stand one another. He found this idea to be idealist and utopian. Despite Carr’s cri-
tique and his growing influence in IR theory, the investigation of how misunder-
standings can lead to large-scale conflicts continued in the field of study that since the
late 1950s is called peace and conflict studies. Contrary to the most widely spread IR
paradigm, which was (and continues to be) derived from Carr’s “realism”, peace and
conflict studies adopted a processual perspective on communication and learning.
Rather than buying into the image of an international anarchy, researchers like Lewis
Fry Richardson, Kenneth Boulding, and Johan Galtung, writing as they did in the sys-
tem-theoretical genre of the time, tried to show that international anarchy and con-
flict can be unlearned. In 1992, Alexander Wendt’s article “Anarchy is what States
Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics” was published in the journal
International Organization (Wendt 1992a). It quickly became a classical text of IR schol-
arship. In it, Wendt does not question the basic tenet that the international system of
states is anarchical. He, however, does dispute the neorealist and neoliberal explana-
tion that this, due to the absence of a world state, somehow is a natural state of af-
fairs. He argues:
292
A world in which identities and interests are learned and sustained by intersub-
jectively grounded practice, by what states think and do, is one in which “anar-
chy is what states make of it.” States may have made that system a competitive,
self-help one in the past, but by the same token they might “unmake” those dy-
namics in the future. (Wendt 1982b:183)
In this quote, which well captures Wendt’s position, he would seem to do little more
than echoe the received wisdom of peace and conflict studies.11 Compared to early
peace and conflict studies, IR constructivism, however, is less informed by behavior-
ism and cybernetics than by contemporary sociology. Processes of learning (and un-
learning) need no longer be defined in terms of feedback loops. Instead, they are ex-
pressed with reference to, and in the terminology of, Anthony Giddens’ theory of
structuration. Both Wendt and Nicholas Onuf, who can be credited with having au-
thored the original publication in IR constructivism (Onuf 1989), depart from Gid-
dens, only that Onuf is more preoccupied with the role of language in structuration.
Another difference between Wendt and Onuf is that the latter is closer to postmod-
ernism in realizing that a theory of structuration necessarily also has implications for
the process of knowledge production in the discipline of IR itself. Onuf asserts that
there is no foundation for IR theory, and thus for constructivism, outside of the on-
going process of construction.12
Through Wendt and Onuf – and others, such as Friedrich Kratochwil, John Rug-
gie, and Martha Finnemore – the quintuple constellation of (1) interaction, (2) norms,
(3) interests, (4) institutionalization, and (5) identity has become fixed as the episte-
mological basis of IR constructivism. The connection between these five analytical
items can be summarized as follows: interaction creates (the need for) norms and
identities; norms determine how interests are defined; a relatively stable set of identi-
ties and interests can be called an institution; institutionalization creates the effect of
norms, interests, and identities appearing to be natural. Where, then, does change en-
ter this analytical constellation? To answer this question, constructivists have refered
to Joseph Nye’s distinction between simple and complex learning processes. To
quote from Nye (1987:380):
Simple learning uses new information merely to adapt the means, without alte-
ring any deeper goals in the ends-means chain. The actor simply uses a different
instrument to attain the same goal. Complex learning, by contrast, involves re-
cognition of conflicts among means and goals in causally complicated situa-
tions, and leads to new priorities and trade-offs.13
11 Stefano Guzzini (2003) remarks on the analogies between peace and conflict studies and IR constructivism.
12 On the relationship between constructivism and poststructuralism/postmodernism: as mentioned in the
beginning, the most important criterion for including in, or excluding from, my discussion various conceptu-
alizations of culture in political science has been what analytical status is ascribed to culture. Approaches that,
in analysis, turn culture into a function or effect of power have therefore not been included. This explanation
may or may not satisfy the reader who, in the presentation of IR constructivism, misses names like Richard
Ashley, R.B.J. Walker, James Der Derian, and Cynthia Weber. Other discussions are available, however. For a
thorough critique of constructivism from a postmodern point of view, see, for example, Zehfuss 2002. For a
work that treats “conventional and radical constructivism” together, see, for instance, Fierke and Jørgensen
2001; in particular the introduction by the editors.
293
Change, in IR constructivism, comes from actors redefining their goals and/or iden-

tities in accordance with available cultural norms. It is at this point that we can discern
the crucial distinction between constructivism and the so-called neo-neo paradigm in
IR.14 The analysis of how actors define their goals and identities is what separates ra-
tionalism from constructivism. In one case – that of rationalism – identities are inter-
preted as individual preferences, and goals are taken to correspond to preferences. To
this is commonly added that “man’s natural proclivity is to pursue his own interests”
(Brennan and Buchanan 1985:ix). Actions “are valued and chosen not for them-
selves, but as more or less efficient means to a further end” (Elster 1989:22). The out-
come of action is what matters. Actors will make choices between courses of action
depending on how they judge outcomes. Norms, rules, and institutions enter the pic-
ture only as possible constraints to available choices.
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Constructivists, on the other hand, may hold that actors will make decisions based
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on what to them seems most appropriate in relation to prevailing rules and norms.
The logic of appropriateness, rather than the logic of consequentiality (to speak with
March and Olsen 1989:160ff), is what seems to drive actors to make certain choices.15
At the same time, actors are able to learn new norms and to redefine situations. And
so on.
Because of its close affinity with Giddens’ theory of structuration, it is possible to
review and revise IR contructivism by way of rethinking Giddens. In particular, scru-
tinizing Giddens’ central proposition that he has solved the agent-structure problem
with his structuration theory seems worthwhile in the light of IR constructivism’s re-
liance on the conceptualization of norms, identities, and interests. Quintessential to
such a revision is to investigate how culture is conceptualized in Giddens’ – and, by
extension, in IR constructivism’s – theoretical edifice. Asking where and how culture
enters Giddens’ theory, in principle, equals asking where and how the same concept
enters IR constructivism.16 Connected to the problem of culture in structuration the-
ory is IR constructivism’s often criticized state-centric, top-down analysis of world
politics. To designate states as the principal or even sole actors in world politics has
been, and still is, common in IR. This has been reproached over and again, not least
from within IR.17 The critique of state-centrism has most frequently come from
those who study globalization and who would like to relabel IR, Global or Globaliza-
13 Nye has borrowed the distinction between simple and complex learning processes from Argyris and Schon
(1978), who use the expressions “single-loop” and “double-loop” learning for the same distinction.
14 That is, neo-realism and neo-liberalism – hence “neo-neo.”
15 March and Olsen (1989:160ff) differentiate between two logics of decision-making, the logic of consequenti-
ality and the logic of appropriateness. With the logic of consequentiality, “human behavior is driven by prefer-
ences and expectations about consequences. Behavior is willful, reflecting an attempt to make outcomes fulfill
subjective desires, to the extent possible” (ibid:160). With the logic of appropriateness, decision-making
“involves what the situation is, what role is being fulfilled, and what the obligations of that role in that situation
are” (ibid).
16 That the concept of culture indeed does enter IR constructivism can be gleaned, for example, from the title
of an anthology entitled, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (1996), edited by Peter
Katzenstein.
17 See, for example, Held and McGrew 1998; Macmillan and Linklater 1995; Rosenau 1990; Rosenau and
Czempiel 1992; Shaw 1994.
294
tion Studies, and the object of study, world politics (instead of international rela-
tions).
In the next and final section, I will discuss whether a revision of Giddens’ structur-
ation theory, and IR constructivism’s account of culture, can be combined with a re-
search approach that goes beyond state-centrism. In conclusion, I will assess the four
conceptualizations of culture in political science under discussion: political culture
theory, civilizational theory, IR constructivism, and a revised concept of culture that
is not limited by a narrow focus on top-down, state-centric, and rationalist structures.
Cultur e : from distant object to close subject

Giddens advanced a theory of structuration to solve the agent-structure problem.
Giddens – just like Bourdieu with his structuralist constructivism – tried to demon-
strate the mutual constitution of agents and structures. As William Sewell (1992) has
pointed out, however, in one vital respect, structuration theory is both inconsistent
and incomplete. In order to unite agency and structure in the single figure of structu-
ration, it is vague on what exactly is the substance of the agency-structure connection.
Giddens (1984:377) does tell that structure “exists only as memory traces, the organic
basis of human knowledgeability, and as instantiated in action.” But what are memory
traces and human knowledgeability if not culture? And how is structure being instan-
tiated in action?
The clues Giddens provides point into the direction of the langue-parole dichotomy.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue-parole opposition, as well as Louis Hjelmslev’s sche-
ma-usage and Noam Chomsky’s competence-performance constellations, differenti-
ate between, on the one hand, language and, on the other, speech. What structuration
theory claims is that language only exists as speech. Just like language, the structure
that structures is only virtual, says Giddens. If cultural schemas only exist as instanti-
ated by action, in what terms do people decipher and interpret other people’s “mem-
ory traces and human knowledgeability”? In other words, is there room for culture
outside of practice?
The answer could be yes, if we were to follow Paul Ricoeur in contending that ac-
tions and events can be considered as texts. In his seminal essay, “The Model of the
Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text” (1971), Ricoeur suggests that the in-
terpretive and explanatory work that is being performed in the ordinary course of life,
in which people try to make sense of what other people say and do, is not all that dif-
ferent from the kind of interpretation and explanation conducted by readers of texts.
If we concede Max Weber’s point about human action always being perceived as
somehow meaningful, actions will inevitably be subjected to interpretation and expla-
nation. What is being interpreted and explained, however, is not action or practice in
itself (whatever that may be), but its meaning. Meanings, on the other hand, are ob-
jectifications, inscriptions, fixations, and so on. It is these inscriptions of action, prac-
tice, and events which we can refer to as culture.
Another way of making the same point is to paraphrase, and adapting to the cur-
rent context, Sewell’s (1992) revision of structuration theory. What is lacking in this
theory, and what I think is lacking in much of IR constructivism as well, is an expla-
295
nation for how culture can change from within. To accomodate the potential for

change in a model of culture, the culture concept needs to be honed. First of all, cul-
ture cannot be likened to a homogeneous structure or system. Actors have access to
alternative cultural codes and can be expected to engage in code switching. In the
same vein, actors are likely to interpret and explain actions and events differently.
Various cultural schemas which exist simultaneously may contradict one another.
Not all actors will detect such contradictions. They may mix alternative codes freely.
Cultural distinctions, however, may gain force in times of crisis (see Swidler 1986).
Secondly, cultural meanings can be applied to novel or unfamiliar situations and con-
texts, which, in turn, can produce unforeseen consequences. To quote Sahlins
(1993b:16): “the world is under no obligation to conform to the logic by which some
people conceive it.” History (practice) always puts categories at risk.
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From this we can conclude that the human acts of interpretation and explanation
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introduce change into culture. It is in this sense that change comes from within cul-
ture. Political scientist Lisa Wedeen (2002:722) makes a similar point when she calls
attention to the fact that “a common conceptual system (intelligibility) is not the
same as a shared episteme (“common knowledge”).” In her study of political rhetor-
ics and performances in Syria (Wedeen 1999), she investigates the puzzle of why the
Syrian regime expended a considerable portion of scarce material resources on the
cult of the country’s president Hafiz al-Asad – despite the fact that nobody, including
those who created the official rhetoric, believed its claims.18 Wedeen calls this type of
political culture an “as if” politics. She suggests that “as if” politics make sense be-
cause they actually work. Citizens self-consciously submit to authority, their own dis-
belief in this authority’s rhetoric notwithstanding. Ironical distance and disbelief are
part of a larger pattern of political compliance.
Wedeen’s analysis of “as if” politics can serve as an illustration of how to hone the
concept of culture in political science. Culture, in the shape of semiotic practices and
intelligibility, has “real” political consequences. It can either sustain a regime, as in the
case of Syria, or cause radical, world-historical upheavals, as in the case of the end of
the Cold War. The latter case is portrayed excellently by Robert Herman (1996) in his
discussion of how Soviet (novoye mishleniye, “New Thinking”) emerged and turned the
tide of history. As Herman reports, the members of three social science institutes of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences – IMEMO (World Economy and International Rela-
tions), ISKAN (USA and Canada), and IEMSS (Economics of the World Socialist
System) – figured prominently in this development. “Propelled by a vision of the
USSR as a democratic and peaceable member of the international community and
touting ‘values common to all mankind,’ these ‘idealists’ sought to eliminate the un-
derlying causes of East-West conflict” (Herman 1996:275). Herman also makes clear
that “even after the selection of Gorbachev – known more as a talented technocrat
than as an ardent reformer – the country was not fated to travel the New Thinking
road” (ibid:278). Alternative scenarios existed all along; and as the events of 19 Au-
gust, 1991 (the date of the coup against Gorbachev) demonstrated, there were those
who never agreed on the definition of the problem or the solutions offered. Even
18 What John Austin (1975:132 and 134) may have called “infelicities” or “misfires.”
296
Gorbachev’s own thinking developed significantly during his six years in power
(ibid:287). Not only did New Thinking evolve over time, its outcome was not given.
Both members of the social science institutes and decision-makers like Gorbachev
and Shevardnadze have attested to the importance of dialogues with Western social
scientists and policy experts for the development of New Thinking (ibid:285 n 45).
One way of conceiving of the end of the Cold War is thus as a case of cultural code
switching, or, in the language of peace and conflict research, of learning. Another way
of interpreting New Thinking is as an instance of what Sewell (1992:17), with refer-
ence to Bourdieu, calls “the transposability of schemas”. That is, schemas “can be ap-
plied to a wide and not fully predictable range of cases outside the context in which
they are initially learned” (ibid). Transposing cultural concepts of universal human
rights, social democracy, and global community to a context in which class struggle,
communism, and systemic conflict had been paradigmatic brought with it the end of
one particular global scenario. In sociology, one often hears that if Japan did not exist
as a case that falsifies many assumptions about the causes of modernization one
would have had to invent it. The end of the Cold War serves a similar function in po-
litical science. Conventional approaches, from rational choice theory to systemic and
functionalist theories, fall short of providing a consistent explanation for the dramat-
ic changes in Soviet foreign and domestic policies. Culture and learning approaches,
on the other hand, can explain historical shifts and normative revolutions. All is not
bad with the conceptualization of culture in political science.
Going back to the beginning, we can note that the concept of political culture suf-
fered from a number of decisive shortcomings. On the one hand, the entire theoreti-
cal edifice had been erected on the shakiest of epistemological and ontological foun-
dations. The combination of methodological individualism and methodological na-
tionalism made for incongruities between levels of analysis and clouded the very def-
inition of what the object of study ought to be. Moreover, political culture theory,
from Almond to Inglehart, has been an ethnocentric project, apparently without be-
ing awake to it. “Cultures” were treated as external objects. They were being meas-
ured, not understood.
Inglehart and his colleagues bridge the divide between the political culture tradition
and civilizational theory (cynics might construe this maneuver as the world values
team riding on the coat-tails of Huntington). Like political culture theory, civilization-
al theory, made famous by Huntington, avails itself of values and orientations as the-
oretical underpinnings. This, however, merely functions as the presupposition or pre-
judgement of the theoretical model. The gist of the theory is that huge civilizational
blocs collide with one another and that, in world-historical perspective, the collisions
may be of the most violent kind. Lacking even in the sort of survey data that Inglehart
uses to legitimate his theses, Huntington must rely on prejudices, impressions, and
scattered literary comments to classify different civilizations. Cultures are defined as
imperfect and defective in relation to the culture Huntington and Inglehart identify
themselves with. They are wanting when it comes to religion, political culture, sexual
liberation, or all of the above. Culture is conceptualized paternalistically (“we know
what is best for you”). Neither engagement with, nor understanding of, non-Western
cultural processes enters the analysis.
297
Constructivism in IR is not burdened by the failures of political culture theory and

civilizational theory. First and foremost, this has to do with IR having a different ob-
ject of study. Instead of researching cultural differences, IR has searched for general
rules that guide the behavior of states in relation to one another. The idea of an anar-
chical international system became a commonplace in IR. Constructivism introduced
the notion that “anarchy is what states make of it”. International norms, malleable
state identities, and norm-guided definitions of national interest are at the core of the
conceptualization of culture in IR constructivism. Culture is considered not in terms
of methodological individualism or methodological nationalism, but from the van-
tage point of methodological holism. This has prepared the ground for a more cos-
mopolitan approach to culture in political science, as global norms and learning proc-
esses begin to replace images of the world as a jigsaw puzzle of cultures.
TO
By emanating from structuration theory, constructivism suffers from some of the
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same problems as Giddens’ theory. In particular, the concept of culture remains un-
derdeveloped. As long as the dialectics of agency and structure is blanketed in fog, it
is difficult to accept structuration theory’s claim to have dissolved the agent-structure
dichotomy. Ultimately, agency and structure stay separate.
Political scientists like Peter Mandaville, Iver Neumann, Matthew Evangelista,
Michael Barnett, Lisa Wedeen (to name just a few), have actively engaged with this
problem in various manners. Some of them have deserted the top-down external
view of cultural processes for ethnographic research on bottom-up processes. Others
have used their first-hand knowledge about top-down politics to provide cultural
analyses of events and situations (see, for instance, Barnett’s (2002) eyewitness ac-
count and sophisticated analysis of the United Nations’ inaction during the Rwanda
genocide). A cosmopolitan conceptualization of culture has occured in this intellec-
tual environment. Culture is being studied as an unknown which holds the potential
of widening one’s horizon and ways of understanding. The mode of research is one
of engagement: Mandaville’s (2001) with global islam; Wedeen’s (1999) with Syrian
politics; Evangelista’s (1999) with the global peace movement’s role in ending the
Cold War; and so on. Of paramount importance in this cosmopolitan turn is the di-
rect engagement with subjective meanings, that is, with other people’s world views.
Conceptualizing culture as enabling change, even world-historical change, may, in a
best case scenario, contribute to the development of political science. As there is no
last word in science, we can look forward with excitement to where such a develop-
ment can take us.
298
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st053 book Page 279 Saturday, December 10, 2005 5:44 PM

■ From Distant Object to Close Subject:

Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.

■ Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift 2005, årg 107 nr 3 s 279-300

■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

The concept of culture

■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

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■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

9 For a brief outline of Laitin’s position, see Laitin 1997.

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■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

Cultur e : from distant object to close subject

■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

■ R ONALD S TADE : F ROM D ISTANT O BJECT

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