ASHLEY - The Poverty of Neorealism

The Poverty of Neorealism Author(s): Richard K. Ashley Reviewed work(s): Source: International Organization, Vol. 38, No.
2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 225-286 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706440 . Accessed: 07/05/2012 09:34
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The poverty of neorealism RichardK. Ashley
The theory of knowledge is a dimension of political theory because the specificallysymbolic power to impose the principlesof the construction of reality-in particular,social reality-is a major dimension of political power. Pierre Bourdieu It is a dangerousthing to be a Machiavelli. It is a disastrousthing to be a Machiavelli without virtu. Hans Morgenthau Almost six years ago, E. P. Thompson fixed his critical sights across the English Channel and let fly with a lengthy polemic entitled The Povertyof Theory. Thompson's immediate target was Louis Althusser. His strategic objective was to rebut the emergent Continentalorthodoxy that Althusser championed: structural Marxism, a self-consciously scientific perspective aiming to employ Marxian categories within a structuralistframeworkto producetheoreticalknowledgeof the objective structuresof capitalistreality. The chargesThompson hurled defy brief summary,but some key themes can be quickly recalled. Althusser and the structuralists,Thompson conThis articledevelops ideas from a draftpaper,"The Hegemonyof Hegemony,"and "Realist Dialectics"(Presentedat the September 1982 meeting of the AmericanPolitical Science Association,Denver, Colo.). My thinkingon this topic has benefitedenormouslyfrom comments and criticismsgenerouslyprovidedby GordonAdams, HaywardR. AlkerJr., AlbertBergesen, ChristopherChase-Dunn,Richard Dagger,Felicia Harmer,Robert 0. Keohane, Stephen D. Krasner,Ivy Lang, Dickinson McGaw, George Modelski, Craig Murphy, Robert C. North, MarkReader,John G. Ruggie,KennethN. Waltz, and David Winters,and the editorsof 10. The argumenthere is controversial.It is thereforeall the more noteworthythat, despite deep allegedly incommensurable differences,communicationswith diverse audiences representing To points of view have been so intelligentand, for me at least, rewarding. all concernedI offer thanks-and my exoneration. 1. E. P. Thompson, The Povertyof Theoryand OtherEssays (New York: MonthlyReview withinEnglishMarxism(London: Arguments Press, 1978). See also PerryAnderson'srejoinder, New Left Books, 1980). InternationalOrganization38, 2, Spring 1984 0020-8183/84/020225-61 $1.50 C 1984 by the MassachusettsInstituteof Technologyand the World Peace Foundation
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tended, were guilty of an egregiouslyselective, hopelessly one-sided representation of the Marxianlegacy they claimed to carryforward.In the name of science, Althusser had purged the legacy of its rich dialectical content while imposing a deadeningahistoricalfinalityupon categoriesstolen from Thompson charged, Marx'swork.To producethis backhandedhagiography, of Althusserhad superimposeda positivistunderstanding scienceupon Marx even as he claimed to surpass the limits of positivism. What is worse, his structuralMarxism had to ignore the historical context of Marx's work, subordinatethe dialectical"Young Marx"to the objectivist"MatureMarx" of the Grundrisse,cast disrespecton old Engels, "the clown," and systematically forget much of the Marxist literaturesince Marx, includingLenin. In Thompson's view, this readingof Marx produced a mechanistictheory of capitalist society-a machine-like model comprised of self-contained, complete entities or parts connected, activated, and synchronized by all It mannerof apparatuses. was, Thompsoncomplained,"an orreryof errors."2 Thompson's attack was by no means a plea for fidelityto Marx'soriginal texts. Rather,it was primarilyconcernedwith restoringa respectfor practice in history. In Thompson's view, structuralMarxismhad abolished the role of practicein the constitution of history, includingthe historicalmaking of social structures.It had produced an ahistorical and depoliticized understanding of politics in which women and men are the objects, but not the project, makers,of theircircumstances.Ultimately,it presenteda totalitarian a totalizing antihistoricalstructure,which defeats the Marxian project for change by replicatingthe positivist tendency to universalizeand naturalize the given order. Repeated in the context of current Europeanand Latin American social theory, non-Marxist as well as Marxist, Thompson's assault might today seem anachronistic.The fortresshe attackedis alreadyin ruins. In Europe, has at least, the unquestionedintellectualparamountcyof structuralism seen its day. True, Europeansocial theory remains very much indebtedto structuralistthought-that set of principlesand problematicsdifferentlyreflected in, say, Saussure'slinguistics,Durkheim'ssociology, Levi-Strauss'scultural anthropology,or Piaget's developmental psychology. Yet today, that debt principlesbut by the is honored not by uncriticaladherenceto structuralist questioningof their limits. poststructuralist On this side of the Atlantic, however, the themes of Thompson's attack are still worth recalling.For just as the dominance of structuralistthought is waning elsewhere, North American theorists of internationaland comparative politics claim to be at last escapingthe limits of what Piagetcalled "atomistic empiricism."Just as the United States' position of hegemony in
2. Also called a "planetarium," orreryis a mechanicaldevice used to illustratewith balls an of various sizes the relative motions and positions of the bodies in a solar system. It takes its name from CharlesBoyle, the Earlof Orrery,for whom one was made.
The poverty of neorealism 227 the world economy is called into question, North American theorists of theirown belated"structuralist relationsareproudlyproclaiming international include some turn." The proponents of this North American structuralism of the last two generations'most distinguishedand productive theorists of international relations and comparative politics: Kenneth Waltz, Robert Keohane,StephenKrasner,RobertGilpin, RobertTucker,GeorgeModelski, amongmany others.The movementthey represent and CharlesKindleberger, is known by many names: modem realism, new realism, and structural realism, to name a few. Let us call it "neorealism."3 Like Althusserand other proponentsof structuralMarxism,North American proponents of neorealism claim to carry forward a rich intellectual traditionof long standing.The neorealisttypicallydefineshis or her heritage, as the name implies, in the Europe-borntradition of "classicalrealism"the tradition associated in the United States with Morgenthau,Niebuhr, Herz, and Kissinger. Like Althusser's structuralism,too, neorealist structuralism claims to surpass its predecessorsby offeringa "truly scientific" renderingof its subject matter-an objective, theoreticalrendering,which allegedlycommonsensical,subjectivist, breaksradicallywith its predecessors' atomistic, and empiricist understandings.Like Althusser's structuralism, neorealismclaims to graspa structuraltotality that constrains,disposes, and finally limits political practice. Like Althusser's structuralism,neorealism has achieved consensusabout the categoriesdefiningthe dominantstructures of the totality examined:in the case of neorealism,these categoriesrefernot to social classes and the arenas and instruments of class struggle but to modern states, their strugglesfor hegemony, and the instrumentsby which and arenas in which they wage it. And like Althusser'sstructuralMarxism, neorealism has very quickly become a dominant orthodoxy. In France of the late 1960s and 1970s, Althusserianstructuralismprovided the pivotal text upon which the intellectualdevelopment of a generationof radicalphilosophers would turn. In the United States of the 1980s, neorealismand its structuraltheory of hegemony frames the measureddiscourse and ritual of a generationof graduatestudents in internationalpolitics. It is time for anotherpolemic. Settingmy sightson neorealiststructuralism, I offer an argumentwhose main themes closely parallelThompson's attack on structuralMarxism. I want to challenge not individual neorealists but
3. In speakingof a "neorealismmovement," it is necessaryto confrontseveralissues. First, the name "neorealism"is not universallyrecognizedby those I am callingneorealists.Some no doubt assume that theirwork reflectsno largermovement or trendthey themselvesdid not of consciouslyset into motion;they thus rejectthe application generallabelsto theirown work. as Second, I recognizethat the scholarshere regarded neorealisthave many seriousdifferences and quarrelsamong themselves. Third, I stress that my treatmenthere is with respectto the structureof an overall movement in its context and not the expressed pronouncementsor conscious intentionsof individualscholarswhose work sometimes may, and sometimes may not, contributeto that movement.
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the neorealistmovement as a whole.4 LikeThompson'scritique,my argument has both negative and positive aspects: both its critical attack and its implications for an approachthat would do better. In spirit with Thompson, let me phrase key themes of that critiquein deliberatelyexaggerated terms. On the negative side, I shall contend that neorealism is itself an "orrery of errors," self-enclosed,self-affirming a joiningof statist,utilitarian, positivist, and structuralistcommitments. Although it claims to side with the victors in two American revolutions-the realist revolution against idealism, and the scientific revolution against traditionalism-it in fact betrays both. It betraysthe former'scommitment to politicalautonomy by reducingpolitical practiceto an economic logic, and it neutersthe criticalfacultiesof the latter by swallowing methodological rules that render science a purely technical enterprise.From realism it learns only an interest in power, from science it takesonly an interestin expandingthe reachof control,and fromthis selective borrowingit creates a theoreticalperspectivethat paradesthe possibilityof a rationalpower that need never acknowledgepower'slimits. What emerges is a positivist structuralismthat treats the given order as the naturalorder, limits ratherthan expands political discourse, negates or trivializesthe significance of variety across time and place, subordinatesall practice to an interestin control, bows to the ideal of a social power beyond responsibility, and therebydeprives politicalinteractionof those practicalcapacitieswhich makesociallearning creativechangepossible.Whatemergesis an ideology and that anticipates,legitimizes, and orients a totalitarianprojectof global proportions:the rationalizationof global politics.' On the positive side, I shall suggest that theoreticalalternativesare not exhausted by the false choice between neorealism's"progressive"structuralism and a "regression"to atomistic, behavioralist,or, in Waltz's terms, "reductionist" perspectives international on politics.This dichotomyof wholes and parts,often invoked by neorealistorthodoxy,obscuresanothercleavage of at least equal importance. This is a cleavage that pits early structuralist "compliance models" of action and social reality (physicalisticmodels as seen in earlyDurkheim,for instance)againstdialectical"competencemodels" (as seen in poststructuralist thought over the last few decades).6Against the
4. As discussed here, neorealism is not just an amalgam of individual scholars'traits or opinions, nor is it the lowest common denominatoramong them. Rather,my contentionsare with respectto neorealismas a collective movement or projectemergingin a sharedcontext, having shared principlesof practice,and observing certain backgroundunderstandings and normsthat participants mutuallyacceptas unproblematic thatlimitand orientthe questions and raised,the answerswarranted, the conductof discourseamongneorealists- this regardless and of the fact that the participantsmay not be conscious of (may merely take for grantedthe universaltruthof) the normsand understandings them as one movement.In Waltz's integrating now well-knownterminology,mine is a systemic, not a reductionist, accountof the neorealist system. 5. The term "totalitarian"is, to say the least, provocative. As seen below, my usage is consistent with that of Hans Morgenthau. 6. This is John O'Neill's terminology.The distinctionwill be elaboratedbelow.
The poverty of neorealism 229 neorealisttendency to march triumphantlybackwardto compliancemodels of the 19th century,I shall be suggestingthat the rudimentsof an alternative competence model of internationalpolitics, a model more responsive to contemporaryarguments in social theory, are already present in classical realist scholarship.Drawingespecially upon the work of PierreBourdieu,I shall suggest that a dialectical competence model would allow us to grasp all that neorealism can claim to comprehend while also recovering from classicalrealismthose insightsinto politicalpracticewhich neorealismthreatens to purge. Such a model, fully developed, would reinstatethe theoretical role of practice. It would sharpen the depiction of the currentworld crisis, includingdilemmas of hegemonicleadership.And it would shed lighton the role and limits of knowledge, including neorealism, in the production,rationalization,and possible transformationof the currentorder. A critiqueof this breadthnecessarily findsits inspiration severalquarters. in In addition to Thompson, I should single out two poststructuralist sources, one Frenchand one German.The Frenchsourceof inspiration,as indicated, is primarilyBourdieu'sdialecticalOutlineof a Theoryof Practice.7 The German source of inspiration is the critical theory of Juirgen Habermas and, more distantly, the whole tradition of the FrankfurtSchool.8 Habermas's theme of the "scientizationof politics" is more than faintly echoed in my critique of neorealism. His diagnosis of a "legitimationcrisis" in advanced capitalist society complements my discussion of the historicalconditions of neorealistorthodoxy.9 At the same time, the studied parochialismof American international political discourse would make it too easy to deploy alien concepts from Europeansocial theoryto outflank,pummel, and overwhelmthat discourse. Such a strategywould be self-defeatinggiven my intentions. My arguments here, intentionally phrased in provocative terms, are like warning shots, meant to provoke a discussion, not destroy an alleged enemy. Thus, I feel an obligation to present my position in "familiar"terms, that is, in a way to of that makesreference the collectiveexperiences North Americanstudents
7. Pierre Bourdieu,Outline of a Theoryof Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: SelectedInCambridgeUniversityPress, 1977). See also Michel Foucault,Power/Knowledge: terviewsand Other Writings,1972-1977, ed. and trans. by Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Practice(Oxford:Blackwell,1977); Pantheon, 1980); Foucault,Language, Counter-Memory, Foucault,TheArchaeology Knowledge of (New York:Pantheon,1972);and Foucault,TheOrder of Things(New York: Pantheon, 1970). 8. Jiirgen Habermas, Towardsa Rational Society, trans. by Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Heinemann, 1971); Habermas, Theoryand Practice,trans. by John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); Habermas, Communicationand the Evolution of Society, trans. by Thomas McCarthy(Boston:Beacon Press, 1979). (London:Heinemann, 9. Juirgen Habermas,LegitimationCrisis,trans.by Thomas McCarthy 1976). Of course, the figurescited can hardlybe said to occupy one school; in fact, there are very sharpdifferences among them. Thompson, for instance,would be among the last to align happily with Foucault, "Althusser'sformerstudent";Habermas'srationalismwould set him of On apartfrom Bourdieu. the theme of the "economization" politics,see also HannahArendt, The Human Condition(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1958).
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of internationalrelations.As it turns out, this is not so hard to do. For those experiencesare not nearly so impoverishedas the keepersof neorealistlore would make them seem. 1. The lore of neorealism Everygreatscholarlymovement has its own lore, its own collectivelyrecalled creation myths, its ritualizedunderstandingsof the titanic strugglesfought and challenges still to be overcome in establishingand maintainingits paramountcy. The importance of this lore must not be underestimated:to a very considerabledegree, the solidarityof a movement depends upon the members' abilities to recount this lore and locate their every practicein its terms. Small wonder, therefore,that rites of passage,such as oral qualifying examinations,put so much stresson the student'sability to offera satisfying reconstructionof the movement's lore and to identify the ongoing struggles that the student,in turn, will continueto wage.Two generationsago, aspiring North American students of internationalrelationshad to show themselves readyto continueclassicalrealism'snoblewaragainstan entrenched American idealism. A generation ago, they had to internalizeanother lore: they had to sing the battle hymns of behavioralscience triumphantagainsttraditionalism. Today, thanks to the emergence of a neorealistorthodoxy, students must preparethemselves to retell and carry forwardyet another lore. a. The triumphof scientificrealism The lore of neorealism might be retold in several ways, and each telling might stress different heroes, but a central theme is likely to remain the same. Neorealism, according to this theme, is a progressive scientific redemption of classical realist scholarship.It serves the interests of classical realism under new and challengingcircumstancesand as advantagedby a clearer grasp of objective science's demands and potentialities. As such, neorealismis twice blessed. It is heir to and carriesforwardboth of the great revolutions that preceded it: realism against idealism, and science against traditionalistthought. A fuller recountingof the lore would begin by diagnosingsome lapses in the classical realist scholarshipof, say, Morgenthau,Kissinger,and Herz. In neorealisteyes, and for reasons considered below, these and other classical realistswere quite correctin their emphasis on power, nationalinterest,and the historically effective political agency of the state. Unfortunately,when held up to modem scientificstandards theory,these classicalrealistscholars of to fall woefully short. Four lapses in the classical heritagemight be seemed stressed. First, classical realist concepts, arguments,and knowledge claims might
The poverty of neorealism 231 be said to be too fuzzy, too slippery,too resistantto consistent operational formulation, and, in application, too dependent upon the artful sensitivity of the historicallyminded and context-sensitivescholar.Somehow, classical realistconcepts and knowledgeclaims never quite ascend to Popper's"third world of objective knowledge,"because classical realistshold that the truth of these concepts and claims is to be found only throughthe situation-bound interpretationsof the analyst or statesman.10 Second, and closely related, classical realists might be said to distinguish political insufficiently betweensubjectiveand objectiveaspectsof international life, thereby underminingthe building of theory. Such a concern is to be and found,for example,in Waltz'scomplaintsaboutMorgenthau's Kissinger's of understandings the international system.They are,forWaltz,"reductionist" becausethey tend to accordto the "attribute" actors'subjectiveperceptions of an importantrole in constituting the and reproducing "system."They thereby deny the system a life of its own as an objective social fact to be grasped by theory." Third, it might be claimed that, in Gilpin'swords, classicalrealistscholarship "is not well groundedin social theory."'2For all its strengths,classical realism could be claimed to exhibit a lamentable lack of learningfrom the insights of economics, psychology, or sociology. The fourth lapse, however, is the most salient from the neorealist point of view, for it marksboth a failureof realistnerve and a point of considerable vulnerabilityin the defense of a key realist principle:the principleof "the autonomy of the political sphere." Classical realists limited themselves to the domain of political-militaryrelations,where balance of power could be granted the status of a core concept. As a result, realism was naive with respect to economic processes and relations;it left them to the power-blind eyes of liberal interdependencethinkersand the questioningeyes of radical theorists of dependency and imperialism.As neorealistssee it, this was not Sinceeconomicprocesses just a matterof rivalrybetweenscholarlyparadigms. over the longerterm, ramifications and relationshave definitepower-political and since these same processes are badly describedby referenceto balanceof-power logics, classical realism's blindness with respect to economics had several relatedeffects:it situatedinterstatepolitics in a reactive"superstructural"pose vis-a-vis economic dynamics,renderedclassicalrealismincapable
10. Karl Popper, "On the Theory of Objective Mind," and "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject," in Objective Knowledge (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). As Morgenthau says again and again, the application of every universalizing formulation "must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place." Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1978), p. 8. 1 1. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 62-64. 12. Robert Gilpin, "Political Change and International Theory" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 3-6 September 198 1), p. 3.
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of graspingpolitical-economicdilemmas, and limited realism's capacity to guide state practice amidst these dilemmas. Given all of this, and given a period of world economic crisis that increasinglycalls into question states' of realism capacitiesto justifythemselvesas managers economicdysfunctions, was in dangerof failingin one of its foremost functions:as a frameworkthat could be deployed to legitimize and orient the state. This situationand the neorealistresponsecan be phrasedin more definite outcries terms. In a period of world economic crisis, wellingtransnationalist againstthe limits of the realistvision, and evidentlypoliticizeddevelopments that realism could not comprehend,the classicalrealisttraditionand its key conceptssuffereda crisisof legitimacy,especiallyin the United States.Sensing this crisis, a number of American scholars, most of whom are relatively young and very few of whom are steeped in the classic tradition, more or less independently undertook to respond in a distinctly American fashion;
that is, scientifically.3 They set out to develop and historically to corroborate
scientific theories that would portray or assume a fixed structureof international anarchy;'4trim away the balance-of-powerconcept's scientifically reducebalanceof power'sscientificstatus inscrutable ideologicalconnotations; to that of a systemic propertyor a situationallogic undertakenby rational, calculating,self-interestedstates;and, most importantly,disclose the powerpolitical strugglefor hegemony behind the economic dynamics that liberal and radicalanalysts had too often falsely treatedin isolation from interstate politics.'5More than that, they set out to construct theories that would lay bare the structuralrelations-the causal connections between means and ends-that give form to the dynamics of hegemonic rise and decline and in light of which a hegemon might orient its effortsboth to secureits hegemony and to preserve cooperative economic and ecological regimes. Politicaleconomic orderfollows from the concentrationof political-economicpower, say these theories. Power begets order. Order requires power. The realist emphasis on the role of state power had been saved.
13. As I shall indicatebelow, neorealismholds to a very definite,highlyrestrictivemodel of
social science.
14. A few neorealistsare extremely hostile to the use of the wordanarchy(e.g., as used in Waltz'swork),even thoughthey acceptthe absenceof centralrule(Waltz'sdefinitionof anarchy) as a hard-coreassumption.GeorgeModelskitakes "worldleadership" his "centralconcept." as Thus, he writes, "we make it clear that we do not regardthe modern world as some sort of anarchicalsociety. To the contrary,our analysisclarifiesthe principlesof orderand authority that have governedthat worldfor the past half millenniumand that, whilefamiliarto historians in each particularinstance, have not been previouslyput togetherin quite this manner and have been generallyunfamiliarto studentsof international relations.Anarchycould be in the Economic eye of the beholder."Modelski,"LongCyclesand the Strategyof U.S. International Political Policy,"in WilliamP. Avery and David P. Rapkin,eds., Americain a ChangingWorld Economy (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 99. One 15. Again, neorealistsdiffer,and the words they choose to use is one of the differences. The word"hegemony" mightspeakof order,anotherof stability,and still anotherof leadership. itself is certainlyin some dispute,even though all agreethat hegemony(whateverone chooses to call it) follows from power or the distributionof the attributesof power.
The poverty of neorealism 233 According to neorealist lore, this rescue of realist power politics was by no means a paltry act. It was, if anything, heroic. For it depended, above all, upon one bold move: a move of cunning and daring against stiff odds and in opposition to the mass of sedimentedsocial-scientifichabits. In order to bringscience to bear in saving and extendingrealism,neorealistshad first to escape the limits of logical atomism, then prevailingamong "scientific" approachesto the study of internationalrelations.To do this, they adopted a critical stance with respect to "reductionist"arguments,arguments that would reduce "systems" to the interactionsamong distinct parts. In their place, neorealistserectedwhat have come to be called "systemic,""holistic," or "structuralist"arguments. For the neorealistrescue of realist power politics, this structuralistmove was decisive. By appeal to objective structures,which are said to dispose and limit practicesamong states (most especially, the anarchicstructureof the modern states system), neorealistsseemed to cut throughthe subjectivist veils and dark metaphysicsof classical realist thought. Dispensingwith the normatively laden metaphysics of fallen man, they seemed to root realist power politics, including concepts of power and national interest, securely in the scientificallydefensible terrain of objective necessity. Thus rooted, realist power politics could be scientificallydefended againstmodernistand radical critics. Without necessarily denying such tendencies as economic interdependence uneven development,neorealistscould arguethat poweror political structureswould refractand limit the effects of these tendencies in ways securingthe structuresthemselves. Such is the stuff of legends. Even in neorealistlore, to be sure, this revturn is only part of neorealism'sstory. The graduate olutionarystructuralist student going throughneorealistrites of passagewould have to graspa good deal more. As will become clear later, the aspiringstudent would also have to come to grips with neorealistperspectiveson internationalcollaboration and the role of regimes, on the role and limits of ideology, and on the dynamics of hegemonic succession and "system change."Most of all, he or she would have to demonstrate an ability to interpret state practices in neorealistterms, which is to say as calculating,"economically"rationalbehaviors under constraints. Still, it is the structuralistturn that is decisive, the sine qua non of neorealism'striumph. Let us take a closer look at this vaunted structuralistaspect. b. The structuralist promise As John Ruggie has been among the first to point out, the promise of neorealism, like the promise of Immanuel Wallerstein'sworld systems perspective, is in very large measure attributableto its structuralistaspect.'6
16. John G. Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," World Politics 35 (January 1983), especially pp. 261-64.
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Ruggie is right. There are indeed certain isomorphismsbetween aspects of neorealist argumentand elements of structuralistargument(as seen in the work of, say, Saussure,Durkheim, Levi-Strauss,and Althusser).Noting the gloryof yesteryear's one isomorphisms, can let neorealismbaskin the reflected structuralisttriumphs in fields such as linguistics,sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. One can say that structuralism'ssuccesses in other fields suggest neorealism'spromise for the study of internationalrelations.'7 At the risk of oversimplification,it is possible to abstract a number of more or less continuous "elements" of structuralistthought. Five of these elements-overlapping aspects,really-are especiallyimportantfor my present purposes.They suggestsome of the parallelsbetweenneorealistargument and structuralistargumentin general. 1. Wherever it has emerged, structuralistargument has taken form in reactionagainstphenomenologicalknowledgeand speculative,evolutionary thought breaksradicallywith the formerbecause of thought.'8Structuralist eyes, phenomenology'sdebt to a conscious subjectivitythat, in structuralist phenomenological is always suspect. It poses precisely the question that knowledge excludes: how is this familiar apprehensionof the given order, and hence the community itself, possible? Structuralismalso breaks with speculative, evolutionary thought, regardingit as nothing more than the "other side" of phenomenology.Evolutionarythought too often fails to see that what pretends to promise change is but an expression of continuity in the deeper order of things. aims to constructthe objectiverelations(linguistic, argument 2. Structuralist of economic, political, or social) that structurepracticeand representations practice,includingprimaryknowledgeof the familiarworld.'I Human conis duct, includinghuman beings' own understandings, interpretedas surface practicegeneratedby a deeper, independentlyexisting logic or structure.In breakswith individstrivingto comprehendthis deeper logic, structuralism ualist perspectiveson social subjectivity,as in the Cartesiancogito. In the same stroke, it attempts to transcendthe subject/objectdualism. For structuralism, to simplify, social consciousness is not "transparentto itself." It is generatedby a deep social intersubjectivity-linguisticrules,for exampleas which is itself regarded the objectivestructureof society. In Paul Ricoeur's words, "Structuralismis predicatedon a Kantian rather than a Freudian
17. See Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Edith Kurzweil, The Age of Structuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), especially chap. 1; Paul Ricoeur, "Structure and Hermeneutics," and "Structure, Word, Event," in Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974); and Miriam Glucksman, Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 18. Giddens, Central Problems, p. 9. 19. Bourdieu, Outline, p. 3.
The poverty of neorealism 235 unconscious, on structuralimperativesthat constitute the logical geography of mind."20 of 3. Thus, structuralismshifts toward the interpretation practicefrom a social, totalizing,or "systemic"point of view. Ferdinandde Saussure'sdistinction between speech and language (parole et langue) is paradigmatic;
what concerned him was not speech per se but the logical conditions of its intelligibility(an inherentlysocial or "systemic"concern).2'What concerns in structuralists generalis not practiceper se but the logical conditions that account for the significanceand significationof practicewithin a community (again, a social or "systemic"relation).Saussurelocated his logical preconspeechbecomesthe product of ditionsfor the intelligibility speechin language: in of language.Structuralists generallocate their explanationsin deep social practicebecomes the productof structure.For Saussure,language structures: contained possible speech, that is, speech that will be understoodwithin the more generally,structureis a system languagecommunity. For structuralists of constitutive rules "which do not regulatebehavior so much as create the possibility of particularforms of behavior." presupposesnot 4. Consistentwith its totalizinginclinations,structuralism only the priorityof structureover practice but also the "absolute predomemphasizethe "system" Structuralists inance of the whole over the parts."22 not only in contrast to but also as constitutiveof the elements that compose it. The overall structureexists autonomously, independent of the parts or actors, and the identities of the constituent elements are attributednot to intrinsic qualities or contents of the elements themselves but to the differentiationamong them suppliedor determinedby the overall structure.Thus, the units have no identity independent of the structuralwhole. Saussure's position is again exemplary:"In language,"he wrote, "there are only differences.... [A] differencegenerallyimplies positive terms between which the differenceis set up; but in languagethere are only differenceswithout
positive terms."23
argumentstend to 5. In their treatmentsof time and change, structuralist betweensynchronic(static)and diachronic presupposean absolutedistinction (dynamic)viewpoints, and they tend to accentuatethe one-way dependence Change, for the strucof diachrony (dynamics) upon synchrony (statics).24 is always to be grasped in the context of a model of structure-an turalist, elaborated model whose elements are taken to be fixed and immutable in the face of the changes it conditions and limits. Cursorythough it is, this listing suggests some obvious correspondences
p. and Hermeneutics," 79. 20. Ricoeur,"Structure 21. Bourdieu,Outline,pp. 23-24. of Marx'sConception Man in CapitalistSociety,2d ed. (Cam22. BertellOllman,Alienation: bridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1976), p. 266. 23. Quoted in Giddens, CentralProblems,p. 12. 24. Ibid., p. 46.
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between neorealistargumentand some of the fundamentalsof structuralism. Consider the first "element": neorealism's criticism of classical realism's subjectivisttendencies(the tendenciesof Morgenthauand Kissinger,among others, to adopt the posture of an ethnomethodologistof a diplomaticcomreaction against phenomenological munity) closely parallelsstructuralism's knowledge. The neorealist reaction to the writingsof transnationalistsand attitude with respect to specmodernists similarly parallelsstructuralism's ulative, evolutionary thought. The shallow analysis behind such writings, neorealiststend to feel, mistakesthe ephemeralfor the eternaland too eagerly seizes upon epiphenomenalchange as evidence of system change. The second,third,and fourth"elements"are equallysuggestiveof parallels. It might be argued,for example, that the centralimportanceof Waltz'swellknown work lies in its attempt to realize these "elements"for the study of internationalpolitics. Waltz's argumentagainst "attributetheories"and on behalfof "systemic"theoriesmightseem to locate the properobjectof theory not in "parts,"and not in externalrelationsamongthem, but in independently existing objective "wholes," which, as orderingand orientingpropertiesof a system, constitute parts and generaterelationsamong them. His argument clearly adopts a totalizing stance in that he focuses not on explainingthe variety of foreign-policybehavior per se (such behavior remains indeterminate) but on uncovering the objective structuresthat determine the significanceof practicewithin the context of an overallsystem. And while Waltz allows that there may be considerablevariety among "actors,"only those forms of differentiationsignificantwithin the overall structure,namely distributionsof capabilities,are of concern to his theory. Finally, the fifth "element" of structuralistargument,having to do with time and change,finds expressionin neorealism:RobertGilpin'srecent War and Change in WorldPolitics offers one example, George Modelski's imIndeed, the preoccupationwith portant "long-cycle" argument another.25 to cycles of hegemonic rise and decline would seem near-perfectly illustrate the structuralisttendency to emphasize synchrony over diachrony. As in structuralistthought, dynamics of change are of concern to neorealistsprimarily insofar as their structuraldeterminantscan be theoreticallygrasped. In view of these isomorphisms,it is easy to see why neorealismmight be of viewed as a "welcome antidote" to the "prevailingsuperficiality" much international relations discourse. If nothing else, neorealists, like Wallersteinians, have illustratedthat scientificinternationalrelationsdiscoursecan entertainstructuralist arguments,can transcendempiricistfixations,and can in principleescape the limits of logicalatomism. At least, researchprograms now purportto try. In turn, the field is encouragedto recognizethat reality
25. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in WorldPolitics (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1981); George Modelski, "The Long-Cycleof Global Politics and the Nation-State," Studies in Society and History20 (April 1978), pp. 214-35. Comparative
The poverty of neorealism 237 is not all "on the surface,"that it has, or might have, depth levels, that an adequate social or political analysis cannot be reduced to a concatenation of commonsense appearances,and that one can look for a unity behind and generatingevident differences.Herein is the neorealistpromise. If neorealism is to bathe in the glow of structuralistaccomplishments, however, it must also be preparedto suffercriticisms as to structuralism's limits. Above all, such critiquesstress the troublingconsequencesof structuralism'stendency to "put at a distance, to objectify,to separateout from the personal equation of the investigatorthe structureof an institution, a In myth, a rite."26 trying to avoid "the shop-girl'sweb of subjectivity"or "the swampsof experience,"to use Levi-Strauss's words,structuralists adopt a posture that denies the role of practicein the making and possible transformationof social order. In part, of course, such critiquesare animatedby revulsionat structuralism's "scandalousanti-humanism."27 in part,also, But they are animated by a concern for the disastrousconsequencesfor political theory and the possibly dangerousconsequences for political practice. An adequate critique of neorealism must develop these themes. 2. The structure of neorealist structuralism: an orrery of errors I am, however, a step or two ahead of myself. I have so far spoken only of promise neorealismoften purthe neorealistlore, includingthe structuralist ports to bear. I have tried to assay that promise by drawingout parallels between neorealistargumentand the now classic positions of structuralism. Still, such comparisonsare more than a triflemisleading.For there is at once more and less to neorealism than might be inferredfrom its isomorphisms with structuralistargument.There is more to neorealism in that it exhibits three furthercommitments: statist, utilitarian,and positivist. There is less to neorealism in that, thanks to the prioritygiven to these commitments, takes a shallow, physicalisticform-a form that neorealist "structuralism" exacerbatesthe dangerswhile negatingthe promise of structuralism. Within neorealism, I suggest, structuralism,statism, utilitarianism,and positivism are bound together in machine-like, self-enclosing unity. This machine-likejoining of commitments appearsas if designedto defy criticism or to drawall oppositioninto its own self-centeredarc. Hereinis neorealism's answer to Althusser's "orrery"-an orreryof errors. Far from questioning the commonsenseappearances, neorealistorreryhypostatizesthem. Far from expandinginternationalpoliticaldiscourse,the neorealistorreryexcludes all standpointsthat would expose the limits of the given orderof things. Before
Social 26. Ricoeur,as quoted in Paul Rabinowand William M. Sullivan,eds., Interpretive Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1979), pp. 10-1 1. Science:A Reader(Berkeley:
27. Giddens, Central Problems, p. 38.
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returningto the matter of neorealist "structuralism," me take up each let of the other elements of this orrery-neorealism's statist, utilitarian,and positivist commitments-in turn. a. Statism Neorealism is bound to the state. Neorealist theory is "state centric" or It "statist," as Krasnerhas labeled the position.28 offers a "state-as-actor" model of the world. So long as one proposes to be understoodamong neorealists, one must work within this model. At a minimum, this means that for purposesof theory,one must view the state as an entity capableof having certainobjectivesor interestsand of decidingamongand deployingalternative means in their service. Thus, for purposesof theory,the state must be treated as an unproblematic unity:an entity whose existence,boundaries,identifying structures, constituencies, legitimations, interests, and capacities to make decisionscan be treatedas given, independentof transnational self-regarding class and human interests,and undisputed(except,perhaps,by other states). In all of these respects, the state is regardedas the stuff of theorists' unexamined assumptions-a matter upon which theorists will consensually agree, and not as a problematicrelationwhose consensualacceptanceneeds explanation.The propositionthat the state might be essentiallyproblematic or contested is excluded from neorealisttheory. Indeed, neorealisttheory is preparedto acknowledgeproblems of the state only to the extent that the state itself, within the frameworkof its own legitimations,might be prepared to recognizeproblems and mobilize resourcestoward their solution. True, individual neorealists sometimes allow that the theoretical commitment to the state-as-actorconstructinvolves a distortionof sorts. Waltz, for instance,writesthat he "canfreelyadmit that statesarein fact not unitary, purposive actors.""9 Gilpin can acknowledgethat, "strictlyspeaking,states, as such, have no interests, or what economists call 'utility functions,' nor do bureaucracies,interest groups, or so-called transnationalactors, for that matter." He can even go on to say that "the state may be conceived as a coalition of coalitions whose objectives and interestsresult from the powers and bargainingamong the several coalitions comprisingthe largersociety And Keohane, as coauthor of Power and Interdepenand political elite."30 dence, can certainly recognize that the conditions of "complex interdependence," includingthe fact of transnationaland transgovernmental relations, fall well short of the "realist"assumption that states are "coherent units" with sharp boundariesseparatingthem from their externalenvironments.3'
28. See Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments
and U.S. ForeignPolicy (Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress, 1978).

29. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 91. 30. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 18. 31. Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in
Transition(Boston:Little, Brown, 1977), especiallychap. 2.
The poverty of neorealism 239 The issue, however, is the theoreticaldiscourse of neorealismas a movement, not the protectiveclausesthat individualneorealistsdeploy to preempt or deflectcriticismsof that discourse'slimits. Once one entersthis theoretical discourse among neorealists, the state-as-actormodel needs no defense. It stands without challenge. Like Waltz, one simply assumes that states have the status of unitaryactors.32 Or, like Gilpin, one refuses to be deterredby the mountainousinconsistenciesbetween the state as a coalitionof coalitions (presumablyin opposition to the losing coalitions againstwhich the winning coalition is formed) and the state as a provider of public goods, protector of citizens' welfare, and solver of the free-riderproblem in the name of winners and losers alike. Knowing that the "objectivesand foreign policies of statesare determinedprimarily the interestsof theirdominantmembers by or rulingcoalitions,"3one nonethelesssimplyjoins the victorsin proclaiming the state a singularactor with a unified set of objectives in the name of the is collectivegood. This proclamation the starting pointof theoretical discourse, one of the unexamined assumptions from which theoretical discourse proceeds. In short, the state-as-actor assumption is a metaphysical commitment priorto science and exempted from scientificcriticism.Despite neorealism's much ballyhooedemphasis on the role of hardfalsifyingtests as the measure of theoreticalprogress,neorealismimmunizes its statist commitments from any form of falsification.Excluded, for instance, is the historicallytestable hypothesis that the state-as-actorconstructmight be not a first-ordergiven of internationalpolitical life but part of a historicaljustificatoryframework by whichdominantcoalitionslegitimizeand secureconsentfortheirprecarious conditions of rule. Two implicationsof this "state-centricity," itself an ontological principle of neorealisttheorizing,deserve emphasis. The first is obvious. As a framework for the interpretation internationalpolitics, neorealisttheory cannot of accordrecognitionto-it cannot even comprehend-those globalcollectivist concepts that are irreducibleto logical combinations of state-bounded relations.In other words,globalcollectivistconcepts-concepts of transnational classrelations,say, or the interestsof humankind-can be grantedan objective status only to the extent that they can be interpretedas aggregations of relations and interests having logically and historically prior roots within state-boundedsocieties. Much as the "individual"is a prism throughwhich methodologicalindividualistscomprehend collectivist concepts as aggregations of individualwants,needs,beliefs,and actions,so also does the neorealist refractall global collectivist concepts through the prism of the state.34Im32. Waltz, Theoryof InternationalPolitics, p. 91. 33. Gilpin, Warand Change,p. 19. 34. Popper understandsmethodologicalindividualismas the principlethat "all social phenomena, and especiallythe functioningof all social institutions,should always be understood as resultingfrom the decisions, actions, attitudes,etc. of human individuals.... [W]e should neverbe satisfiedby an explanationin termsof so-called'collectives.'" KarlPopper,The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London:Routledge, 1966), p. 98. Takingstates as the living in individualsof international life, neorealiststatism is understandable analogousterms.
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portantly, this means that neorealist theory implicitly takes a side amidst contending political interests. Whatever the personal commitments of individualneorealistsmightbe, neorealisttheoryallieswith, accordsrecognition to, and gives expression to those class and sectoral interests (the apexes of Waltz's domestic hierarchiesor Gilpin's victorious coalitions of coalitions) that are actuallyor potentiallycongruentwith state interestsand legitimations. It implicitlyopposes and denies recognition those class and humaninterests to which cannot be reducedto concatenationsof state interestsor transnational coalitions of domestic interests. The second implicationtakes longerto spell out, for it relatesto neorealist "structuralism"-the neorealist position with respect to structuresof the internationalsystem. Reflecting on the fourth element of structuralistargument presented above, one might expect the neorealist to accord to the structureof the internationalsystem an identity independentof the parts or units (states-as-actors this case);the identitiesof the unitswouldbe supplied in via differentiation. neorealistorrerydisappointsthese expectations,howThe
ever. For the neorealist, the state is ontologically prior to the international
system. The system's structureis produced by definingstates as individual unities and then by noting propertiesthat emerge when several such unities are brought into mutual reference. For the neorealist, it is impossible to describe internationalstructureswithout first fashioning a concept of the state-as-actor. The proper analogy, as Waltz points out, is classical economic theorymicrotheory,not macrotheory.As Waltz puts it, "International-political systems, like economic markets, are formed by the coaction of self-regarding units." They "are individualistin origin, spontaneouslygenerated,and unintended."35Other neorealists would agree. Gilpin, for example, follows economists Robert Mundell and Alexander Swoboda in defining a system of as "an aggregation diverse entities united by regularinteractionaccording to a form of control."36 then names states as "the principalentities or He actors," and he asserts that control over or governanceof the international system is a function of three factors, all of which are understood to have their logicaland historicalroots in the capabilities,interests,and interactions of states: the distributionof power among states, the hierarchyof prestige among states, and rightsand rulesthat have their "primaryfoundation... in the powerand interestsof the dominantgroupsor statesin a social system."37 For Gilpin, as for other neorealists, the structureof internationalpolitics, far from being an autonomous and absolute whole that expresses itself in the constitution of acting units, is an emergent property produced by the joining of units having a prior existence.
35. Waltz, Theoryof InternationalPolitics, p. 91. 36. Robert A. Mundelland AlexanderK. Swoboda, eds., MonetaryProblemsin the International Economy (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 343; Gilpin, War and Change,p. 26. 37. Gilpin, Warand Change,p. 25.
The poverty of neorealism 241 Ruggie's recent review of Waltz's Theoryof InternationalPolitics brings Informed this point home by diagnosinga lapse in Waltz's "structuralism." literatures,Ruggieconsidersthe three analyticalcomponents by structuralist (or "depth levels") of Waltz's political structure-organizational principle, differentiationof units, and concentrationor diffusion of capabilities-and pinpoints what he takes to be a problem: ... [A] dimension of change is missing from Waltz's model. It is missing because he drops the second analyticalcomponent of political structure, differentiationof units, when discussinginternationalsystems. And he drops this component as a result of giving an infelicitousintertaking it to mean pretationto the sociologicalterm "differentiation," that which denotes differencesratherthan that which denotes
separateness.38
The alleged problem, in other words, is that Waltz has misunderstoodthe structuralist position on identityand difference(the fourthelement presented above). Ruggie moves to put it right by restoringthe second "depth level" that of politicalstructure,now as principlesof differentiation tell us "on what basis" acting units are individuated.Specifically,he contends that there are contrastingmedieval and modem variantsof the second depth level of structure:a "heteronomous"institutionalframeworkfor the medieval versus the modern institutionalframeworkof "sovereignty."Ruggie'sargumentis important. From a genuine structuralistpoint of view, it is indispensable. Ruggie introduces his argument as a contributionto a "neo-realistsynthesis," it is true, and he couches it in an extremelygenerousinterpretation of Waltz'stheory.By posingand tryingto repairthe problemof differentiation issueswhatis so farthe strongest in Waltz'stheory,however,Ruggieindirectly pretensionsin Waltz's neorealism.By posing the critiqueof the structuralist from a structuraliststandpoint,Ruggieinvites us problem of differentiation to wonder why neorealists, most especially Waltz, had not considered the problem before. The answeris simple: neorealismis statist before it is structuralist.From a neorealistpoint of view, Ruggie'sargumentis simply superfluous because it treats as problematic, and hence in need of a structural accounting,what neorealistsinsist on treatingas unproblematic-the identity of the state. In neorealist eyes, there is nothing "infelicitous"about Waltz's interpretation of differentiation.When Waltz takes differentiationto refer to specification of the "functions performed by differentiatedunits," he is giving There is no the only interpretationpossible from a neorealist standpoint.39 need to decide the basis upon which units are individuated, because the essential individualityof states is alreadytaken for granted.It is embedded in a definition of sovereignty that neorealists accord to states independent
38. Ruggie,"Continuityand Transformation," 273-74, emphasisin original. pp.
39. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 93.
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of the system. For Waltz, "To say that a state is sovereign means that it decides for itself how it will cope with its internaland external problems." For Gilpin, "The state is sovereign in that it must answer to no higher Whetherit be one state in the lone authorityin the internationalsphere."40 isolation of universal dominion or many interacting,the definition is the same. Ruggie'scritiqueof Waltz has a familiarring. His position vis-a-vis Waltz is not unlike the critiqueof "utilitarianindividualism"in the work of Durkheim, upon whom Ruggie draws. "The clincherin Durkheim'sargument," writes John O'Neill, "is his demonstrationthat modern individualismso far from creating industrial society presupposes its differentiationof the sociopsychicspace which createsthe concepts of personalityand autonomy.""4 The clincherin Ruggie'sargumentis his attempt to show that the sovereign state, so far from creatingmodern internationalsociety, presupposesinternational society's production of the sociopolitical space within which sovpoliticalidentity ereigntycould flourishas the modem conceptof international and liberty. b. Utilitarianism The aptness of the analogy is no accident. For if neorealism'sfirst commitment is to statism, its second commitment is to a utilitarianperspective on action, social order, and institutionalchange. By utilitarianism,I do not mean the moral philosophy often associated with Bentham and Mill-a philosophy that holds, for example, that the proper measure of the moral worth of acts and policies is to be found in the value of their consequences. senseemployed My usageof the termis broader,much morein the sociological by Durkheim, Polanyi, Parsons, and, more recently, Brian Barry, Charles Camic, and MichaelHechter.i2As these people have made clear,sociological and utilitarianpositions stand sharply opposed. As Camic argues, modem Still, the utilitarianposociology emerged as the critiqueof utilitarianism.43 sition has refused to die. Indeed, the utilitarianperspective-first outlined by Hobbesand Mandeville,evolvingthroughthe classicalpoliticaleconomists, and findingmore recentexpressionin the writingsof von Mises and Hayekhas "been making steady inroads into the territorythat sociology had tra40. Ibid., p. 96; Gilpin, Warand Change,p. 17. 41. John O'Neill, "The HobbesianProblemin Marxand Parsons,"in O'Neill, Sociologyas a Skin Trade(New York: Harper& Row, 1972), pp. 195-96. Universityof Chicago (Chicago: Sociologists,Economists,andDemocracy 42. See BrianBarry, of Press, 1970);Talcott Parsons,The Structure Social Action(New York:McGraw-Hill,1937); (1944; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), and The Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation Livelihoodof Man (New York:Academic Press, 1977); CharlesCamic, "The UtilitariansRevisited,"AmericanJournalof Sociology85, 3 (1979), pp. 516-50; and MichaelHechter,"Karl Polanyi'sSocial Theory:A Critique,"Politics & Society 10, 4 (1981), pp. 399-429. 43. Camic, "UtilitariansRevisited."
The poverty of neorealism 243 ditionally staked out as its own." Today it finds expression in the form of theoriesof politics,gametheory,exchangetheory,and rational microeconomic choice theory. Today, Hechtercan arguethat, "if currentsocial science can boast anything remotely resembling a paradigm, then utilitarianismis its Neorealism shares in the "paradigm." leading candidate."44 by Broadlyconstrued, utilitarianismis characterized its individualistand rationalistpremises. Its individualism stipulates the theoreticalprimacy of individualactors ratherthan of social collectives. The individualactingunit is taken to be essentiallyprivate. It exists priorto and independentof larger social institutionsand is understoodas the autonomousgeneratorof its own ends. Social realityis understoodas made up of many such individualactors, inhabitinga world characterizedby scarcity-a world in which not all goals can be equally realized and, hence, choices have to be made. Utilitarian rationalismdefinesrationalityin means-endsor instrumentalterms:efficient action in the service of establishedends whose value or truth is properlythe province of the individual actor and cannot be held to account in public terms. Economic rationalityis the archetype,the ideal form. What Weber called "substantiverationality"or Habermascalled "practicalreason"(both of which can pass judgment on ends as well as means) are excluded from the utilitariannotion of rationality.Indeed, insofaras substantiverationality and irreand practicalreason presupposenormativestructurestranscending ducible to individual wants and needs, the utilitarianwould hold them to be scientificallyindefensible metaphysicalnotions. found theirtheoriesof action, interaction, Upon these premises,utilitarians order, and change. Utilitarian theories of action hold that actors behave rationally,in the narrow instrumentalistsense. Actors strive to serve their produced)desiresor ends in the most intrinsic(biologicallyor psychologically is by efficientmeans possible.Socialinteraction interpretable, directextension, as instrumentalcoaction or exchange among individual actors, each party regardedas an external object or instrument in the eyes of the rationally acting other. Utilitarian theories also hold that, at base, social order is a derivative relation. It derives entirely from equilibria (dynamic or static, stable or unstable) in the instrumentalrelations and mutual expectations among rational egoistic individuals. Social institutions are taken to be the of consequence of the regularization mutual expectations.As for its theory of institutionalchange, utilitarianismproposes that changes occur spontaneously, as a consequence of relative changes in the competing demands and capabilities of individual actors. Social order being a consequence of instrumentalrelations among individual actors, changes in actors' interests and means give rise to demands for change and, among other things, new coalitions. It is important to add that such modes of action, interaction,order, and
44. Hechter, "Karl Polanyi's Social Theory," p. 399.
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changearedeemedintrinsically objective,in need of neithernormativedefense nor historicalaccounting.Their realizationin practice,while not always to be observedhistorically,is takento be an essential,objective,and progressive tendency of history. It follows that, for the utilitarian,modes of action folobjective.The existence lowingthe logicof economicrationality inherently are of an economy whose actors obey this form of rationalityis interpretedas a realizationof universal and objective truths existing independent of any social-normativebasis. Hence, for the utilitarian,the market presents itself as an idealmodel of rational,objectiveaction,interaction, order,and changea frameworkfor the interpretationof political as well as economic life. Neorealism approachesthe internationalsystem from a utilitarianpoint of view. The major difference,of course, stems from the neorealist'sstatism. For the neorealist, states are the rational individual actors whose interests and calculatingactions and coactions give form and moment to the internationalsystem. Such a positioncould easilyprovokelengthycriticalanalysis. For presentpurposes,I shall confine myself to a brief,two-step commentary. The first step is simply to note that the utilitarianmodel is indeed the effectivemodel of internationalpolitics in neorealistresearchprograms.This is not to say that neorealists systematicallyexclude insights or hypotheses from other points of view. Among neorealism'snoteworthytraitsis an unexcelled eclecticism:many neorealistswill use an argument,a clause, a phrase The from almost any source if it suits their purposes.45 point, rather,is that utilitarian premisestogetherwith statistcommitmentsestablishthe anchoring "purposes"that all these borrowingsserve. To use Imre Lakatos'sfamiliar terminology,utilitarianstatism is the "hardcore"of the neorealist"scientific research programme."Around this hard core, neorealistsdevelop a "protective belt" of "auxiliary hypotheses" derived from many sources.46 of This claim, whichgoes to the orientingstructure "grammar" neorealist or practice, cannot be demonstratedin a few pages. Two examples will have to suffice.The first is the neorealisttreatmentof power. In neorealism,there is no concept of social power behind or constitutive of states and their interests. Rather, power is generally regardedin terms of capabilitiesthat are said to be distributed,possessed, and potentiallyused among states-asactors. They are said to exist independent of the actors' knowing or will. They are regardedas finallycollapsible,in principle,into a unique, objective measure of a singular systemic distribution(as if there were one uniquely true point of view from which the distributioncould be measured).Waltz puts it this way: "To be politically pertinent, power has to be defined in
45. What are we to make of a structuralism, example, that deploys both Adam Smith for and Emile Durkheim for its authoritieswithout once stopping to consider the contrarieties between the two? 46. Imre Lakatos,"Falsification and the Methodologyof ScientificResearchProgrammes," in Lakatos Alan Musgrave, and eds., Criticism the Growth Knowledge and (London: Cambridge of University Press, 1970).
The poverty of neorealism 245 terms of the distributionof capabilities[among agents or actors];the extent of one's power cannot be inferred from the results one may or may not get.... [A]n agent is powerfulto the extent that he affectsothers more than is Gilpin's understanding not dissimilar.Power,he writes, they affecthim."47 "refers simply to the military, economic, and technologicalcapabilitiesof states."As he is quickto add, "Thisdefinitionobviouslyleaves out important and intangible elements that affect outcomes of political actions, such as public morale,qualitiesof leadership,and situationalfactors.It also excludes what E. H. Carr called 'power over opinion.' These psychologicaland frequently incalculableaspects of power and internationalrelations are more closely associated with the concept of prestige.... "48 Such understandings of power are rooted in a utilitarianunderstandingof internationalsociety: an understandingin which (a) there exists no form of sociality,no intersubjective consensual basis, priorto or constitutive of individualactors or their private ends, and hence (b) the essential determinants of actors' relative effects on one another will be found in the capabilities they respectively control. Only within such a conception could one believe, as Waltz believes, that "power provides the means of maintaining one's autonomy." Only within such a frameworkis one inclined to join Gilpin in reducingmatters of morale, leadership,and power over opinion to "psychological"factors. The second is the neorealist conception of internationalorder. For the neorealist, there are no rules, norms, mutual expectations, or principlesof practice prior to or independent of actors, their essential ends, and their capabilities.In the last analysis,if not immediately,the evolution of all rules follows from the regularizationand breakdownof mutual expectations in accordancewith the vectoringof power and interestamong states-as-actors. It follows that for the neorealist, a world of a multiplicityof actors having relatively equal power is a formula for chaos. The potentiality for order increases as the hierarchicalconcentration of power steepens. For Waltz, reduceto a singledominant who is concernedlest the envisionedconcentration principleof interstate, therebyoverturningthe fundamentalorganizational national politics, the optimal concentration is with two states. For other neorealists, who somehow manage to ignore Waltz's concerns while citing his "structuralist" authority,the condition of maximal order is a hierarchy centeringpower within the graspof a singularhegemon, a state, in Keohane and Nye's words, that is "powerfulenough to maintain the essential rules governing interstaterelations, and willing to do so."49 Even in the analysis
47. Waltz, Theoryof InternationalPolitics, p. 192. 48. Gilpin, Warand Change, pp. 13-14. chap. 3. See also Robert 0. Keohane, 49. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence, Regimes, 1967-1977," in "The Theory of HegemonicStabilityand Changesin International Ole R. Holsti, RandolphM. Siverson,and AlexanderGeorge,eds., Changein the International System (Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, 1980); and Keohane, "HegemonicLeadershipand U.S. Foreign Economic Policy in the 'Long Decade' of the 1950s," in Avery and Rapkin, Americain a Changing World.
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of internationalregimes, this emphasis persists. As Krasnerputs it, "The is most common proposition[amongneorealists] that hegemonicdistributions of power lead to stable, open economic regimes because it is in the interest of a hegemonic state to pursue such a policy and because the hegemon has the resourcesto provide the collective goods needed to make such a system In orderentirely international functioneffectively."'50 short,neorealismregards as a derivative relation. Deriving from the rational coactions of individual actors, order is taken to be finallydependentupon their respectiveinterests and relative means of influencingone another.5' The second step in this two-step commentary is to consider some of the objectionswith which neorealism,as an instanceof utilitarianthought,must contend. Three establishedcriticismsof utilitarianthought, all centeringon the utilitarianconception of order, deserve mention. As will be seen, the objections suggest a contradictionin neorealistthought, one that threatens to fracturethe statist pillars of neorealistinternationalpolitical theory. The three objections can be briefly summarized.The first objection has its roots in sociology. It is found in Talcott Parsons's diagnosis (informed by Durkheimand Weber)of the so-calledHobbesianproblem:in the absence of a frameworkof norms consensually accepted by its members, it might be possible momentarily to establish an orderly social aggregate(a "social contract," for example) among instrumentallyrational individuals. Except under conditions of absolute stasis, however, it cannot be maintained.The second objection to the utilitarianconception of order is developed within As the utilitarianframeworkitself. This is MancurOlson's critique.52 aptly summarizedby Hechter: Rational self-interestedactors will not join large organizationsto pursue collective goods when they can reap the benefit of other people's activ50. Stephen D. Krasner,"Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables,"InternationalOrganization36 (Spring 1982), p. 499. Krasnerin this paperdemof onstratesthat he is among the most open-mindedand criticism-conscious neorealists.He its explores the limits of neorealism;in fact, he goes rightto the brinkof undermining statist between regimes,state interests,politicalcaprops altogether.Exploringvarious relationships pabilities,and state practices,he comes close to raisingthe possibilitythat regimes(principles, that have some autonomyfrom the vectoringof state behaviors)might norms, and procedures of be constitutive states and their interests. thinkers,are 51. I am carefulin my wordinghere, because neorealists,like most utilitarian rationalaction and the productionof slipperyabout the position they in fact take regarding order. In a recent review of MancurOlson's The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1982), BrianBarrymakes a similarpoint. He notes that Olson could be offeringa "monocausalexplanation,"a primus inter pares explanation,or an explanationin terms of a factor that is not always the most importantbut that will always emerge on top when other factorsare not too strong(which is not sayingmuch). Barrysays that he is "not at all clear what position MancurOlson himself wants to take." Barry,"Some QuestionsAbout Explanation,"InternationalStudies Quarterly27 (March 1983). Consideringthe same three possibilitiesin neorealistexplanationsof order, I am not at all sure what position neorealists mean to take. HarvardUniversityPress, Action(Cambridge: 52. See MancurOlson, TheLogicof Collective 1965).
The poverty of neorealism 247 ity to pursue those ends. This means that the rationalactor in the utilitarian model will always be a free rider whenever given the opportunity.Thus, accordingto utilitarianbehavioral premises, social organizationis unlikely to arise even among those individualswho have a strong personal interest in reapingthe benefits that such organization provides.53 The thirdobjection,and no doubtthe most important,is Marx's.Anticipating the broad outlines of both Parsons's and Olson's arguments, Marx went beyond them to try to draw out what utilitariansmust presupposeif they (i.e., instrumentalistor exchange-based) are to hold to their "contractarian" of understandings order in society. Marx arguedconvincinglythat the myth of the contract, put into practice, depends upon a dominant class's ability to externalizethe costs of keepingpromisesonto a class that lacksthe freedom to contract;the Hobbesian "state of war" is thus held in check throughoneUtilitarianorder thus presupposesclass resided power in a "class war."54 lations (and associated political, legal, and institutionalrelations),which its comprehending, consciousindividualistpremisesprohibitit from confronting, or explaining. How do neorealistsdeal with these objections?The answer,quite simply, is that they finesse them. In a bold stroke, neorealism embraces these objections as articles of faith. Turning problems of utilitariananalysis into virtues,neorealismredefinesthe Hobbesianproblemof orderas an "ordering principle"of internationalpolitics. Strugglesfor power among states become the normal processof orderlychangeand succession.The free-riderproblem among states becomes a global "sociological"legitimation for hegemonic states, whose private interestsdefine the public "good" and whose preponderant capabilitiessee to it that more "good"gets done. As for the Marxian critique, it is accepted, albeit with a twist. It is accepted not as global class analysis per se but in the idea that order among the great powers, the great states, is ever dependent on the perpetuationof a hierarchyof domination among great and small states. Inequality,Waltz says, has its virtues. Order is among them.55 One has to have some grudgingadmirationfor theoristswho would make such a move. They must have enormous courage,and not just because such positions expose neorealiststo a lot of self-righteousmoralizing.Neorealists must be courageousbecause their attempt to finesse objectionsto utilitarian accounts of order involves a bluff of sorts. It counts on our failureto notice that, at a certain moment in making their move, neorealistsare suspended in thin idealist air. That moment comes when, conceding objections to utilitarianaccounts,
53. Hechter, "Karl Polanyi's Social Theory," p. 403, note 6. 54. O'Neill, "The Hobbesian Problem." 55. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 131-32.
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the neorealist embraces them to describe internationalorder among states at the "level" of the internationalsystem. The rhetoricalforce of this concession, ironically,is to divert the critic of utilitarianconceptions of order into own statism,a statismthat would momentarycomplicitywith the neorealist's its face if the critic were to raise the same objectionsat the level collapse on of the state. That is to say, the neorealistcounts on our being so awestruck by the Hobbesianand free-riderdilemmas we confrontat the "international level" that we shall join in neglectingthe same dilemmas at the level of the state.The neorealistcountson our failureto noticethatthe objectionsaccepted at the level of the internationalsystem can equally well be turned against the metaphysicalprop upon which dependsthe reificationof an international from domestic and transnational politicalsystem analyticallydistinguishable relations:the conception of the state-as-actor. The neorealistmove is, in short, a sleight of hand. For despite its statism, neorealismcan produceno theory of the state capableof satisfyingthe stateas-actor premises of its internationalpolitical theory. On the contrary,by implicitly theoryof action,order,and change,neorealists adoptinga utilitarian give the lie to their idkefixe, the ideal of the state-as-actorupon which their distinction among "levels" and their whole theory of internationalpolitics depend. c. Positivism I am being unfair. To suggest, as I have, that neorealists play a trick of sorts is to imply some kind of intentional duping of an innocent audience. This is surely wrong. It is wrong because neorealistsare as much victims as perpetrators.And it is wrong because, in truth, the bedazzled audience is far from innocent. We alreadyshare complicity in the illusion. Neither neorealists nor we, the fawning audience, can imagine seeing the world in any other way. Why should this be so? Why, for example, is it so difficultto see that the level" underutilitarianperspectiveneorealistsembraceat the "international mines the state-as-actornotion upon which their whole theoreticaledifice, includingthe distinction between levels, depends?The history of utilitarian thought is, after all, largelythe story of philosophicaloppositionto the "personalist" concept of state required by neorealism's internationalpolitical theory. In part, surely, this refusal to see is due to the blinding light of the halo surrounding state in neorealistthought.But in part,too, this blindness the is due to the third commitment of the neorealist orrery.Neorealist theory is theory of, by, and for positivists. It secures instantaneousrecognition,I want to suggest, because it merely projectsonto the plane of explicit theory certain metatheoreticalcommitments that have long been implicit in the habits of positivist method. It tells us what, hidden in our method, we have known all along.
The poverty of neorealism 249 Bornin struggle,"positivism"is of coursea disputedterm. ManyAmerican political scientists are unaware of its rich currents of meaning in recent European,Latin American,and North Americansociology, philosophy,and anthropology.Many trivializeand thus evade the term by misequatingpositivism with "mindless number crunching,"brute empiricism, inductivist logic, or narrow logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. And the term has suffered at the hands of a number of silly or naive radicals who, having encountered Lenin's indictment, use the term as a synonym for regimesupportingscholarshipor bourgeois social science. Many of these radicals are positivists themselves.56 At the very minimum, positivism means two complementarythings. In its most generalmeaning,positivism refersto the so-called"receivedmodel" of naturalscience.57 the same time, and aproposthe subject-object,manAt nature dualisms implicit in this "received model," one can follow Michel Foucault in distinguishingpositivist from eschatologicaldiscourse. For eschatologicaldiscourse (evident in phenomenology,ethnomethodology,and some hermeneuticalsciences) the objective truth of the discourselies within and is producedby the discourse itself. By contrast,for positivist discourse, with its naturalisticbias, the truth of discourse lies in the external object.58 In general, positivist discourseholds to four expectations.The firstis that scientificknowledgeaims to graspa realitythat exists in accordwith certain fixed structuralor causal relationswhich are independentof human subjectivity (hence their objectivity) and internallyharmoniousor contradictionfree (as if authored from a single point of view). The second is that science seeks to formulate technically useful knowledge, knowledge that enhances humancapacitiesto make predictions, orientefficientaction,and exertcontrol
56. I hold that all social science aspiring to theory has a positivist aspect in the sense given below. This is true of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Bourdieu, Foucault, Morgenthau, Alker, and me. Following Bourdieu, even dialectical knowledge contains the objectivistic, the positivistic. As I use the term here, however, a movement is "positivist" if it appears to be a one-dimensional positivism. The issue is not the purging of positivism-the positivist moment is an inescapable moment of all inquiry-but the realization of a more adequate "two-dimensional" or dialectical perspective by bringing the positivist moment into unceasing critical tension with the practical moment such that each side ever problematizes the other. Valuable readings on the subject of positivism and its limits include Gerard Radnitzky, Contemporary Schools of Metascience, 3d enl. ed. (Chicago: Regnery, 1973); Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Political and Social Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); the first chapter of Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Hayward R. Alker Jr., "Logic, Dialectics, Politics: Some Recent Controversies," in Alker, ed., Dialectical Logics for the Political Sciences, vol. 7 of the Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982); and Theodore W. Adorno et al., The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, trans. by G. Adey and D. Frisby (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976). In my present discussion, I am especially concerned with that strain, still predominant in Anglo-American sociology, anchored in Weberian solutions to the problem of human subjectivity and meaning in a naturalistic social science.
57. Giddens, CentralProblems,p. 257.

58. Foucault, The Order of Things.
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knowledge in the serviceof given human values. The thirdis that sought-after is value-neutral.The fourth, consistent with the first three, holds that the truth of claims and concepts is to be tested by their correspondenceto a field of external experience as read via (problematic)instrumentsor interpretative rules."9 When one turns to positive social science, at least one other expectation needs to be added to the list. This is the expectation that "the phenomena barriers the treatment to of human subjectivity... do not offerany particular of social conduct as an 'object'on a par with objects in the naturalworld."60 Obviously,this is a most troublesomeexpectation.Makinggood on it requires overcoming a double problem inherent in human subjectivity.On the one side, human subjectivity raises a problem from the perspective of social actors: the problem of meaningful,value-laden social action. On the other side, there is a problem from the analyst's point of view: the analyst'sown potentiallynegate the analyst'sability to norms, values, and understandings detach himself or herself from the social world, to treat it, on a par with nature,as an external,objective, "dumb generality."Positivist social science has had to "solve" this double problem. As it turns out, the "solutions" are worth a few moments of our time. For it is in these solutions that we encounter the social-theoreticalcommitments embedded within dominant conceptionsof social science itself. In particular,I have in mind positivist solutions to the problem of human subjectivityanchoredin an unquestionedcommitment to the objective, historical force of instrumentalor technicalrationality.Let me brieflydescribe to this commitmentand then considerits role in "solutions" the dual problem of subjectivity in positivist social science. As I shall indicate, the result is a metatheoreticaloutlook implicit in positivist method, which circumscribes scientificcriticism and limits the rangeof theories about society that can be scientificallyentertained.As I shall also suggest,these limits establishamong positivists an uncriticalreceptivity to neorealists'conceptions of the international system. Again, the commitment in question is a commitment to the essential objectivity of technical rationality. According to this (typically unspoken) commitment, which also appearsat the centerof utilitarianthought, meansends rationalityis inherentlyobjective, value-neutral,void of normative or substantive content. Technical rationalityis said to inhabit the domain of the "is" ratherthan the domain of the "ought,"and hence its truth requires no normative defense. Indeed, as exemplified by Max Weber's resignation to the world historical "rationalization"of all modes of life, technical raforcein history.Rationalization tionalityis takento be a necessaryprogressive
59. Anthony Giddens, ed., Positivismand Sociology (London:Heinemann, 1974), chap. 1. Comparewith the list in Alker, "Logic,Dialectics,Politics." 60. Giddens, Positivismand Sociology, p. 4.
The poverty of neorealism 251 limitsand the progressive involves the breaking down of traditional absorption of all institutions of life within a mode of thought that aims to reduce all aspects of human action to matters of purposive-rational action-efficiency in the service of pregiven ends. For Weber, this tendency was inexorable, its outcome inevitable: the "iron cage" of a totally bureaucratizedlife.6' Science, committed to the objectivity of technical reason, is on the side of this necessary historicaltendency. It is at the leading edge. Immediatelyone can see that this commitment replicatesin a novel way the classicaljustificationof positivist science as a critical,even revolutionary force, a force that demystifiesall forms of romanticism,dispenseswith atavistic myth, and establishes the "end of ideology." What may be harder to see, especially for positivists, is that this commitment ties positivism to an ideology of its own. It endorses a metahistoricalfaith in scientific-technical progressthat positivist science itself cannot question. Insofar as the commitment affords "solutions" to the dual problem of human subjectivity,it justifies itself in its own technicalterms, enrichingthe theoreticalcontent of positivist method qua politicalideology.Having mentionedWeber'sposition as exemplary, it is appropriateto consider the role of this commitment in Weber'sown (now conventional) solutions to the two sides of the problem. In Weber,the first side of the problem,the side concernedwith the meaningful characterof social action, could be reducedto this: how can there be a naturalisticsocial science, one that producesobjective knowledgecapable of calculatingand predictingsocial outcomes, given that human action is necessarily"subjective"in character? Weberconfrontedthis problemin the Authors like Roscherand specificcontext of the German historicalschool.62 Knies had concluded that, given the subjective quality of human action, human action is not calculableor predictablein the same way that one might calculateor predictevents in the naturalworld.In this sense, they concluded, In human action has an "irrational" quality.63 Weber'sview, this conflation of "subjectivism"and "irrationalism"presented a serious obstacle to the reconciliationof naturalismand sociologicaland historicalmethod. He thus set out the classic synthesisto which much of modernpositivistsocial science is indebted. Premisedon the inherentobjectivityof technicalrationality,the synthesis was this:if we abstractand regardas objectivelygiven an agent'ssubstantively
61. See Max Weber,From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology,ed. and trans.by H. Gerthand C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 44-45. See also Herbert Marcuse,"Industrialization Capitalismin the Workof Max Weber,"in Negations:Essays and in Critical Theory(Boston:Beacon Press, 1968);Jiurgen Habermas,"Technologyand Science as Ideology,"in Towardsa Rational Society;and Anthony Giddens,Politicsand Sociologyin the Thoughtof Max Weber(London:Macmillan, 1972). 62. Giddens, Positivismand Sociology, p. 5. in 63. Max Weber,"Roscherund Knies und das Irrationalitatsproblem," Wissenschaftslehre in (Tilbingen: C. B. Mohr),pp. 127-37, and translatedas "Subjectivism J. and Determinism," Giddens, Positivismand Sociology,pp. 23-31.
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empty logic of technical reason, then in interpretingthe agent's action we can assume that, from this objective standpoint, society will appearto the individual agent as a subjectless set of external constraints,a meaningless second nature. We shall then be able to say that meaning enters society primarily through the autonomously generated ends of individual acting agents: meaningful action is merely motivatedaction. With that, we have our objective, naturalisticsocial science. For with knowledgeof an agent's pregivenends and "meaningless"social constraints,"meaningful"and "rational" subjective relations become calculable,predictable,and susceptible to causal accounts.64 For most North Americantheoristsof internationaland comparativepolitics, Weber's solution is a "methodologicalprinciple"whose obviousness precludes any need for justification. Yet as recollection of the Weberian moment makes clear, the methodologicalprincipleimplicit in this solution restrictsus to a particular conceptionof society. We may call this conception an actor model. Upon commencingany analysisof a social system, the habitborn principle predisposes the positivist to identify the irreducibleactors whose rationaldecisions will mediate the entryof meaninginto social reality. Thanks to this "principle,"the committed positivist knows almost "instinctively" that all explanations of social action must ultimately come to rest with the interpretationof some frozen set of actors, their values and their ends. All analysis comes to rest with actors who are capable of exercising technical rationality;whose ends, values, and boundaries separatingone anotherare taken to be given and independentof communicationand interaction among the several; who accordingly must appear to one another, individuallyand in aggregates,as externalconstraints;and who must relate to one another, in the last analysis, in strictly instrumentalterms.65 Weber'ssolution to the second side of the problem of human subjectivity is equallyimportant.The problem, seen from the second side, is the possible confoundingof scientific detachment and objectivity owing to the fact that the social scientist's own norms, values, and understandings implicate him or her in the social world examined. As Weberrecognized,even one's categories of analysis and the meaningsone attaches to them depend upon normative commitments that bind one to the social world. All knowledgehas its socially rooted presuppositions. Weber's solution to this second side of the problem is also anchoredin a commitment to the essentialobjectivityof technicalrationality.The solution
64. See ibid. 65. I am sayingnot that the predisposition towardactormodels reflectsconsciousconformity to a norm, but that social scientistsdo not conceive of the principlebecause it is so faithfully observed that, in general,social scientistscannot conceive of thinkingabout the world in any other ways. The principleat once exhaustsand limits the span of active social reasoning.My thinkingregardingthe irresistibletug of "actor models" is largelysparkedby a conversation with Robert North, althoughI do not know that he would agreewith my characterization of this predispositionas methodologically rooted.
The poverty of neorealism 253 the involves radicalizing separationbetweenthe processby whichthe validity of scientific concepts and knowledge claims may be scientificallydecided and the process by which scientists take interest in, generate, or come to recognize as meaningfultheir concepts and knowledge claims. In Weber's view, socialscientificdiscoursewould centeron the formerprocess-a process whose objectivity would be assuredbecause it could and should be monopolized by the logic of technical rationality. It would concentrateon issues decidable within technical rationality'sown inherentlyobjective terms.66 Thus, while individual scientists' norms, values, and socially established understandings may help decide the directionin which the scientificbeacon
will cast its light, science as an enterprise cannot pass judgment on the truth
includingthose at workin scientists' of values, ethics,ends, or understandings, choices of what to study. Scientificdiscourse cannot criticallyexamine the for at meaningstructures workin and accounting scientists'mutualrecognition of the concepts they deploy. Scientificdiscourse can speak decisively only
to the efficiency of means. In sum, science as an enterprise preserves its
objectivity by excluding from its terrain all questions that cannot be formulatedand solved withinthe allegedlyobjectivelogicof technicalrationality. This solution, like the first, is now widely taken for granted as one of science'sdelimitingfeatures.Like the first,too, it buttressesthe commitment of positivist science to an actor model. It does so primarilyby limiting the range of scientificcriticism. In particular,it excludes discussion of forms of social consensus that might themselves be value-laden, that might be historically contingent and susceptible to change, and that might nonetheless coordinatehuman practicesand distributionsof resourcesin ways that produce and accordrecognitionto the consensuallyrecognizedactors(including elements their boundariesand ends) which positivists take as the irreducible of analyses. Taken together, then, the two solutions establish a methodologicalpredisposition that is anything but neutral with respect to social orderingpossibilities. On the contrary,they implicate and profoundlylimit the rangeof possibilitiesthat theorycan contemplateif it is to findacceptanceas objective, scientifictheory.Even beforethe firstself-consciouslytheoreticalwordpasses anyone's lips, a theoreticalpictureworth a thousandwords is alreadyetched in the minds of positivist speakersand hearers.Born of long practiceconformingto the solutionsjust described,this picture,a kind of scheme, orders and limits expectationsabout what explicit theoreticaldiscoursecan do and say. In particular,it commits scientific discourse to an "actor model" of social reality-a model within which science itself is incapableof questioning the historical constitutionof social actors, cannot question their ends, but can only advise them as to the efficiencyof means. Here in this theory-masked-as-methodwe find a partial explanation of
66. See Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding, pp. 5-6.
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the ease with which neorealistsare able to delude themselves as well as us, their admiringaudience. Despite the contradictionbetween neorealists'utilitarianconception of politics and their statist commitments, neorealistsare able to perpetuatethe state-as-actorillusion in their conceptionof the international system. They are able to do so because,as positivists, we are methodologicallypredisposedto look for preciselythe kindof model they "reveal." Without an actor model, we somehow sense, we shall lack any scientific of point of entry into a meaningful understanding the internationalsystem; the systemwill appearto us, we worry,as a meaningless swirlof "disembodied forces." They are furtherable to do so because, as positivists, we join them in excluding from the realm of proper scientific discourse precisely those modes of criticism that would allow us to unmask the move for what it is. At the very moment we begin to question this state-as-actorconception,we are given to feel that we have stumbled beyond the legitimategrounds of science, into the realm of personal ethics, values, loyalties, or ends. We are given to feel that our complaints have no scientific standing. And so, as scientists, we swallow our questions. We adopt the postureof Waltz's utter detachment, Gilpin's fatalism, Krasner'swonderment, or Keohane's Weberian resignationwith respect to the powers that be. We might not like it, we say, but this is the world that is. As scientists, we think we cannot say otherwise. d. Structuralism There is more to the story of neorealism'ssuccess than this, however. As noted earlier,the decisive moment in neorealism'striumphwas its celebrated turn. As also noted, this structuralist structuralist turn would appearto hold out a promise for a deepening of internationalpolitical discourse. Now, having examined the other three aspects of the neorealist orrery, we can returnat last to neorealiststructuralism consideronce againits attractions. and We can listen as it explodes the one-time limits of internationalpolitical discourse. We can look to see how it penetratesbeneath commonsense appearancesof the given order. We can sift throughthe argumentsto find the many ways in which this structuralismtranscendsthe confines of utilitarianism, statism, and positivism-perhaps enrichingthem by disclosingtheir deeper historicalsignificance.We can listen, look, and sift some more. And what do we find? Disappointment,primarily. The reason is now beginningto become clear:neorealistsslide all too easily in between two concepts of the whole, one structuralist the sense described earlierand one atomist and physicalist.The structuralist posits the possibility of a structuralwhole-a deep social subjectivity-having an autonomous existence independent of, prior to, and constitutive of the elements. From a structuralist whole cannotbe describedby starting point of view, a structural with the partsas abstract,alreadydefinedentities,takingnote of theirexternal
The poverty of neorealism 255 joining, and describingemergentpropertiesamong them. The standpointof the structuralwhole affordsthe only objective perspective.By contrast,the atomist conception describes the whole precisely in terms of the external joinings of the elements, including emergent properties produced by the joinings and potentially limiting furthermovement or relationsamong the elements. Clearly,in this conception,the whole has no existenceindependent of the parts taken together. But it may be possible that, from the point of view of any one part (a point of view that remains legitimate within an atomistic perspective),the whole may exist independentof that part or its possible movements. From this standpoint,the standpointof the singlepart, the whole is an external physical relation-a "second nature" to be dealt with, in the last analysis, only physically or instrumentally.It cannot be otherwise, for no prior intersubjectiveunity joins part and whole.67 Neorealism has managed to conflate these two concepts of the whole. Considerthe one position, the misnamed "sociologicalposition," that many neorealiststake to be exemplary:Waltz's position. As noted earlier,Waltz understands"internationalstructure"not as a deep, internal relation prior to and constitutive of social actors but as an externaljoining of states-asthat actorswho have preciselythe boundaries,ends, and self-understandings theorists accord to them on the basis of unexamined common sense. In turn-and here is the coup-Waltz grants this structurea life of its own independent of the parts, the states-as-actors;and he shows in countless ways how this structurelimits and disposes action on the part of states such that, on balance, the structureis reproducedand actors are drawninto conformity with its requisites. But how is the independence of this structural of whole established? is not establishedindependent the partstakentogether, It for it is never anythingmore than the logicalconsequenceof the partstaken together. Nor is it established by anchoring it in any deep intersubjective structureof the state-systemic whole. Indeed, Waltz systematicallypurges from the realist legacy all hints that subjective relations might be, in his terminology, "systemic"; true to Waltz's atomism, all subjective relations are interpreted psychologicalrelations,and propositionsthat referto them as are thus banished as "reductionist." Rather, Waltz establishesthe independenceof the structuredwhole from the idealized point of view of the lone, isolated state-as-actor,which cannot alone alter the whole and cannot rely on others to aid it in bringingabout change in the whole's deepest structures.We are encouragedto glimpse and authenticate the independence of this structure,in other words, from the standpoint of a frozen abstraction:the point of view of the single state-asactor, or the points of view of any numberof states-as-actors,one at a time. These, though, are precisely the states-as-actors(or, more correctly,this is the same fixed,abstractstate-as-actor with whichthe theoristbegan. category)
67. See Ollman,Alienation,Appendix 2.
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The autonomy of the neorealistwhole is establishedpreciselyfrom the hypostatized point of view of the idealized parts whose appearancesas independententitiesprovidedthe startingpoint of the analysis,the basic material, the props without which the whole physicalstructurecould never have been erected.From startto finish,we never escape or penetratethese appearances. From start to finish, Waltz's is an atomistic conception of the international system. At the same time, once neorealistsdo arrive at their physicalisticnotion of structure, they do attribute to it some of the qualities of structure in political structuralist thought.Neorealistsdo tend to grantto the international system "absolutepredominanceover the parts."In neorealism,as in structo turalism,diachronyis subordinated synchrony,and changeis interpretable solely within the fixed logic of the system. And neorealists,like structuralists, do tend to regardthe structurethat they describe in the singular.Thus, as noted earlier,there are definite isomorphismsbetween aspects of neorealist thought and structuralistprinciples. This, however, is no compliment. For what it means is that neorealism gives us the worst of two worlds. In neorealism we have atomism's superclosure such that, once we are drawn ficialitycombined with structuralism's into the neorealistcircle,we are condemnedto circulateentirelyat the surface level of appearances. And what an idealist circle it is! What we have in neorealism's so-called structuralismis the commonsense idealism of the powerful, projected onto the whole in a way that at once necessitates and forgives that power. It is the statist idealism developed from the point of view of the one state (or, more properly,the dominant coalition) that can afford the illusion that it is a finished state-as-actorbecause, for a time, it is positioned such that the whole world pays the price of its illusions. With apologies to E. P. Thompson, I would suggestthat there is a certain The head of the snake is an "snake-like"quality to neorealiststructuralism. unreflectivestate-as-actor,which knows itself only to rely on itself and which will not recognize its own limits or dependence upon the world beyond its and its skin. It slithersaroundhissing"self-help" projecting own unreflectivity onto the world. Finding its own unreflectivenessclearly reflectedin others, it gets its own tail into its mouth, and the system is thus defined. Asked to describe the system so defined, the snake says that it reproducesitself, and it swallows more of its tail. What, though, of the values or norms of this system?The values and norms, the snake answers,are those that reflectthe power and interests of the powerful and interested. What, then, of power? knot- has an answer The snake-or what is left of it, for it is now a wriggling for this, too. Power is rooted in those capabilitieswhich provide a basis for the state-as-actor'sautonomy. And what of autonomy?In a final gulp, the snake answers. Autonomy is the state-as-actor'sprivilege of not having to
The poverty of neorealism 257 reflectbecause the whole world bends to its unreflectedprojectionsof itself. "Plop! The snake has disappearedinto total theoreticalvacuity."68 As Thompson says of another structuralism:"It is, of course, a highly conservativevacuity;whatis governswhatis whose firstfunctionis to preserve the integrity of is-ness; what dominates has the functional imperative of preservingits own dominance."Thompson'swordsare apt. Neorealiststructuralismlends itself wonderfullywell to becoming an apologiafor the status quo, an excuse for domination, and "an invective against 'utopian' and 'maladjusted'heretics"who would question the givenness of the dominant
order.69
In The Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper concerned himself with the totalitarianimplicationsof certain progressivistversions of structuralism to which he gave the label "historicism."70 What we find in neorealist structuralism is a historicismof stasis. It is a historicismthat freezes the political institutions of the current world order while at the same time rendering as absolutethe autonomyof technicalrationality the organonof socialprogress to which all aspects of this order, includingstates-as-actors,must bow. It is a historicismthat almost perfectlymirrorsHans Morgenthau's understanding of the "totalitarianstate of mind."7' ... Whereas perfectionismcreates an abstractideal to which it tries to elevate political life through force or exhortationor reform, totalitarianism, that is, the totalitarianstate of mind, identifies the ideal with the facts of political life. What is, is good because it is, and power is to the totalitariannot only a fact of social life with which one must come to terms but also the ultimate standardfor judging human affairsand the ideal source of all human values. He says "Yes" to his lust for power, and he recognizesno transcendentstandard,no spiritualconcept which
68. Thompson, Povertyof Theory,p. 77. 69. Ibid., pp. 77, 73. 70. Popper, The Povertyof Historicism(New York: Harper& Row, 1961). 71. So dangerousis the term that I must once again hasten to stress that I am addressing the logic of the neorealistmovement as expressedin its theoriesand not the consciouslyheld values, intentions,or ideals of individualneorealists.I readilystipulatethat Krasner;Gilpin, Keohane,Waltz,and other neorealistsare not championsof totalitarianism theirconsciously in held personalvalues. I readilystipulate,too, that some neorealists,like Gilpin in his Warand Change,can moralizeat length in their professionalwritingsand do expresspluralistic values in their moralizing.The problem is-and this is my charge-that neorealistdiscoursegrants absolutelyno scientificstandingto moral norms. At best, the moralizingof neorealistscholars is recognized a proclamation personal as of commitments, belief,or faithon the partof individuals, and not as an argument whose truthcontentis decidablewithinscientific discourseor groundable within theory. The resultis a scientifictheorythat says no to neorealists'expressedvalues and yes to totalitarianexpectations-hence the aura of quiet despairing(but not theoreticallydescribableirony)surrounding some neorealistarguments.Sadly,many neorealistsinterpret their own resignation sucha situationas a kindof scientifictough-mindedness, formof "realism," to a when in fact theirsituationis largelyattributable unquestioning to acceptance a moralsystem: of the moral norms of economic reasonand positivist science.
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might tame and restrainthe lust for power by confrontingit with an ideal alien and hostile to political domination.72 Of course, neorealism'stotalitarianimplicationsare only partlyto be discovered in its celebrationof power before order. They are also present in neorealism's silences, in those aspects of history neorealism denies, omits, or represses.As Aldous Huxley reminds us, the greatesttriumphsof totalitarian propagandahave been accomplished "not by doing something, but from doing. Great is the truth,but still greater,from a practical by refraining Neorealist structuralismis silent point of view, is silence about truth."73 about four dimensions of history. I will call these the "four p's": process, practice, power, and politics. First, neorealist structuralismdenies history as process. Like other static One is a "fixity of structuralisms,neorealist theory has two characteristics. of stasis even when it is theoreticalcategories"such that each is a category is set in motion among other moving parts. The other characteristic that all movement is confined within a closed field whose limits are defined by the pregiven structure.Thompson very clearly articulatesthe consequences of such a conception:"[H]istoryas process,as open ended indeterminateeventuation-but not for that reason devoid of rational logic or of determining pressures-in which categories are defined in particularcontexts but are continuously undergoinghistoricalredefinition,and whose structureis not pre-givenbut protean,continuallychangingin form and in articulation-all
of this . .. must be denied."74
Second, neorealismjoins all modes of historicismin denyingthe historical significanceof practice, the moment at which men and women enter with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness into the making of their world. For the neorealistintellectual,men and women, statesmenand entrepreneurs, appear as mere supports for the social process that produces their will and the logics by which they serve it. In particular,people are reduced to some idealized homo oeconomicus, able only to carry out, but never to reflect critically on, the limited rational logic that the system demands of them. They are reduced in the last analysis to mere objects who must participate in reproducingthe whole or, as the enlightenedintellectual knows, fall by the wayside of history. True, neorealists would never admit that theory is without "practicalrelevance."But for them, relevancefinds its measureonly in terms of the technicaladequacyof the theorists'advice to agentsof power, and technical adequacy consists solely in the enhancementof the efficiency of means underobjective structuralconstraints.Nowhere in neorealistcategories do we find room for the idea that men and women who are the
Dilemmas of Politics "The Escapefrom Power,"in Morgenthau's 72. Hans J. Morgenthau, (Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1958), pp. 244-45. 73. Aldous Huxley, BraveNew World(London:Vanguard,1952), p. 14. The forewordwas authoredin 1946. 74. Thompson, Povertyof Theory,pp. 83-84.
The poverty of neorealism 259 objectsof theorycan themselves theorizeabout theirlives; arein fact engaged of in a continuingstruggleto shape and redefinetheir understandings themselves, their circumstances,their agencies of collective action, and the very categoriesof social existence;do indeed orient their practicesin light of their understandings; and, thanks to all of this, do give form and motion to the open-endedprocessesby which the materialconditionsof their practicesare cannot allow made, reproduced,and transformed.Neorealist structuralism this to be sb. For to do so would mean that neorealisttheory would itself be a mere part of history,and not the intellectualmasterof historyit aspires to be. Third, for all its emphasis on "power politics," neorealism has no comprehensionof, and in fact denies, the social basis and social limits of power. For the neorealist,as we have seen, power must be ultimatelyreducibleto a matterof capabilities,or means, underthe controlof the unreflectiveactor whose status as an actor is given from the start. No other position on power concould possiblybe compatiblewith neorealism'satomisticand utilitarian ceptions of internationalorder. Yet such a position strictlyrules out a competence model of social action. Accordingto a competencemodel, the power of an actor, and even its status as an agent competent to act, is not in any sense attributableto the inherent qualities or possessions of a given entity. Rather, the power and status of an actor depends on and is limited by the conditionsof its recognitionwithin a community as a whole. To have power, an agentmust firstsecureits recognitionas an agentcapableof havingpower, and, to do that, it must first demonstrate its competence in terms of the collective and coreflectivestructures(that is, the practicalcognitiveschemes and history of experience) by which the community confers meaning and organizes collective expectations. It is always by way of performancein reference to such collectively "known" (but not necessarily intellectually and generativeschemesthat actorsgainrecognition areempowered. accessible) Thus, accordingto a competence model, buildingpower always has a comaspect.Thus, too, the powerof an actoralways performative munity-reflective has its limits. Although an actor can play creatively off of given practical schemes, and although an actor can sometimes offer up virtuoso improvisations that elicit novel orchestratedresponses to new circumstances,the The actorcan never exceed the limits of recognition.75 authorof the "Melian Dialogues" understood this dialectic of power and recognition.Neorealists have forgottenwhat Thucydidesknew, in favor of a notion of powerwedded to the IndustrialRevolution's faith in humankind'slimitless expansion of control over nature. Fourth, despite its spiritedposturingon behalf of politicalautonomy and in opposition to the alleged economism of other traditions, neorealist his75. See especially Bourdieu, Outline, chap. 4, "Structure, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power."
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toricism denies politics. More correctly,neorealismreducespolitics to those exclusively within a frameaspects which lend themselves to interpretation constraints.In so doing,neorealism workof economic action understructural both immunizes that economic frameworkfrom criticism as to its implicit politicalcontent and stripspolitics of any practicalbasis for the autonomous reflectionon and resistanceto strictlyeconomicdemands.It therebyimplicitly allies with those segments of society that benefit from the hegemony of economic logic in concertwith the state. Politics in neorealismbecomes pure technique: the efficient achievement of whatever goals are set before the political actor. Political strategy is deprived of its artful and performative aspect, becoming instead the mere calculation of instruments of control. Absent from neorealistcategoriesis any hint of politics as a creative,critical enterprise, an enterpriseby which men and women might reflect on their goals and strive to shape freely their collective will. Takentogether,reflectionson these "fourp's" suggestthat neorealiststructuralismrepresentsanythingbut the profoundbroadeningand deepeningof internationalpoliticaldiscourseit is often claimed to be. Far from expanding discourse,this so-called structuralismencloses it by equatingstructurewith external relations among powerful entities as they would have themselves be known. Far from penetratingthe surface of appearances,this so-called structuralism'sfixed categoriesfreeze the given order, reducingthe history and future of social evolution to an expressionof those interestswhich can be mediated by the vectoringof power among competing states-as-actors.76 Far from presentinga structuralismthat envisions political learning on a in transnational scale, neorealismpresentsa structure whichpoliticallearning is reduced to the consequence of instrumentalcoaction among dumb, ununities that are barragedand buffetedby techreflective, technical-rational nological and economic changes they are powerless to control. Again, though, none of this is to say that neorealist "structuralism"is without its attractions.For one thing, and most generally,there is something that pretendsto a commanding, remarkablycongenialabout a structuralism objective portraitof the whole while at the same time leaving undisturbed, even confirming,our commonsense views of the world and ourselves. As compared to Wallerstein'sconception of the modem world system, for instance, neorealist structuralismis far more reassuringas to the objective convention among students of polnecessityof the state-as-unit-of-analysis It itics.77 thus relieves this particularniche in the academicdivision of labor
are effectof neorealiststructuralism pointed 76. Some good examplesof the agenda-limiting International Regimes: "Transforming in of up by CraigMurphy his discussions StephenKrasner's What the Third World Wants and Why," InternationalStudies Quarterly25 (March 1981), pp. 19-48; and RobertW. Tucker'sThe Inequalityof Nations(New York:BasicBooks, 1977). of See Murphy,"Whatthe ThirdWorldWants:An Interpretation the Developmentand Meaning 27 StudiesQuarterly (March EconomicOrderIdeology,"International of the New International 1983). 77. As Wallerstein,Hopkins,and others frequentlyurge,the modernworld system presents itself as only one unit of analysis,an N of 1.
The poverty of neorealism 261 of responsibilityfor reflectionon its own historicity.Its pose of Weberian detachment can be preserved. For another thing, this strange structuralismfinds much of its appeal in the fact that it complements and reinforcesthe other three commitments of the neorealistorrery.As alreadynoted, neorealism'satomisticunderstanding of structuregives priorityto-and then reconfirms-the commitment to the state-as-actor.One might also note that neorealismemploys the only form of structuralismthat could possibly be consistent with its utilitarianand positivist conceptions of internationalsociety. Anchored as they are in the constraints, quasinatural idealof rationalindividualactionundermeaningless, these conceptions would be radicallychallengedby modes of structuralism that question the dualism of subject and object and thus highlightthe deep constitutionof objective internationalstructures.Neorealism intersubjective is able to avoid this radical challenge. It is able to do so by restrictingits conception of structureto the physicalist form of a clockwork, the philosophical mechanism so dear to the heart of the Industrial Revolution's intelligentsia.
3. The ghost of the old revolution

The "secret world," John le Carrewrites, "is of itself attractive.Simply by The turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its center."78 same, we can now note, might be said of the neorealist orrery of errors. positivism, Havingseen its severalelements whiz by-statism, utilitarianism, structuralism,and statism yet again-we sense that there is a strangeunity of contrarietieshere. We sense that the whole machine exerts a centripetal force that is difficultto defy. To be sure, when we slow and examine the elements we find that errors and absurditiesabound. We find, for example, that the utilitarianinterpretation of internationalorderpresupposesa conceptionof the state-as-actora conception that a utilitarianwould want to disown. We find, too, that understanding neorealiststatism runs contraryto any genuinelystructuralist of the internationalsystem. We find that neorealismappeals to a Weberian interpretationof positivist method, a method that parades as the end of ideology even as it subordinatesall criticism to a scientificallyindefensible commitment to technical rationality'sobjectivity and neutrality. And we find that despite neorealism's pretensionsto the status of a political structuralism, neorealisttheory is as economistic as they come. Yet the neorealistorreryis meant never to be held at rest. It presentsitself only in motion. And thanks to this, its countlesserrorsbecome not damning indictments but counterweightsto other errors,balancingand perpetuating
78. Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl (New York: Knopf, 1983).
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the motion of the whole. The limits of positivism obscure the errors of statism in a state-as-actorconception of internationalorder, which reduces which in turn propelsus into systemic analysisto a physicaliststructuralism, worldof technicalreasonand necessity,whichbringsus around the utilitarian to positivism once again. Around and around it spins, eroding and then consuming the ground upon which opposition would stand. Around and around it spins, until we lose sight of the fact that it is only motion. Like le Carres secret world, this neorealistorreryhas no center at all. A much earlier study of the emergence of statist tendencies offers some clues as to how such a centerless swirl could become so powerful. In The EighteenthBrumaireof Louis Bonaparte,KarlMarx set out to discoverhow in Franceof 1848 through1852 it becamepossiblefor "agrotesquemediocrity wieldingof power to play a hero's part."His conclusionwas that Bonaparte's was occasioned by a crisis-bornbourgeoisreaction,but that it could not be wholly accounted for by materialcircumstances.Nor could it be attributed to the intrinsic qualities of Louis Bonaparte.In large measure, Bonaparte attainedpower because he was able to securerecognitionamong the French, and he was able to secure recognitionbecause, amidst crisis, he helped to make "the ghost of the old revolution walk about again." ... The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10, 1848, proved. From the perils of revolution their longingswent back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, and December 2, 1851, was the answer. They have not only a caricatureof the old Napoleon, they have the old Napoleon himself, caricaturedas he would inevitably appear in the middle of the nineteenth century.79 to One may venture a similarinterpretation account for the extraordinary power of the neorealistorrery.As in the ascent of Bonaparte,the emergence of neorealism is no doubt partly to be explained as a reaction to crisis. In of particular,a reasonablycomplete interpretation neorealismin its context would want to considerthe currentfiscaland legitimationcrisis surrounding of and the Americanstate in its role as system-manager guardian the capitalist might comprehendneorealism accumulationprocess. Such an interpretation as a crisis-promptedredeployment,from domestic to internationalpolitics, of the "economistic"ideologicallegitimationshitherto evidenced primarily and increasinglywith respect to the state's domestic performance.This account would grasp neorealism as a contributionto "statist economism," a historical successor to internationallaissez-faireeconomism.80 Another part of the explanation of neorealism's success looks beyond
79. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), pp. 438-39. 80. I develop this interpretation at greater length in Richard K. Ashley, "Three Modes of Economism," International Studies Quarterly 27 (December 1983).
The poverty of neorealism 263 materialcircumstancesto collective memoriesof the past. Despite its errors, its idealism,and its emptiness, neorealismsucceedsin its illusionof greatness because it at once cues and caricaturesthe ghosts of revolutions past, most of all the behavioral revolution in the Cold War study of internationalrelations. Awakened is a remembranceof a naturalisticmodel of science, the very model in whose name the behavioralrevolutionariesmarched.Awakened, too, is a one-time revolutionary faith that the light of science will illuminate the conditions of state action, thereby reducing the chances of miscalculation, overcommitment, and their sometimes disastrous consequences. Summoned forth once again is the sense of urgencyof the darkest days of the Cold War. Objectivity,neutrality,detachment, "state-as-actor," a "technology of peace"-these were among the slogans. Recollectingthis heroic revolutionaryproject,neorealismennobles its followers.Never mind that the faith in naturalisticscience and the harmonizingforce of reason implicit in these memories do violence to the very core of classicalrealism's internationalist thought,includingits long-standing resistanceto behavioralist methods. Never mind that the darklypessimistic side of Morgenthau,Carr, Wight, and Herz does not square with the behavioralists'optimism. With Gilpin, one can remember classical realism not as an embodiment of a continuing dialectical struggle between absolutist darkness and bourgeois Enlightenmentbut only as a product of the latter: Embedded in most social sciences and in the study of international relations is the belief that through science and reason the human race can gain control over its destiny. Throughthe advancement of knowledge, humanity can learn to master the blind forces and constructa science of peace. Throughan understandingof the sources of our actions and the consequences of our acts, human rationalityshould be able to guide statesmen through the crisis of a decayingworld order to a renovated and stable world order. The fundamentalproblem faced, this argument continues, is not uncontrollablepassions but ignorance. Political realism is, of course, the embodiment of this faith in reason and science. An offspringof modern science and the Enlightenment,realism holds that throughcalculationsof power and national interest statesmen can create order out of anarchyand thereby moderate the inevitable conflicts of autonomous, self-centered,and competitive states.... [T]his faith that a 'science of internationalrelations'will ultimately save mankind still lies at the heart of its studies.8' Likethe Frenchgazingupon Louis Bonaparte,neorealism'sfollowersglimpse in this caricatureof past revolutions an image that reflects well on them, that calls to mind the best images of themselves. Yet like the French, the followers quickly experiencea sickeningjerk as the whole project is yanked too soon into closure. The neorealistcaricature
81. Gilpin, Warand Change,p. 226.
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imagesto "firethe imagination," of sciencehas not deployedits revolutionary or to "glorifythe new struggles,"but to seal discourse within a continuous "parodyof the old." Its discourse is now frozen in acquiescenceto the Cold War conditions of the revolution it recalled:competition among states mutually preparingfor war. As Gilpin writes, "The advance of technologymay open up opportunities for mutual benefit, but it also increases the power available for political struggle.The advance of human reason and understandingwill not end this power struggle,but it does make possible a more How and enlightenedunderstanding pursuitof nationalself-interest."82 painful this is: the revolutionaryscience of peace has become a technology of the state! Was it always so? By the time this awful realizationcomes, it is too late for such reflections.The neorealistorreryhas spun its followersinto its arc. A "grotesquemediocrity"reigns. Such reflections suggest that a serious problem awaits the critic of neonature,neorealistorthodoxy realism.Despite its seriousflawsand totalitarian will not be dislodged from its lofty status by the force of logical criticism alone. For neorealism'spoweris largelydue not to its truthor the consistency of its logic but to its capacity to elicit the collective recognitionof women and men, scientists mostly, who must somehow organizetheir expectations and coordinatetheirpracticesin lightof commonly rememberedexperiences. True, as I have noted, neorealist theory is like all intellectualisttheory in that it contains no terms that would allow it to reflect critically on the practicalsocial basis and limits of its own power. Yet the fact remains, "the ghosts of revolutions past" are neorealism's main allies. At least, so they appear.Everywherethe collective remembranceof the study of international politics is on neorealism's side. 4. Recovering a silenced realism And then we spy an apparitionin the shadows, lodged deep in the recesses of our rememberedexperience. When last we met these ghosts of classical realism,we were introducedvia neorealists'terse interrogations theirheriof tage. Neorealists asked the classical ghosts a few pointed questions: Is the state the most important actor, yes or no? Is it not true that your central concept is "national interest defined as power," yes or no? They elicited testimony establishingneorealism'sstatus as classicalrealism'srightfulheir. Then, as the ghostswerehurriedout of the probatecourtroom,the neorealist interrogators explainedto us why the interrogation to be so brief.Classical had realists had a few sound ideas worth remembering,it seems. But they "are consideredto be traditionalists- scholarsturnedtowardhistoryandconcerned
82. Ibid.
The poverty of neorealism 265 more with policy than with theory and scientific methods."83Sadly, their work knew nothing of economic relationsand fell short of modern scientific standards. They would often fall prey to the "analytic fallacy," engage in "circularreasoning,"get their explanations "inside-out,"or even "drift to the 'subsystem dominant pole.' "84 Hard as it is to believe, many classical realists did not even know, until helped along by neorealists,that the logic of their "framework identicalto that used in neo-classicaleconomic theory is where it is assumed that firms act to maximize profits."85 Worse, many had been heardto echo Hans Morgenthau's insistenceon realism's"emancipation from other standardsof thought," including economics.86Why, some had even "insist[ed]that theorists'categoriesbe consonant with actors' motives and perceptions."87 Under the circumstances, surely, the classical realist legacy is honored most and embarrassedleast by retainingits scientifically redeemable statements and turninga deaf ear to its fatuities. Let the tired old ghosts rest in peace. As we edge closer to the dark corner, however, the haze lifts, and the visages of classical realism appear, far more clear-eyed than we had been led to believe. As their words become audible,we note that there is a definite coherence here, a coherence born of a sustained, disciplined, and richly developed perspectiveon international politics. Some of the wordsdo indeed resonate with things that we have heard neorealists say. Others, however, do not. Eavesdropping this conversationof honoredghosts we learnmany on things that the neorealist keepers of the flame have somehow neglected to bring to our attention. As we listen, it begins to become clear why. a. The practical structureof classical realism The firstthingwe learnis in some respectsquite obvious. Classicalrealism, in its method, is not at all the intellectualistor technocratictradition that neorealiststructuralism would aspireto be. On the contrary,classicalrealism It is very much animated by a practical interest in knowledge.88 is, if you will, the ethnomethodology of the modern tradition of statesmanship.As such, its approachis largelyhermeneutical.Its reality is the reality familiar to those who are competent parties to the tradition of statesmanship. Its of remembrances thingspast arethe officialremembrances this community, of
83. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 63. In the quoted words, Waltz refers specifically to Morgenthau and Kissinger. 84. The quoted words are all Waltz's. He includes nonrealists as well as classical realists among his targets. 85. Krasner, Defending the National Interest, p. 37. 86. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, pp. 12-14. 87. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 62. Waltz refers specifically to "Aron and other traditionalists" in this connection. 88. See Richard K. Ashley, "Political Realism and Human Interests," International Studies Quarterly 25 (June 1981).
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the way historywould have been and perhapsshouldhave been had it offered recurringendorsement of this modern tradition of internationalpolitical practice.Its problematicsare those that partiesto this tradition-competent statesmen-are preparedto recognize as problematic,not as economic inbut dividualsand not as history-lessstates-as-actors, as statesmenwho expect that their understandingscan secure public recognitionwithin the overall of community of statesmen and againstthe background collectivelyremembered experience. What takes longer to see is that such an approachis above all systemic, althoughnot of a form that neorealistphysicalismcan comprehend.In fact, after a good deal of time watching and listening to neorealistcommentary with an eye to elements of continuity, we begin to see that classical realist
scholarship already has a definite "structuralist" aspect. It is not the struc-
like turalismof clockworkmetaphysics,to be sure. It is not a structuralism, Waltz's, anchored in an atomistic conception of global society. Instead, as in competence models of social action, classical realism is enduringlycommitted to a simple generative scheme, a practical cognitive structurethat orients its discourseand in referenceto which all politicalpracticeis understood. Before I introduce this scheme, a few general notes on its qualities and its status in classical realist argumentare in order. This scheme, it must be said, is a practicalscheme. At once subjective and objective, necessary and contingent, the scheme exists as a preliteral relation,almost a posturalrelation,which can be graspedonly in the objective coherence of the actions it generates, in its uniting of otherwise seemingly disparatepractices.It is not producedas a scientificpostulatein some sense external to practice. Rather, it is learned, much as Thomas Kuhn would insist a scientific paradigmis learned, through the practicaltransferenceof It quasiposturalrelations.89 can be grasped only by reliving, via ritual and practice,the conflicts, rites of passage,and crises that bringthe scheme itself into strategically play, sometimesartfullyand sometimesineptly.Accordingly, the meaning of the scheme is in its practicalstate, and the scheme is misunderstood at the very moment that it is objectifiedor "captured"within some conceptual system, formal logic, or set of rules externalto practice.90
to 89. See Kuhn'sconcludingcontribution Lakatosand Musgrave,Criticismand the Growth. are All social scientistswho work with graduatestudentsin their researchprograms "familiar" with such schemes. The generative scheme of a researchprogramis what our "brightest" a students-the ones who arereallycompetent-seem to graspthrough kindof "fuzzyabstraction" from our own researchpractices.It is what allows them to do, with minimaldirection,the kind of independentresearchwe instantly recognizeas exactly the kind of work we would have wanted to do but, for some reason, never thought to do. The generativescheme is also that graduatestudentsnever quite graspwhen, in tryingto learnfrom our which our "second-rate" own practices,they embarrassus by mimickingour practicestoo exactly under inappropriate circumstancesor by followingour instructionstoo much by rote. It is that which we spend hours tryingpatientlyto explainto graduatestudentsbut which, we know, always loses its life once it is translatedinto a rule. InventionwithinLimits," Logic: "Generative SchemesandPractical chapter, 90. See Bourdieu's in Outline.
The poverty of neorealism 267 For the classical realist, however, this generative scheme is no less real because it resists capture within a frozen category. On the contrary, this scheme is graspedas the self-replicating "geneticcode of politicallife." Embodied in all aspectsof international politics,from the sovereignstate through the internationalsystem, this scheme is the principle"which allows [us] to distinguishthe field of politics from other social spheres,to orient [ourselves] in the maze of empiricalphenomenawhichmakeup that field,and to establish a measure of rational order within it."9' For the classical realist, it is the graspingof this scheme and the conditions of its successfulapplicationthat makes competent political practicepossible. It is the indispensableelement of internationalpolitical savoirfaire. In moderninternational society,the communityboundedby the consensual recognition of this scheme defines the modern tradition of statesmanship for the classical realist. Within this tradition, statesmanshipis not, as objectivism would have it, the "execution of a rule," or acting in accordance with some externalobjectivenecessities,or mechanical obedienceto a timeless model for which all processes are reversible and time and tempo are no matter.92 Nor is it reducible, as in neorealism, to rational choice, under constraints, on the part of an actor whose status as such is pregiven and unquestioned.Rather, statesmanshiprefersto practice, playing off the generative scheme in ways rangingfrom the awkwardand uninventive to the artfuland creative-and alwayswith an eye to the problematicreproduction of the state itself. On the one hand, it allows for the possibility of slips, mistakes, and clumsy moments on the part of the maladroit.On the other hand, it involves virtuoso improvisationsreflectinga perfect command of the "artof living"and playingon "allthe resources inherentin the ambiguities and uncertaintiesof behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriateto each case, to do that of which people will say, 'There was nothing else to be done.' "'9 What, then, is this scheme? One possible way of answeringis to refer to "power,""interestdefined as power,"or, better, "balanceof power." I shall refer to it as a balance-of-powerscheme.94All such labels are troubling, however. They conceptualizethat which functionsto dispensewith concepts. an They invite a kind of fetishism among too-literalinterpreters, ahistorical reductionof the scheme to the manifest conditions and relationsthe labels immediatelyconnote. For the communicationof the classicalrealisttradition this has been a difficultproblem.
91. HansJ. Morgenthau, "TheCommitmentof PoliticalScience,"in his Dilemmasof Politics (Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1958), p. 39. 92. Bourdieu,Outline,p. 24. 93. Ibid., p. 8. 94. 1will not defendthis choice of labelsat this point;my reasoning soon becomeevident. will RecallingErnstHaas's important1953 paper,"The Balanceof Power:Prescription, Concept, exerciseto explore whetherthe or Propaganda?" WorldPolitics 5, 4, it may be an interesting balance-of-power scheme discussedhere could (undervariouscircumstances) generateall eight of the meaningsHaas abstractedfrom the relevantliteratures.
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Gropingtowardan answerStill,an answer,howevertentative,is required. and knowingthat any writtenanswerwill fail as much as it succeedsbecause it idealizes that which has its true meaning in its practical site-I would venture to introducethe balance-of-powerscheme as a "dialecticalunity of pluraltotalities."An extremelysimple posturalscheme, it poises in unceasing dynamic tension two opposed attitudesor interpretiveorientations.Lacking of better alternatives, let me call these opposed aspects the "particularity the universal"and the "universalityof the particular." The particularityof the universal.Accordingto this side of the dialectical relation, all universalizingclaims-all claims as to some universal truth and objective necessity of law, morality,concept, theory, or political order-are inherentlyproblematic.They are problematicin that they reflect and conceal particularpoints of view and particularinterests that cannot be reconciled with other points of view occupyingthe same totality. Put somewhat differently,all universalizingclaims mask an implicit hierarchyof social control relationscentered on some particular set of interests and subordinatingother opposing and legitimate interests. The universalityof the particular.Accordingto this side, all claims or sort-interests expressed, actions undertaken, actions of a particularistic and commitments made on the basis of immediate, contingent,and specific experience-are inherentlyproblematic.They are problematic because they bear implicit universalizingprojects, implicit claims on what the whole world might be. Claims as to the truth of action or commitments based on a unique heritageor on unreflectedunderstandings of individual interests, for example, imply limits on what other aspects of the social totality can do, have, and be. They implicate the social whole. Such a scheme, it should be clear,in no sense impliesa necessaryreduction of politics to the interplayof instrumentallogics (as in utilitarianmodels). Quite the contrary. Among parties who recognize the scheme, including classical realists, the scheme at once generatesand unifies all practicesin a system of structures that are evaluative as well as cognitive. Against all pretensesand aspirationsas to the existence of the possibilityof a universal of reason,the anticipation orderfounded unity-be it the unityof unrestrained on law or morality, the expectation of logical unity implicit in positivist science, the championing of universal empire, or a Cobdenite faith in the harmonizinginfluenceof the market-the scheme commends recognitionof which will be animated towardpluralismor fragmentation, countertendencies in reaction to just these universalisticand unifying aspirations. Likewise, against all claims as to the rightnessor truth of a particularexperience or point of view, the scheme commends attention to the universe of opposing perspectivesthat might oppose or even negatethe first. In short, the scheme legitimates a pluralityof perspectives on all relations in life, and it unifies
The poverty of neorealism 269 all political practice in opposition to all attempts to reduce political life to the singularrational unity that any one perspectivewould impose upon it. It is not too much to say that the balance-of-power scheme, far from being a logical relation deduced from a prior structureof states in anarchy,is the constitutive principleof a pluralisticstates system. Practicesoriented with order. respectto the scheme produceand transformthe moderninternational The reasoning,briefly summarized,is as follows. Working amidst ever-shifting factors and forces, including all of those traditionallycalled "elements of national power," statesmen never literally possess power and never truly hold the reins of control. Rather,competent statesmen are engagedin an unceasingstruggle,at once artfuland strategic, to be "empowered." They succeed to the extent that they can strikebalances among all aspects of power-e.g., industrialcapacity, populationdemands, militarycapability,nationalistlabor,internationalist bankers,and the consent and recognitionof other statesmen-to establishan at least momentaryequilibrium that, in turn, defines the state and its interests.It is towardjust this balance of forces, a balance of power embedded in and producingthe state, that statesmen strive. This, and nothing else, is the national interest, the This equilibrium,and nothing else, "national interest defined as power."95 is what defines the state's boundariesand secures the effective distinction, however momentary,between domestic and internationalpoliticallife. The "96 state, to borrow from Foucault, is an "effectof power. Defining and achieving this balance is the art of statesmen. Theirs is not the task, as in neorealism,of securingthe ends of an unproblematical, given the of state. Theirs, rather,is the art of orchestrating (re)production the state in a transnationalcontext of other statesmensimilarlyengaged.In their art's work, statesmen must of course pick their way through an overwhelming maze of problems, roadblocks,and dead ends, all of which are susceptible to countless interpretationsfrom multiple points of view. Amidst all these complexities, competent statesmen know "instinctively"to interpretall reinstitutions lations with referenceto a scheme firstinscribedon international as the earliest modern states established their precariousfootings in the dialectic of particular aristocratic and universalizing bourgeois interests. Through long practice,they have internalizeda predispositionto orient all practices with reference to the axial principle, the generative scheme, of balanceof power.For statesmen,this simple dialecticalscheme has a genuine economy of logic (though it is not the logic of economy) that will make their own practicescomprehensiblein the eyes of other competentstatesmen,and as thanksto whichthey can understand theirpractices well. Moreimportantly,
95. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 6.
96. Foucault,Power/Knowledge, 73-74. In the specificquotation,Foucaultrefersto the pp. individualas an "effectof power,"but his overall argumentis applicableto the empowering or constitutionof all subjective agents, includingthe state. His "Two Lectures"addressthe relationbetween the two.
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as judiciously applied by artful participants,the scheme orients the comprehension of interests and the undertakingof practices that promise to optimize power, in its fullest sense, on behalf of the state. b. The political conceptionof political concepts As we listen furtherto the conversationamong classicalrealistghosts, and scheme at workthroughout as we begin to get a feel for the balance-of-power classicalrealistdiscourse,anotherinsightcomes. If classicalrealistssometimes appear slippery in their use of concepts, it is not always because of a lack of discipline, an inductivist bias, or a failure to think in systemic terms. Neorealists mistakenly read classical realism in this way because they do not understand the tradition they purport to carry forward. They do not understandthat, for the classical realist, the fruits of intellectuallabors are no more immune to the dialecticallogic of the balance-of-powerschemeat once subjectiveand objective-than are the institutionsand practicesthey study. They do not see that, thanks to classicalrealists'commitment to the a scheme, classicalrealisttheoryinstitutionalizes persistent balance-of-power struggleto overcome problemsnoted earlierwith respectto neorealisttheory. In particular, classicalrealisttheorizinglong soughtto avoid the tendency, so evident in neorealism, to let the "impulse to theorize" manifest itself in the production of a lifeless, antihistoricalenclosure. Deeply committed to the balance-of-powerscheme, classical realists such as Martin Wight are of politicsto beingtheorized consciousof "a kindof recalcitrance international about."97Hans Morgenthaucautions that there is "a rational element in political action that makes politics susceptible to theoretical analysis, but there is also a contingentelement in politics that obviates the possibilityof Both warn against any attempt to arrive at a theoreticalunderstanding."98 that accountingin terms of finishedexternalstructures complete, naturalistic finally contain the political world. As both understand,to try to impose a single conceptualorder on internationalpolitical life, even if that attempt is inspired by the dialecticalbalance-of-powerscheme, is to deny the truth of the scheme that inspiresthe attempt. From the vantage point of classical realism, as from the vantage points of statesmen participatingin the traditionof the modern states system, all key concepts-power, nationalinterest,the sovereignstate, the statessystem, scheme. and so on-must be understoodin referenceto the balance-of-power Seen as finding expression throughout all levels and in all things of the political universe, the balance-of-powerscheme dictates an understanding of all such concepts as reflecting (perhaps momentary) equilibria among
Theory?"in HerbertButterfieldand 97. Martin Wight, "Why Is There No International (London:Allen & Unwin, 1967). Wight,eds., DiplomaticInvestigations "The Intellectual and PoliticalFunctionsof Theory,"in Morgenthau, 98. Hans Morgenthau, Truthand Power.Essays of a Decade, 1960-1970 (New York:Praeger,1970), p. 254.
The poverty of neorealism 271 opposed tendencies and opposed interests:monarchand church,nationalist and progressive, traditionalist and internationalist, local and global,regressive and rationalist,fragmentingand universalizing,aristocracyand bourgeoisie. Not even the structuresof the modern state or the states system, not even the practicalefficacyof the balance-of-powerscheme itself, can be taken as given. They are essentially political concepts because they are, in the words of a recentdebate,"essentially contested"or "essentially disputed"concepts.99 And they are disputed not so much because of a lack of agreement but because, at a deeperlevel, there is an agreementto disagree.There is a moreor-less consensual recognitionof the truth of a dialecticalscheme that both truthand generates disallowsany finalclosureon a singular, contradiction-free the expectation that, for reasons unspoken, there will forever be pressures to subsume the whole within a false unity. In contrast to neorealism's closure, then, the tradition of practicerepresented by classical realism (the tradition institutionalizedin the modern states system) is never really "complete." Rather, it appears to each new ambiguous,and nevercompleted generation that inheritsit as a lively, difficult, of This struggle the struggle. requires creativeinterpretation new circumstances of and sometimesvirtuosoperformance system renewal,in lightof commonly recognizedorganizingschemes embedded in past experienceand embodied in currentsocial structures.The compromisesamong contendingforcesmust ever be won again.The balancesmust ever be restruck.The strategicalliances with various factions having contesting nationalist and internationalist claims-alliances without which statesmen might not secure the autonomy accordingto classicalrealist requiredto permittheir competent participation ever be drawn anew. Always and everywhere,balances expectations-must are in jeopardy;always and everywhere,strategicartistryis required. c. Power, recognition,and balance of power At last we are beginningto graspthis balance-of-powerscheme. Although we are still no doubt quite clumsy in its application-overcoming this clumsiness does take practice and a sense of history-it does at least enable us to make sense of the continuingconversationamong classicalrealists.Take, for instance, their discussions of power. We can now see that the classical realist conception, when compared to the neorealist conception, is considerably richer and much more sensitive to power's social basis and limits. We can sense that this is because the classical realistconception is founded
99. See W. B. Gallie, "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
andAction(New York:Viking,1959);StephenLukes, 56 (1955-56); StuartHampshire,Thought Power.A Radical View(London:Macmillan, 1974); K. I. Macdonald,"Is 'Power'Essentially Contested?" BritishJournalof PoliticalScience6 (November 1976),pp. 380-82; Lukes,"Reply of to K. I. Macdonald,"ibid. 7 (1977), pp. 418-19; John Gray, "On the Contestability Social Languageand PoliticalUnderstanding. and PoliticalConcepts," ibid.(August1977);and Shapiro,
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on an implicit competence model of political practice,a model anchoredin the balance-of-powerscheme. The scheme dictates a commitment to the necessary ambiguityofpoliticalreality,and this in turnestablishesthe dialectic of recognition a necessaryand irreducible as aspectof all socialpowerrelations. This becomes clearerwhen one takes note of the interpretiveunity at work behind classical realists'dual usage of the term "power,"both as a capacity to influence(to "have power")and as a designationof competent,recognized participants(to "be a power"). To be recognizedas a power, that is, as a sovereignstate, a state must satisfycertainminimalrequisites(e.g., effectively patrolledterritory); and, in general,these requisitesreflecta state's capacity to makegood on the claim that its statesmen'spartially uniqueinterpretations of the whole need to be recognized and granted a separate voice in the To dialogueamong mutually recognizingstates.'00 "increasepower," statesmen must engage in practicesthat serve to move their own vantage points on the whole, and within the eyes of other powers, toward the collectively recognized"central"vantage point-the view from the center of a plurality of political orbits. To become a "dominant power" is to become the one power recognized as the state whose vantage point, and interests defined therefrom,defines the objective limits of politicaland social possibility;that is, the limits that no power can violate without imperilingits status as a power. Whethera stateis a minoror a dominantpower,though,its powerconfronts its own limit, as contained in the anchoring scheme of balance of power recognized by all competent parties to the system. Even among dominant powers (perhaps especially so) statesmen must make good on the claim, implicit in the modern concept of sovereignty,'?'that their own vantage
100. However, beforeone leaps to the conclusionthat there is some fixed set of operations of by which one translatescertainobjective requisitesinto "attributes statehood,"it must be stressed that the requisitesof statehood themselves depend upon collective recognition,are essentiallyreinterpretable, subjectto dispute, and have historically are evolved. 101. This is one of the points where Ruggieand I part ways-or, perhaps,it is on this point that Ruggieneeds to make more explicit what remains unclear,at least to me. In his review of Waltz, Ruggiedrawsinterestingparallelsbetweenprivatepropertyrights,as conceptualized by Locke, and sovereignty,as conceptualizedby Vattel. I agree that Vattel exhibits strong parallelsto Locke's atomistic and contractarian views; as Quincy Wrightnotes of Vattel, he to law "adhered the atomistictheorywhichholdsthat international is merelya seriesof contracts betweenwholly independentstates" (Wright,A Study of War[Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1964], p. 230). I think, too, that the parallelsare provocative:Ruggie'sanalysiscauses me to wonder if there might be more than an analogyat work here, if perhapsthere is more than a coincidencebetween the emergenceof new relationsof laborand property,as justified by Locke, and the new mode of sovereignty,as justifiedby Vattel. It occursto me, however,that Ruggiemay have been drawninto a scholasticargument which the betweenintellectual at causeshim to exaggerate surfaceparallels rationalizations the expense of an understanding a real differencebetween private propertyrights and sovereigntyas of active principles practice.I wouldlike to offerthe view thatthe modernconceptof sovereignty of law designatesthe collectively recognizedcompetenceof entities subject to international and superiorto municipallaw. It thus involves not only the possessionof self and the exclusionof others but also the limitationof self in the respectof others, for its authoritypresupposesthe recognitionof others who, per force of their recognition,agree to be so excluded. In effect,
The poverty of neorealism 273 points on the whole are indeterminate,ambiguous,and allow for the plurality of possible interpretationswithin the whole that they themselves interpret. Playingoff the balance-of-powerscheme, the powerfulstatesmanmust make good on the claim that his interpretationof the whole allows room for the interpretive vantagepoints of even the lowliestof "minorpowers"recognized by the system of states and from whom the dominant power expects recognition in return. For to the extent that a power statesman fails to make good on this claim in the eyes of others-perhaps because he has become to captive of moralzeal, for instance,or becausehe has surrendered "national interests" in the most "egoistic" sense of the term-his practiceswill take on a special significance when read in reference to the balance-of-power scheme. His practices will signify the state's incompetence as a partnerto the dialogue of internationalpolitics. The statesman representing power the in question will be viewed as unwilling, or perhaps as structurallyunable, to learn from diplomatic interaction. His diplomatic practiceswill be seen as nothing more than instrumentsof "nationalistuniversalism,"the attempt on the part of a single society to bend the whole world to the logic and demands of its unique national experience. Such a state will actually lose power, or what we may call "symbolic capital."'02 In fact, there is a strong sense in which a master-slavedialecticof power obtains: one in which the aspirationto absolute power yields absolute impotence, and the demand for a totally gratifiedego negates being itself. At the extreme, the high-capabilitystate whose leaders performincompetently and allow themselves to be understoodas attemptingto make globally determinate their own univocal interpretationsof order will be denied recognition, and hence existence within the communityof states, altogether.From the point of view of the tradition,such statesmenwill be seen not as competent partnersin a communityof sovereignstates,and leastof all as worthyleaders, but as threats and dangersto be opposed, taught to behave if possible, and expelled or destroyed if necessary. d. Rudiments of a theory of internationalpolitical practice The conversationamong classicalrealistghosts continues. And as it does, classical realism's status in internationalrelations discourse, and its implisovereigntyis a practicalcategorywhose empiricalcontents are not fixed but evolve in a way reflectingthe active practicalconsensus among coreflectivestatesmenwho are ever struggling to negotiateinternaland externalpressuresand constraintsand who, if competent,orienttheir practicesin respectof the balance-of-power scheme. Thus, one cannot say flatlythat sovereign states exhibit a "form of sociality characteristic 'possessive individualists,'for whom the of social collectivity is merely a conventionalcontrivancecalculatedto maintainthe basic mode of differentiation and to compensate for the defects of a system so organizedby facilitating orderly exchange relations among the separateparts" (Ruggie,p. 278). One has to say that practiceso normalizedmay be associatedwith a particular form of sovereigntyunderspecific historicalcircumstancesyet to be explained. 102. See especiallythe last chapterof Bourdieu'sOutline.
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cations for scientific theory, begin to be seen in a differentlight. It is clear that classical realism, owing to its practical interests and its reliance on a competence model, provides a richer political frameworkthan does neorealism: at once broader in the scope of critical questions it can entertain (includingself-reflectivecriticism),superiorin its generativepotential, more elegant and less demanding in its assumptive and conceptual bases, and more sensitive to the deep politicallimits and dilemmas of competentinternational practice.At the same time, there is somethingtroublingabout this discoursethat might conversation-especially if we measure it as a scientific provide a viable alternativeto neorealisttheory. Thanks to its commitment to "the priorityof practiceto theory," classical realism is vulnerableto the '03 charge,advanced by neorealists,of circularity. It is ensnaredin the "hermeneutic circularity"of the traditionof practiceit interprets. Evolving its theory while peering "over the shoulder of the statesman when he writes his dispatches,"'04 classical realism can advance its theory no fartherthan competent statesmen,in the courseof their practice,are able to theorize about themselves and their circumstances.Classicalrealismthus cannot pose questions that competent professionalsin the traditionwill not recognize, including those questions that they have a structuredpolitical interest in not recognizing. Where competent statesmen are prepared to recognizeproblems, classicalrealism will give voice to problems. But where competent statesmen have an interest in silence, classical realism will be silent, too. Among these problems are those that would call into question the traditionwithin whose context statesmendemonstratetheir competence, securerecognition,and orchestratethe empoweringof states.For the classical realist, as for the competent statesman, such questions are not literallyforgotten. Rather, they inhabit the domain of "that which must not be said." They are unspoken and unrecognizedby competent parties as a condition of their competence.'05 this of Considering tradition-bound circularity the classicalrealistdialogue, we are forced to conclude that, as a theoreticalalternativeto the neorealist orreryof errors, classical realism fails. It fails as a theory of world politics, in the firstplace, becauseit is so deeply immersedin the traditionit interprets that it lacks any independenttheoreticalstandardsfor the criticism of that tradition'slimits. It fails, in the second place, because it honors the silences of the traditionit interpretsand thus containsno categoriesthat would allow one to specify, or even advance hypotheses about, the historicalconditions
103. Martin Wight, "The Balanceof Power and International Order,"in Alan James, ed., The Bases of InternationalOrder(London:OxfordUniversity Press, 1973). 104. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 5. 105. This interestin silence, it must be stressed,is not an instrumental interest,not a relation that competentstatesmenconsciously in conceptualize logicalor means-ends terms.It is, instead, one that statesmen do not necessarilyconceptualize,one best served when it is universally internalizedwithout conceptualization.
The poverty of neorealism 275 that make that traditionpossible or the deep and transnationalsocial power structuresthat tradition-boundpractice at once presupposes, reproduces, and mystifies. It fails, in the third place, because it is unable to contemplate the historicallyspecificdevelopments that threatenthe unspokenconditions upon which the dominance of that traditionhistoricallyrests. It is therefore unable to grasp the deeper dimensions of crisis in the world polity. And it fails, in the fourth place, because in refusingto comprehendits own limits it must refuse as well to engage and learn from opposing theories and arguments (includingtheories of imperialism,transnationalism,and interdependence)that would call these conditionsinto question.Thus, while classical realism is rich with insights into political practice, it fares no better than neorealism as a scientific theory of internationalpolitics. Though it closes on an understandingthat is far truer to the traditional practice of world politics, it is no less closed. Though it affirmsthe hegemony of a balanceof-power scheme ratherthan the hegemony of a logic of economy, it is no less self-affirming. To say that classical realism should be denied the status of a scientific theory, though, is not to say that it should be banished from the theoretical discourseof internationalrelations.On the contrary,its practicalsignificance should be accommodated within any reasonablycomplete theory of international politics. True to its own practicalcommitments, it should be conceptualized within theory as the "organicintellectuality"of a transnational tradition of statesmanship. It should be conceptualizedas the ideological apparatusof a global professionalcommunity, the communityof competent statesmen, which administersthe recognizedpublic sphere of international life, which is able to rememberand interpretits past, which can learn from its experiencesand theorizein limited ways about itself and its performance, and which can to some degree transformits practicesand its institutionsin So light of its remembrancesand its theories.'06 viewed, classical realism's lapses, circularities,silences, and omissions cannot be regardedas pretexts classicalrealistargument as in neorealism, or, for "rejecting" then ignoring and tested"version.Suchreactions for developinga "new,improved,scientifically forget that classical realism and its lapses and omissions at once mirrorand ideologicallyreproducea traditionthat constitutes importantaspects of the world we study. Instead, classical realism, its generative potential, and its limits and distortions should be addressed, interpreted,explained, and deployed as part of the explanation within a theory of modern international political practice. To think of classical realism in this way is to begin to look beyond the simple competence model implicit in the conversation among ghosts. It is
106. The term "organic intellectual" is due to Antonio Gramsci in his path-breaking studies of hegemony. See Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks ofAntonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 197 1), especially pp. 5-14.
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to anticipatethe development of a dialectical competencemodel-a model that would overcome classical realism's failingsand provide a viable alternative to neorealism'seconomic model of choice under constraints.Several features of such a model merit notice. First, such a model would be developed to account for the emergence, reproduction,and possible transformationof a world-dominantpublic political apparatus:a tradition or regime anchored in the balance-of-power scheme and constitutive of the modern states system. The regime should not be construedto organizeand regulatebehaviorsamong states-as-actors. It insteadproducessovereignstates who, as a condition of their sovereignty, embody the regime. So deeply is this regime bound within the identitiesof the participantstates that their observations of its rules and expectations become acts not of conscious obedience to something external but of selfrealization,of survival as what they have become.'07We may refer to this regimeas a balance-of-power regime.We may understand to be the tradition it of statecraftinterpretedby classical realism. Again, classical realistsare the intellectuals"of this regime,the reigningintelligentsia the world"6organic of wide public sphere of modern global life. Second, such a model would situatethis balance-of-power regimein terms of the conditionsmakingit possible:the social,economic, and environmental conditions upon which its practical efficacy depends. One such condition can be inferredfromclassicalrealists'notorioussilenceon economicprocesses and their power-political As ramifications. Hedley Bullsays of MartinWight, so can it be said of classical realists and regime-boundstatecraft:they are ".notmuch interestedin the economic dimension of the subject."''08 How is it possible for the balance-of-power regimeto maintainsuch a silence?Under what historicalsocial, economic, and environmentalconditionsis it possible for the balance-of-power regime,as the publicpoliticalsphereof worldsociety, to maintainsilence on matterseconomic while at the same time coordinating and orienting practicesin ways reaffirmingthe regime itself? One possible answer is that the regimepresupposescapitalistrelationsof productionand exchange.It presupposesa deep consensus grantingcontrolover production to a sphere of "private" decisions that are themselves immunized from public responsibility-a practicalconsensus that thereby producesa sphere of "economy" operatingaccordingto technical rationallogics of action. In turn, such a consensus further presupposes capitalist labor and property relations. This consensus, together with the worldwide power bloc whose dominance it signifies and secures, might be called the modernglobal hegemony. The balance-of-power regimeis its publicpoliticalface. The silences
107. See Richard K. Ashley, The Political Economy of War and Peace: The Sino-SovietAmerican Triangleand the ModernSecurityProblematique (London:FrancesPinter, 1980), pp. 38 and 279-86. 108. Hedley Bull, "MartinWight and the Theory of InternationalRelations:The Second MartinWightMemorialLecture," BritishJournalof International Studies2 (1976), pp. 101-16.
The poverty of neorealism 277 of the regimeon matterseconomic at once reflectand reinforcethe dominant power bloc's control over productionindependentof public responsibility. Third, such a model would necessarilyaccount for the balance-of-power regime's orientation and coordination of political practices such that, on they tend to directcommitments balance(andas an unintendedconsequence), in of resourcesand the developmentof ideologicallegitimations ways securing the possibilityconditionsof the regime.The model might show, for example, how the competent statesman's interest in accumulatingsymbolic capital, or symbolic power, by playing off the balance-of-powerscheme, effects a "double standard"of politicalaction. That double standard,in turn, secures the politicalpreconditionsof globaldominationon the partof a transnational capitalistcoalition,the dominantpowerbloc of the modernglobalhegemony. Fourth, such a model would explore the learningpotentialof the balanceof-power regime. In particular,along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu'sargument, '09it might furtherdevelop its specificationsof the processof symbolic capital accumulation. It might explore how symbolic capital, accumulated of performances competent hegthroughthe ambiguousand "disinterested" emonic statesmen,providesa kind of "creativereserve,"a basis in authority, of for the exerciseof leadershipin the orchestration collective improvisations in response to crisis. Fifth, such a model would offer an account of crisis. It would specify the to tendenciesthreatening undermineor transformthe conditionsupon which the practicalefficacyof the balance-of-powerregime depends. It might specificallyconsider those tendencies that threatento eradicatethe statesman's honoring equivocalpoliticalperformances latitudefor ambiguous,intrinsically the balance-of-powerscheme and not immediatelyreducibleto expressions of economic interests.''? Owing to this loss of latitude for ambiguous performances, it might be shown, the competent statesman is deprived of the ability to accumulate symbolic capital and, with it, a reserve capacity for would suggest learningand changein responseto systemcrisis.Suchreasoning the possibility of a world crisis-not just one more cyclical economic crisis, but an epochal crisis of world political authority,a crisis involving a degen109. Bourdieu,Outline,chap. 4. 110. A number of tendenciesare relevant in this connection. Most can be associatedwith to according whichthe formsof state legitimation late capitalistdevelopment:"post-industrial" as grounds,but increasingly an economic dysfunction state legitimatesitself, not on traditional to manager;the fiscal crises of modem states struggling justify themselves in these terms;the countries,resultingin of internationalization capitaland the emergenceof newly industrialized symbols meansand traditional capacitywith political-coercive of a malalignment worldindustrial is of politicalpower;the globalizationof the world polity such that hegemonic"responsibility" of ostensibly universal,with no "externalareas" remainingfor the externalization costs; the contradictionsexposed through encountering"limits to growth";the emergenceof socialist of the movements aimingto institutionalize public politicaldetermination productionand exchange but which are also under pressureto rationalizetheir politics;the Cold War, which the institutionalizes totalizationof politicalcompetition;and nuclearweapons, which institutionalizethe possibilityof totalizedwarfare.
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eration in the learningcapacity of the regime and, consequently, a loss of politicalcontrol. Understood in the context of the modernglobalhegemony, such a crisismight be expectedto be markedby the economizationof politics and the resulting loss of political autonomy vis-a-vis economic and technological change. As if internationalpolitics were the last frontier of the progressiveworld rationalization tendency delineatedby Weber,hegemonic practice might come under increasingpressuresto find its rationalenot by playingequivocallyoff the balance-of-power scheme, but by measuring every gesture in terms of the ultrarationalistic logic of economy. Sixth, such a model would not view the modern global hegemony in isolation. Nor would it mistake it for the whole of world politics."' It would it of insteadregard as the dominantworldorderamonga multiplicity mutually and interpenetrating opposed world orders,some of which might escape the logic of the modern global hegemony and assert alternativestructuring possibilities under circumstancesand by way of oppositionalstrategiesthat can in principlebe specified. For example, the modern global hegemony might be understoodto contest with-and, as a kind of "pluralistic insecuritycommunity,"to contain-totalitarian communist, collectivistself-reliance,Eurocommunist, Muslim transnationalist,and corporatistauthoritarianworld order alternatives."2Developing such a niodel would involve exploringthe strategies by which oppositional movements representingthese and other alternativesmight take advantageof the indeterminateand ambiguousqualities of regime-boundstatecraft,while exploiting its traditionalsilences, to transformits conditions of dominance, producethe conditions of their own self-realization,and secure the widening recognitionof their own ordering I3 principlesas the active principlesof practice." These anticipations of theory are, of course, rudimentaryat best. They do, however, suggestsome possibilitiesfor the development of a model that would preserve classical realism's rich insights into internationalpolitical practicewhile at the same time exposingthe conditions,limits, and potential for change of the tradition in which classical realism is immersed. Fully developed, such a model would more than surpassneorealism.It would offer an interpretationof neorealism, finding in it a historicallyspecific reaction to crisis that refusesto comprehendthat crisisbecauseit cannot acknowledge the richnessof the traditionthat is endangered.It would interpretneorealism,
11 1. Ashley, Political Economy of War and Peace, pp. 294-98; Hayward R. Alker Jr., "Can the End of Power Politics Possibly Be Part of the Concepts with Which Its Story Is Told?" in Alker's "Essential Contradictions, Hidden Unities" (in progress). 1 12. See Hayward R. Alker Jr., "Dialectical Foundations of Global Disparities," International Studies Quarterly 25 (March 1981). 1 3. As might be inferred from this description, the capitalist power-balancing order addressed in this dialectical competence model is not understood to exhaust the totality of international political reality worthy of theoretical examination. On the contrary, while it is arguably the dominant mode of order, it is but one point of entry into the theoretical analysis of an international reality that consists of the dialectical interplay and interpenetration of multiple world orders.
The poverty of neorealism 279 in other words, as an ideologicalmove towardthe economizationof politics. And it would underscorethe possibly dangerousconsequencesshould this move succeed.For from the point of view of such a model, the economization of internationalpolitics can only mean the purgingof internationalpolitics of those reflective capacities which, however limited, make global learning and creativechangepossible.It can only mean the impoverishment political of imaginationand the reductionof internationalpolitics to a battlegroundfor the self-blind strategicclash of technical reason against technical reason in the service of unquestionedends. e. The classical realist repudiationof neorealism We do not need to await a dialecticalcompetence model's critical interpretationof neorealism'sflawsand dangers,however.Such a critiquealready exists. It is alreadypresent in the very literatureto which neorealismclaims to owe its intellectual debts. In classical realism's revered texts, we find recurringwarningsagainst the very practicesthat neorealism has made its own. In the name of realism, neorealism commits specific errors against which classical realists specificallywarned. Listen, for instance, to the sixteen-year-oldwords of Hans Morgenthau, I4 whom Gilpin calls "the leadingmodem spokesmanfor politicalrealism."" What characterizescontemporarytheories of internationalrelationsis the attempt to use the tools of modern economic analysis in a modified form in order to understandinternationalrelations.... In such a theoretical scheme, nations confront each other not as living historic entities with all their complexities but as rationalabstractions,after the model
of 'economic man.' ...
Hear Morgenthau'swords of nineteen years ago: ... This theorizingis abstractin the extreme and totally unhistoric.It endeavors to reduce internationalrelationsto a system of abstract propositionswith a predictive function. Such a system transformsnations into stereotyped'actors' engagingin equally stereotypedsymmetric and asymmetric relations. What Professor[Martin]Wight has noted of internationallaw applies with particularforce to these theories:the contrast between their abstractrationalismand the actual configurations of world politics. We are here in the presence of still another type of progressivisttheory. Its aim is not the legalizationand organizationof internationalrelations in the interest of internationalorder and peace but the rational manipulationof internationalrelations... in the interest of predictableand controlled results. The ideal toward which these theories try to progressis ultimately internationalpeace and order to be achieved through scientificprecision and predictabilityin understanding and manipulatinginternationalaffairs.
114. Gilpin, Warand Change,p. 213.
280
A quarter-century ago:
... [T]he contemporary political scene is characterized by the inter-
action between the political and economic spheres.... Yet what political science needs above all changes in the curriculum-even though it needs them too-is the restorationof the intellectual and moral commitment to the truth about matters political for its own sake. That restorationbecomes the more urgentin the measure in which the general social and particularacademic environment tends to discourageit.... And thirty-six years ago: The very appearanceof fascism not only in Germany and Italy but in our very midst ought to have convinced us that the age of reason, of progress,and of peace, as we understood it from the teachingsof the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had become a reminiscenceof the past. Fascism is not, as we preferto believe, a mere temporaryretrogressioninto irrationality,an atavistic revival of autocraticand barbaric rule. In its mastery of the technologicalattainmentsand potentialitiesof the age, it is truly progressive-were not the propaganda machine of Goebbels and the gas chambersof Himmler models of technical rationality?-and in its denial of the ethics of Westerncivilization it reaps the harvest of a philosophy which clings to the tenets of Western civilization without understandingits foundations. In a sense it is, like all real revolutions, but the receiver of the bankruptage that preceded it."5 Other famous lines could be recalled, includingthe contrastatisttheme introduced as part of Morgenthau'ssix-point manifesto of political realism: "While the realist indeed believes that interest is the perennialstandardby which political action must be judged and directed, the contemporaryconnection between interest and the nation state is a productof history, and is thereforebound to disappearin the course of history."'16 Now it is abundantlyclearwhy neorealistinterrogators have been so abrupt in theirquestioningof the classicaltradition.These extensive remarkssuggest that classicalrealists,given a chance to speak, would be among neorealism's sternestcritics. As Morgenthaustressedon many occasions, utilitarian,poscommitments-commitments presentin neorealismitivistic,and rationalist tend to pitch social science on an unhistoricand apolitical attitude toward politics, an attitude too often dangerouslyallied with the state. Such commitments threatento producea form of pseudo-politicalunderstanding that of falselyreducesthe inherentlydialecticalcharacter politicsto the monothetic orientation of economic reason, an orientation in which all perspectives,
115. Morgenthau, "Common Sense and Theories," in Truthand Power, p. 244; "The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory," p. 248; "The Commitments of Political Science," p. 48; Scientific Man versus Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), pp. 6-7. 1 16. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 10.
The poverty of neorealism 281 even the measure of power and its changes, are thought to be ultimately collapsible into a singular, internally consistent scale of universally interconvertible values. Such commitments permit no real sense of political dilemmas, no real appreciationof the autonomy of the political sphere. They tend toward a one-sided rationalism,a view tragicallyflawed for its lack of a sense of the tragic, a half-truththat must ultimately be transformedinto the opposite of itself and must produce its own ruin in the vain search for a universaldomain. These commitments are not just politicallynaive. They are positively dangerous. I do not mean to glorify classical realism. It is, as I have said, a tragic tradition. It is a tradition whose silences, omissions, and failures of selfcritical nerve join it in secret complicity with an order of domination that reproducesthe expectationof inequalityas a motivatingforce,and insecurity as an integratingprinciple.As the "organicintellectuality" the worldwide of public sphere of bourgeois society, classical realism honors the silences of the traditionit interpretsand participatesin exemptingthe "privatesphere" from public responsibility.It thus disallows global public responsibilityfor "economic forces" that will periodically disrupt and fragment the global public sphere. Herein, I think, are the seeds of realismas a traditionforever immersed in the expectationof politicaltragedy,an expectationthat realists can explain only euphemistically,in terms of the antinomies of fallen man. My aim, rather,is to underlinethe fact that neorealism is not worthy of its name. Neorealismscoffsat classicalrealism'swarningsand sense of limits, misstates its interests, deadens its ironies, empties its concepts, caricatures its rich insights, reduces practice to an endless serial performanceof constrained economic choices on the part of one-dimensional characters,and casts the whole of it up beforea flat historicalbackdropdevoid of perspective, contradiction,and life. Once again,the memory of TheEighteenthBrumaire comes to mind: "Hegel remarkssomewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personagesoccur, as it were, twice. He forgotto add: the firsttime as tragedy,the second as farce.""7
5. A concludingself-critique
autoE. P. Thompson concluded ThePovertyof Theorywith an "obligatory" critique.I, too, sense the obligation.Having played the critic, I want to offer a few self-criticalremarksin conclusion. Much that I have said needs to be criticized-so much, in fact, that I fearthat the severalrespondentswill have neither the time nor the space to give me all the swats I deserve. Let me concentrateon five criticisms that I think are important. First, my argument may not have been sufficientlyattentive to the sig117. Marx, "Eighteenth Brumaire," p. 436.
282
nificanceit will take on when readagainstthe background the greatbattles of of the past. In particular,much of my argumenthas crossed the venerable battlegroundwhere once the entrenched soldiers of "tradition"confronted "science" on the march, and I may have left room for the conclusion that I have enlistedin the ranksof "tradition" over againstneorealist"science." as In fact, such a conclusionwould be mistaken.For the burdenof my argument in this respect is not to condemn science in favor of tradition. Nor is it to suggest the dilution of scientific standards by broadeningliberal scientific toleranceto embracetraditionas part of science. What is called for, instead, is a methodologicallymore demanding science: a science that expands the range of allowable criticism, and sharpens the standardsof theoreticaladequacy, by institutionalizing expectationof continuouscriticalreflection the on the historicalsignificanceand possibilityconditions of our own attempts to arrive at objectivist conclusions. That is, a dialectical science is called for."8 Second, I think there is some merit to the charge that I am engagingin that sort of criticism which, if successful, leaves an aching void in the soul of a discipline. In attackingneorealism,I have moved not only againstneorealist theory but also against predominantunderstandings method that of deflect criticismand obscureneorealism'smany theoreticalflaws.Yet I have only brieflyoutlined some possibilitiesfor an alternativetheory, and I have not even begun to sketch the implicationsof my argumentfor an alternative method. I have failed to outline a dialectical methodology that recognizes the inevitable opposition of theory and practiceand attempts to internalize that opposition in its method. I have failed to stress adequatelythe need to approach all aspects of internationalsystems not only as reflectionsof an objective whole but also, and at the same time, as potentiallybearingcompeting wholes, competing ordering principles strugglingto find unfettered expression. I have insufficientlystressed that practice must be grasped not just as conformity to the norm but also as a continuingstrategicstruggleto produceor escapealternativeforms of order.If my critiqueis to be successful, these gaps will need to be filled."'
1 8. Bourdieudescribesthree modes of knowledge-phenomenological,objectivist,and dialectical. For a discussion of these three modes of knowledge in the study of international politics, see Ashley, "Realist Dialectics." 119. One major projectunder way is the "Dialecticsof WorldOrder"work of HaywardR. Alker Jr., Thomas Biersteker,Ijaz Gilani, and Takashi Inoguchi. See, for example, Alker, "DialecticalFoundationsof Global Disparities"; Alkerand Thomas Biersteker, "The Dialectics of WorldOrder:Notes for a FutureArchaeologist International of SavoirFaire" (Deliveredat the September 1982 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Denver, Colo.); and Alker,Biersteker, Inoguchi, and "FromImperial PowerBalancing People'sWars: to Searching for Orderin the TwentiethCentury"(Presentedat the April 1983 meetingof the International Studies Association, Mexico City). The World Order Models Project,under the directionof Richard Falk and Saul Mendlovitz, can be said to exemplify a dialectical methodologyof normativeclarification whichcompetingworldorderdevelopmentalconstructs,representing by various social and culturalpoints of view, are exposed, confronted,and elaborated.See for example, Richard Falk, A Study of Future Worlds(New York: Macmillan, 1975). Papersby
The poverty of neorealism 283 Third, it may be reasonablyarguedthat I have unfairlysingled out neorealismto take the bruntof a critiquethat could easilybe expandedto include other targets. Neorealism is in many ways just part of a trend. I think it is evident, for example, that the "economization"of political theory is not a phenomenon unique to internationalrelations theory in the United States. The current"legitimationcrisis" in the U.S. polity may help to account for of the suddenreinvigoration microeconomictheoriesof politics,game theory, exchangetheory, rationalchoice theory, and public choice theory, but such economic theories of domestic politics have always been near the center (if not always the surface)of the postwar scientific study of politics. I think it is evident, too, that even among internationalrelationstheories, neorealism is not the only perspective meriting such an attack. In importantrespects, much that I have said here could as easily be applied to Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems perspective. I think that Wallerstein'sneo-Marxist structuralismexhibits many of the positivistic and physicalistic qualities earlierascribedto neorealism.I think, too, that Wallerstein'sperspectiveis, in some ways, just as guilty of statism. I would be inclined to account for this replicationof flaws in terms of Wallerstein'ssharinga Weberianlineage (in his case via Merton and Parsons)with neorealism.'20
Terence Hopkins indicate an important effort toward the development of dialectical perspectives within neo-Marxist world systems analysis. See Hopkins, "World Systems Analysis: Methodological Issues," in Barbara Kaplan, ed., Social Change in the Capitalist World Economy (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1978); and Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, "Cyclical Rhythms and Secular Trends of the Capitalist World Economy," Review 2, 4 (1979). Johan Galtung's The True Worlds as well as his most recent methods text, Methodology and Ideology, outline and richly illustrate a dialectical approach. 120. The mention of Wallerstein reminds me to amend my earlier remarks on the commitment to "actor models" implicit in Weberian solutions to the problem of subjectivity and meaning. There is a partial exception to the claim that social scientists rooted in this tradition will generally reject as "meaningless" social analyses which do not come to rest in an "actor model." That exception is social analyses which come to rest in "the market"; I term it a "partial" exception because market and exchange relations are generally taken to be individualist in origin within bourgeois ideology, and hence all analyses in terms of market relations can themselves be thought ultimately to come to rest in an actor model. Despite his radical intentions, Wallerstein's analysis seems now stuck in this box. His model of the capitalist world system seems to amalgamate a market-based model of production and exchange relations (one which refuses to close its eyes to the reproductive hierarchy of the global division of labor) with an actor model of state practice, a joining that has some sorry consequences. Wallerstein is left to oscillate between-without ever transcending-the poles of market force and state purpose. Worse, when called upon to account for creative moments in the system's evolution (moments that cannot be reduced to market "dynamics" within the center-periphery hierarchy) he is left only two avenues: either (a) that instrumentalist form of economism according to which the state conspires with (or is totally enslaved to) a dominant power bloc or segments of capital who themselves are close to omniscient, or (b) that idealist form of statism which credits the state with an all-seeing awareness of its situation in history, and the will and ability to change the system while perpetuating its essential structures. As this suggests, Wallersteinians offer us the choice between economistic accounts and what turn out to be, on close inspection, neorealist accounts (which, we have seen, are themselves economistic in an important sense). I do not think, by the way, that this trap is escapable via a Parsonian move in the treatment of the states system, such as the one promoted by John Meyer. It seems to me that escaping this trap will require reexamining the position that locks Wallerstein into it, namely, the Weberian position on subjectivity and meaning
284
Fourth,in this connection, it may be arguedalso that my neglectof Wallersteinian and other radical perspectives has deprived my critique of a full sense of the epistemo-politicalcontext of neorealism.This is a fair criticism. A more complete critique would have stressed the opposition between Wallersteinianheterodoxyand neorealistorthodoxyagainstthe background of crisis.'2'On the one side, Wallerstein'sperspectiveis an instance of heterodoxy, a mode of theory that consciously sides with the dominated in a social system. Occasionedby the currentcrisis, it strugglesto find words for that which the dominantwould preferto excludefrom the realmof conscious relations. political discourse, namely, the political content of core-periphery In PierreBourdieu'swords, it strugglesto "expandthe domain of discourse" On of and expose "the arbitrariness the taken for granted."'22 the other side, neorealist theory is an instance of orthodoxy, implicitly on the side of the dominant. It emerges under the condition of a crisis that calls into question the self-evidence of the given order by severing the once near-perfectcorrespondencebetween the objective order and the subjectiveprinciplesof its organization.Under these conditions, and with the help of heterodoxy, the arbitraryprinciplesof the prevailingorder can begin to appear as such. It becomes necessaryto develop orthodoxies to "straightenopinion" by "naturalizingthe given order," an order that, prior to crisis, was simply taken for granted. Neorealist orthodoxy does just that. It develops "a system of euphemisms, of acceptable ways of thinking and speakingthe natural and social world, which rejects heretical remarks as blasphemies."'23 serves It primarily,as I noted earlier,to constrain the domain of discourse. I regret that this line of argument could not have been more fully developed; had we followed it further,we mighthave come to understandsome of the strange asymmetriesin debates between neorealistsand neo-Marxistworld systems analysts.
in social reality. Having said that, let me distance myself from a fashion current among neorealists: the ritual slaying of Immanuel Wallerstein (usually coupled with the celebration of the totemic figure of Otto Hintze). I want to state plainly my own intellectual debt to Wallerstein's pioneering work: like many American international relations theorists trained in the 1970s, I owe much to Wallerstein, not just for his theory but for the exemplary boldness of his enterprise, and his willingness (so threatening to neorealism) to punch holes in the convention-made walls of our minds. On Wallerstein's error of anchoring his analysis in market-based explanations, see Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," New Left Review no. 104 (1977). See also John W. Meyer, "The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State," in Albert Bergesen, ed., Studies of the Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1980); John Boli-Bennett, "The Ideology of Expanding State Authority in National Constitutions, 1870-1970," in Meyer and Michael T. Hannan, eds., National Devel-
opmentand the WorldSystem:Educational,Economic,and PoliticalChange,1950-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 121. This treatment of the opposition between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the context of crisis is due to Bourdieu, Outline, pp. 159-71. 122. Ibid., p. 165. 123. Ibid., p. 169.
The poverty of neorealism 285 Finally,I must confess to naggingdoubts about tone. Had I the neorealist's gift for theorizing,I would certainlyaspire to write the kind of critiquethat wouldcausemy oppositionto concedeerroron the spot-a deft, dispassionate, of precisearticulation a logicalflawthat would bringneorealists and surgically to their knees with technical certitude. I am not so gifted, however, and so my lesser approachhas been to circle the neorealistorreryof errors,try to and antihistoricalclosure, and then set the whole glimpse its self-affirming of it before the eyes of the classical realist traditionupon which neorealism claims to improve. Along the way, I have called names, I have poked fun, angrierwords to hurl at neorealists,and I have stolen some of Morgenthau's neutral I have triedto expose the implicitpoliticalcontent of this purportedly enterprise.I have said, in effect, that this supposedlyscientificrealismis bad science and worse realism. In the manner of Thompson, I have whacked away at the bungs of structuralistbarrels lined up in the academy, and I have done so in the hope that some "minds might get out." Such a tone is hardly calculated to win friends, I know. Worse, it makes me appear the aggressor,and leaves me open to a calculated strategyof "witheringnonchalance" in response. In my defense,let me say that I am drivento these lengthsby a combination of concernand hope. My concernis that, amidst the wrenchingof economic, relations social, and epistemic crisis, social scientistswho study international will mistake neorealism's anticriticalclosure for a much needed pillar of I certainty,security,and, most of all, collective understanding. am concerned that the faculties that above all distinguish science from nonscience-the reflective exercise of criticism-are thus being deadened at just the time when their potential is most needed and most likely to burst forth. I am concerned that, as a result, the scientific study of internationalpolitics in towarda reactionary the United Statesis gravitating pole ratherthaninvolving itself in the expansion of the field of political discourseand, with it, opportunities for the creative evolution of world society. And I am especially concerned about graduate students and younger scholars who are told to think criticallyand creativelybut whose freedomto think criticallyin public depends to a very considerabledegree upon their linking their accomplishments to collectivelyrecognizedfoundations.Insofaras neorealistlore comes to occupy the collectively recognizedfoundationsof the discipline,the urging of criticism-consciousnesscan only be a cruel hoax. My hope is encapsulated in the words of Sartre:"Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly."'24 My hope and my hunch is that the present polemic amounts to little more than a putting into words of what many have already "lived namelessly." I suspect that I am not the first to wonder why neorealistargumentsalways
124. Jean-Paul Sartre, L idiot de la famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 1: 783, and quoted in
Bourdieu,Outline,p. 170.
286
come to us not as ideas that pry open beloved concepts and make room for new scientificadventuresbut as case-hardened conceptualdevicesthat enclose the senses in an all-encompassing finality.I imaginethat othershave recoiled at the feeling, upon encounteringthese neorealistdepictions, that one is an innocent fallen victim of a vast and diabolicalmachine, a perpetualmotion machine that bends every attempt to escape it into a reaffirmation itself. of And I would guess that others have been troubled by the eerie sense of completeness about neorealisttheory, as if there is no more of consequence to be said, save a defense of the edifice here, a demonstrationof its efficacy there. If I am right, and I hope I am, then most internationalrelations scholars have long sensed what I have tried to put into words. Let us then play havoc with neorealistconcepts and claims. Let us neither admire nor ignore the orreryof errors,but let us instead fracturethe orbs, crackthem open, shake them, and see what possibilitiesthey have enclosed. And then, when we are done, let us not cast away the residue.Let us instead sweep it into a jar, shine up the glass, and place it high on the bookshelf with other specimens of past mistakes.

ASHLEY - The Poverty of Neorealism

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What is Thompson's criticism of Althusser and structural Marxism?

What is Ashley's criticism of neorealism?

The Poverty of Neorealism Author(s): Richard K. Ashley Reviewed work(s): Source: International Organization, Vol. 38, No.

The poverty of neorealism RichardK. Ashley

and U.S. ForeignPolicy (Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress, 1978).

Transition(Boston:Little, Brown, 1977), especiallychap. 2.

57. Giddens, CentralProblems,p. 257.

3. The ghost of the old revolution

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