ð Tries to criticize the structuralist approach of realists in a similar way as Thompson condemned the the Marxists structuralist approach at his time
ð Thompson’s attack was by no means a plea for fidelity to Marx’s original texts. Rather, it was primarily concerned with restoring a respect for practice in history.
ð North American theorists of international and comparative politics claim to be at least escaping the limits of what Piaget called ‘atomist empiricism’.
o Represented by authors such as: Waltz, Keohane, Krasner, Gilpin, Tucker, Modelski, Kindleberger, among many others.
ð Synonyms of the structural realism are: modern realism, new realism, structural realism, NEOREALISM.
ð The neorealist typically defines his or her heritage, as the name implies, in the Europe – born tradition of ‘classical realism’ – the tradition associated in the United States with Morghentau, Niebhur, Herz and Kissinger.
ð Ashley is not challenging any specific realist, but the movement as a whole.
NEGATIVE CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERALISM
ð From realism it learns only an interest in power, from science it takes only an interest in expanding the reach of control. What emerges is a positivist structuralism that treats the given order as the natural order, limits rather than expand political discourse, negates or trivialize the significance of variety across time and place, subordinates all practice to an interest in control, bows to the ideal of a social power beyond responsibility andthereby deprives political interaction of those practical capacities which make social learning and creative change possible. What emerges is an ideology that anticipates, legitimizes, and orients a totalitarian project of global proportions: the rationalization of global politics.
POSITIVE CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERALISM
ð Theoretical alternatives are not exhausted by the false choice between neorealism’s ‘progressive’ structuralism and a ‘regression’ to atomistic, behavioralist, or, in Waltz terms, ‘reductionist’ perspectives on international politics.
ð The dichotomy of wholes and parts, often invoked by neorealist orthodozy, obscures another cleavage of at least equal importance. The one between ‘compliance models’ (as in early physialistic Durkheim) and dialectical ‘competence models’ (as in recent poststructuralist thoughts).
o A dialectical competence model would allow us to grasp all that neorealism can claim to comprehend while also recovering from classical realism those insights into political practice which neorealism threatens to purge.
ð 2 main poststructuralist critiques:
1. French: Bourdieu’s dialectical outline of a theory of practice, also supported by some essays of Foucault
2. German: The critical theory of Jurgen Habermas scientization of politics and the whole Frankfurt Tradition.
ð In neorealist eyes, classical realists were quite correct in their emphasis on power, national interest, and the historically effective political agency of the state. Unfortunately, when held up to modern scientific standards of theory, these classical realist scholars seemed to fall woefully short.
ð Points 4 lapses of classical realism pointed by neoliberalists:
1. Classical realists are said to be too fuzzy, too slippery, too resistant, too consistent operational formulation
o Somehow, classic realist concepts and knowledges claims never quite ascend to Popper’s “third world of objective knowledge”, because classical realists hold that the truth of these concepts and claims is to be found only through the situation-bound interpretations of the analyst or statesman.
2. Classical realists might be said to distinguish insufficiently between subjective and objective aspects of international political life, thereby undermining the building of theory.
o Waltz complains about their ‘reductionist behavior’ because they tend to accord to the ‘atribute’ of actors subjective perceptions an important role in constituting and reproducing the ‘system’.
3. In Gilpin’s words, classical realist scholarship ‘is not well grounded in social theory’, showing a lamentable lack of learning from the insights of economics, psychology, or sociology.
4. Classical realists jeopardize the goal of politics as an autonomous sphere when they limit themselves to the domain of political-military relations, being naïve to economics and, for so, being vulnerable to liberal interdependence critics, as well as radical theorists of dependency and imperialism.
ð Neorealism raises as answer to a legitimacy crisis of non-scientifically realism in a distinct US Fashion.
o Accordingly, political-economic order follows from the concentration of political-economic power. Power begets order. Order requires power. The realist emphasis on the role of state power had been ‘saved’.
o Thus rooted, realist power politics could be scientifically defended against modernist and radical critics.
ð 5 Parallels between neorealist argument and structuralist argument in general
1. Both are reactions against phenomenological knowledge and speculative, evolutionary thought
2. Structuralist argument aims to construct the objective relations (linguistic, economic, political, or social) that structure practice and representations of practice, including primary knowledge of the familiar world. For this, they breack with individualist perspectives or social subjectivity, as in the Cartesian cogito. Structuralism is predicted on a Kantian rather than a Freudian unconscious, on structural imperatives that constitute the logical geography of mind.
3. What concerns structuralists in general is not practice per se, but the logical conditions that account for the significance and signification of practice within a community.
4. Pressuposes not only the priority of structure over practice but also the “absolute predominance of the whole over the parts”. They emphasize the system not only in contrast to but also as constitutive of the elements that compose it. Thus, the units have no identity independent of the structural whole.
5. In their treatment of time and change, structuralist arguments tend to presuppose an absolute distinction between synchronic (static) and diachronic (dynamic) viewpoints, and they tend to accentuate the one-way dependence of diachrony upon synchrony.
ð Points 2 obvious correspondences between neorealists arguments and some of the fundamentals of structuralism, as follows:
1. Neorealism criticism of classical realism’s subjectivist tendencies closely parallels structuralism’s reaction against phenomological knowledge.
2. Neorealist reaction to the writings of transnationalist and modernist similarly parallels structuralism actitudes with respect to speculative, evolutionary thought.
ð While Waltz allows that there may be considerably variety among actors, only those forms of differentiation significant within the overall structure, namely distributions of capabilities, are of concern to his theory.
ð The preoccupation with cycles of hegemonic rise and decline would seem near-perfectly to illustrate the structuralist tendency to emphasize synchrony over diachrony.
ð Structuralism tendency to put at a distance, to objectify, to separate out from the personal equation of the investigator the structure of an institution, a myth, a rite, leads to what Giddens called a scandalous anti-humanism.
ð Neorealism isomorphism with structuralism neglects some aspects in which neorealism is less and more than structuralism, as follows:
o MORE:
§ Three extra commitments:
· Statism: Raises the hardcore of states as actors with settled goals and plain capabilities in the main rule of international relations
o Punctuates that eventually neoliberals betray theirselfs while describing this aspect, however, he points, just as individual defensive clauses unlinked to the mainstream proposals.
§ Quotes Waltz admission that states are in fact not unitary politics designers and pursuers.
§ Gilpin defines states as coalitions resulting from the powers and bargaining among coalitions.
o There’s an implicitly oppose and denie to those class and human interests which cannot be reduced to concatenations of state interests or transnational coalitions of domestic interests.
o For neorealist, the state is ontologically prior to the system. The system’s structure is produced by defining states as individual unities and then by noting properties that emerge when several such unities are brought into mutual reference.
§ Gilpin clearly endorses this.
o Ruggie criticizes the way Waltz articulation of his three analytical components loose sense by the misperceptions of the differences among unities being limited to the modern sovereignt concept, while in fact there are some important medieval influences, for instance.
§ The three main points are: Organizational principle; differentiation unities; concentration of diffusion.
§ Ruggie pointed that but in a neorelist synthesis.
· Utilitarianism:
o He didn’t mean the moral philosophy of Bentham and Mill.
o Uses in the broad sense of Durkheim, Polany, Parsons, Bryan Barry, Charles Camic and Michael Hecher
§ As expressed in microeconomic theories of politics, game theory, exchange theory and rational choice theory.
§ Makes individualist and rationalist premises to be paradigms.
o Social reality is understood as made up of many such individual actors, inhabiting a world characterized by scarcity – a world in which not all goals can be equally realized and, hence, choices have to be made.
o Social interaction is interpretable, by direct extension, as instrumental coactions or exchange among individual actors.
o For its theory of institutional change, utilitarianism proposes that changes occur spontaneously, as consequence of relative changes in the competing demands an capabilities of individual actors.
o Imre Lakatos define the neorealism as utilitarian statism according to two elements:
a) Agent is powerful to the extent that he effects others more than they effect hi
i. Only with one framework one is inclined to join Gilpin in reducing matters of morale, leadership, and power over opinion to `psychological` factors.
b) There are no rules, norms, mutual expectations, or principles of practice prior to or independent of actors, their essential ends, and their capabilities.
i. Neorealism regards international order entirely as a derivative relation.
o 3 main critiques to utilitarism which apply to neorealists:
1) In the absence of a framework of norms consensually accepted by its members, it might be possible momentarily to establish an orderly social aggregate among instrumentally rational individuals.
a. Structuralists claims that struggles for power among states become the normal process of orderly change and succession.
2) The rational actor in the utilitarian model will always be a free rider whenever given the opportunity. Thus, social organization is unlikely to arise even among those individuals who have a strong personal interest in reaping the benefits that such organization provides.
a. Structuralists claims that it becomes a sociological legitimation for hegemonic states, whose private interests define the public good and whose preponderant capabilities see to it that more good gets done
3) Utilitarism substitutes the Marxist class war by the class relations, however, without the conflictive element there`s no one such cathegorie as class. The utilitarism individualist premises prohibit it from confronting, comprehending or explaning any relation among classes.
a. They kind of accept, however, they raise the idea that order among great powers, the great states, is ever dependent of a hierarchy of domination among great and small sates.
i. Waltz says that inequality has its virtues for creating order.
b. This last examples shows how realist attempt to finesse objections to utilitarian accounts are suspended in thin idealist air.
ð The neaorealist counts on our failure to notice that the objections accepted at the level of the international system can equally well be turned against the metaphysical prop upon which depends the reification of an international political system analytically distinguishable from domestic and transnational relations: the concept of the state-as-actor.
ð Points that it`s not a settled plan of realists, but, instead, that they are as much victims as perpetrators.
· Positivism
ð Neorealist theory is theory of, by, and for positivists. It secures instantaneous recognition.
ð Didn`t refer to the Viena Circle positivism of brute empiricism, inductivist logic.
ð Positivism means two contemporary things:
o Refers to the received model of natural science, in opposition to what Foucault called escchatalogical discourse (when the objective truth of the discourse lies within and is produced by the discourse itself
o The naturalistic discourse in which its truth lies in the external object.
ð In general the positivist discourse holds to 5 expectations:
1) Scientific knowledge aims to grasp a reality that exsts in accord with certain fixed structural or causal relations which are independent of human subjectivity and internally harmonious or contradiction-free.
2) Science seeks to formulate technically useful knowledge that enhances human capacities to make predictions, orient efficient action, and exert control in the service of given human values.
3) The search for knowledge is value-neutral.
4) The truth of claims and concepts is to be tested by their correspondence to a field of external experience as read via (problematic) instruments or interpretative rules.
5) The expectation that the phenomena of human subjectivity do not offer any particular barrier to the treatment of social conduct as an object on a par with objects in the natural world.
a. Creates two problems:
i. The inability to value social realities
o Weber answer that meaningful action is merely motivated action. With that, we have objective, naturalistic social science.
ii. The inability of the author to not involve in the analyzed case.
o Weber`s solution involves radicalizing the separation between the process by which the validity of scientific concepts and knowledges claims may be scientifically decided and the process by which scientists take interest in, generate, or come to recognize as meaningful their concepts and knowledge claims.
ð Ashley criticizes the transformation of science in an interprise which preserves its objectivity by excluding from its terrain all questions that cannot be formulated and solved within the allegedly objective logic of technical rationality.
ð In particular, neoliberalism commits scientific discourse to an actor model of social reality – a model within which science itself is incapable of questioning the historical constitution of social actors, cannot question their ends, but can only advise them as the efficiency of means.
ð Theory-masked-as-method.
ð Ashley criticizes that the very idea of end of ideology is a positivist commitment to an ideology of its own.
ð Upon commencing any analysis of a social system, the habit-born principle predisposes the positivist to identify the irreducible actors whose rational decisions will mediate the entry of meaning into social reality.
o LESS:
§ Neorealism structuralism takes a shallow, physicalistic form, which exacerbates the dangers while negating the promise of structuralism.
ð Neorealists slide too easily between atomist and physicalist concepts
o From a structuralist point of view, a structural whole cannot be described by starting with the parts as abstract.
o The atomist describes the whole precisely in terms of the external joining of the elements.
ð In Waltz atomism, all subjective relations are interpreted as psychological relations, and propositions that refer to them are thus banished as reductionist.
ð Once neorealists do arrive at their physicalistic notion of structure, they do attribute to it some of the qualities of structure in structuralist thought and to grant absolute predominance of the system over the parts.
ð Neorealism give us the worst of two worlds: atomism superficiality and structuralism closure.
ð Says that neorealism is a case of Karl Popper`s historicism that freezes the political institutions of the current world order while at the same time rendering absolute autonomy of technical rationality as the organ of social progress to which all aspects of this order, including states as actors, must bow.
ð Neorealist structuralism is silent about 4 dimensions of history:
1) Denies history as a process and, with its fixity of theoretical categories, confines history to a closed field whose limits are defined by the pregiven structure.
2) Joins all kinds of historicism by denying the historical importance of practice, the moment at which men and women enter with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness into the making of their world.
a. For do so they allow theirselfs to be a mere part of history as well, and not the intellectual masters of history it aspires to be.
3) For all its emphasis on power politics, neorealism has no comprehension of, and in fact denies, the social basis and social limits of power.
a. Don’t notice that power depends on recognition.
4) Neorealism reduces politics to those aspects which lend themselves to interpretation exclusively within a framework of economic action under structural constraints.
a. Politics becomes pure technique.
ð Far from presenting a structuralism that envisions political learning on a transnational scale, neorealism presents a structure in which political learning is reduced to the consequence to instrumental coaction among dumb, unreflective, technical-rational unities that are barraged and buffeted by technological and economic changes they are powerless to control.
ð Statecentrism is the only form of structuralism that could possibly be consistent with its utilitarian and positivist conceptions of international society.
ð Ashley seeks to build on a generative potential of classical realism bt anticipating the development of a dialectical competence model which would depend on 6 aspects:
1) The regime should not be constructed to organize and regulate behaviors among states-as-actors. Instead, it should produce sovereign states who, as condition of their sovereignty, embody the regime.
a. Here he points that classic realists are the organic intellectuals, the intelligentsia of the publc sphere of modern global life
2) Such a model should situate this balance-of-power regime in terms of the conditions making it possible: the social, economic, and environmental conditions upon which its practical efficacy depends.
3) Such a model should necessarily account for the balance-of-power regime`s orientation and coordination of political practices such that, on balance (and as an unintended consequence), they tend to direct commitments of resources and the development of ideological legitimations in ways securing the possibility conditions of the regime.
4) It might explore how symbolic capital, accumulated through the ambiguous and disinterested performances of competent hegemonic statesman, provides a kind of creative reserve, a basis in authority, for the exercise of leadership in the prchestration of collective improvisations in response to crisis.
5) Such a model would offer an account of crisis. It would specify the tendencies threatening to undermine or transform the conditions upon which the practical efficacy of the balance-of-power regime depends. It might specifically consider those tendencies that threaten to eradicate the statesman`s latitude for ambiguous, intrinsically equivocal political performances honoring the balance-of-power scheme and not immediately reducible to expressions of economic interests.
6) Such a model would not view the modern global hegemony in isolation. Nor would it mistake it for the world politics. It would instead regard it as the dominant world order among a multiplicity of mutually interpenetrating and opposed world orders, some of which might escape the logic of the modern global hegemony and assert alternative structuring possibilities under circumstances and by way of oppositional strategies that can in principle be specified.
