The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism

Barry Buzan, Charles Jones and Richard Little

New York

Columbia University Press

1993

Section III
Rethinking the Methodology of Realism

 

One reaction to the project undertaken in this book might easily be to protest that the era of structuralist theory in the social sciences has gone, never to return, and ask why we continue busily fitting a copper sheath to our man o' war while the submarines slink by, just as though nothing had happened.

Details of exposition would naturally vary from one critic to another, but it is easy to imagine a pincer movement: historical and philosophical. The historical strand of the argument would point to the Cold War functionality of structuralist theories, claiming that while Karl Popper attacked totalitarian thought directly in The Open Society and its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, he mounted a more subtle but equally necessary defense of reason through work on scientific methodology which yielded in the doctrine of falsification a keystone for mid-twentieth-century positivist methodology, binding together law, conjecture, experiment, and theory. His work, in turn, the argument might go, underpinned neoclassical economics during the crucial decades of Western economic growth following the Second World War. Structuralism in the social sciences, it might be said, was inextricably linked with the statist project which dominated the twentieth century, only to founder in the 1980s.

A second, more philosophical, line of argument would be that the conjunction of individualist and anthropocentric ontology, positivist methodology, and empiricist epistemology associated with structuralist social theories of recent decades was the only possible support of structuralism, and a faulty one at that. Take away these supports, it might be said, and structuralism cannot stand. But this is wrong, and the argument of this final section is an attempt to persuade readers that many supposed foundations of structuralist theory and of modern conceptions of reason itself may be discarded without jeopardizing the disciplined or theoretically informed exercise of practical judgment in the world. More strongly, it will be claimed that the rotten foundations need to be hacked away and the prudential nature of statesmanship again made apparent if we are to have any hope of navigating rather than merely drifting in the seas of post-Cold War international politics.

Such a view runs the risk of alienating more or less everybody. The project will be dismissed from the outset by post-structuralists as hopelessly conservative. But neither can it be accomplished without employing familiar arguments from the sociology of knowledge, and slightly less familiar ones concerning the relation of language to the world, which will immediately provoke howls of rage from philosophical conservatives directed against the reflexive and relativist nature of all such critiques of traditional epistology.

Some readers are bound to feel that truth is reduced here to the status of a privileged metaphor and that an attempt is being made to deprive them of criteria for judging between competing theories, including those contained in the earlier sections of this book. But to say that truths and theories--assuredly two very different classes--are socially constructed and provisional does not amount to an abandonment of reason any more than to admit that cookbooks have authors amounts to a denial that there are right ways of cooking and recipes that work, given suitable ingredients, equipment, and conditions. The aim here is simply to switch emphasis and responsibility away from law, theory, recipe, or truth as timeless, certain, or objective sites of authority, vesting it instead in statesmen, scientists, cooks, or philosophers acting reasonably in circumstances not of their own choosing. Right recipes do not guarantee good meals; well-conceived theories do not guarantee understanding. But saying so does not inhibit reasonable, informed deliberation and discrimination from playing their part in good cooking or effective action. Put another way, the strength of structuralist abstraction lies not in the simplicity and elegance of the structures themselves but in the quality of their articulation with the complex and contingent world in which they serve as guides to action.

The question of why Kenneth Waltz, though clearly much more aware than many of his contemporaries of this articulation of theory and contingency, should have allowed himself in TIP to draw back and vest excessive authority in theory per se, provides a valuable opportunity to open up these issues. It will be argued that, when carefully examined, the methodological assumptions of Waltz's TIP turn out to be mutually inconsistent. ("Methodology," frequently used to refer to the study of practical research procedures, is understood throughout Section III in its broader sense, as the general study of forms of scientific inquiry and explanation.) Is methodological incoherence an inescapable defect of structuralist theory? No, because a viable methodological basis for a systemic theory of international relations can be devised which happens to be consistent with part of Waltz's work but will serve also to bind Structural Realism much more effectively into the broader Realist tradition. This is because the methodological incoherence of Neorealism, which will first be traced to confusions in epistemology, or theory of knowledge, turns out to stem from assumptions about the relation between language and the world. And once this is made clear, and this relation restated in a way that eschews any idea of language as mirror or representation of the world, the way is open for the effective deployment of a Structural Realist approach on the lines set out in the first two Sections of this book.

Any reconciliation of this sort has implications which are bound to be viewed as costs by some and gains by others. Some of these are spelled out in what follows. Perhaps the most important is a more open awareness and acceptance of the role of rhetoric--the persuasive use of language--in what may nevertheless still claim to be a social science. The clearest expression of this rhetorical turn here will be the provision of a fresh characterization of the analogous relationship between balance of power theory and microeconomics which pervades TIP. Waltz construed this within a broadly Popperian discourse about theory, hypothesis, and confirmation; here it is reformulated as a particular instance of the use of metaphor, and none the worse for that. A neo-romantic theory of language-as-metaphor will be employed to account for the genesis of scientific explanations, to explore what has earlier been referred to as the "idealism of Realism," and to develop discussion, begun in chapter 3, of the disaggregation of state power and the vertical sectoring of the international system.

This approach will involve a critical development of Waltz's structuralist approach of a far-reaching but not wholly unsympathetic kind. It is consistent with the accounts he provides of language and of the genesis of theory, and with the developments and elaborations of Structural Realism provided in earlier chapters of this book. It has the additional advantage of offering methodological support for the positions taken on the disaggregation of power and the mutually constitutive character of structures and agents (and interacting structures) in earlier sections of our book. It also tries to provide further justification, on methodological grounds, for a less sparse theory than Waltz offered, while pointing to the practical advantages of a richer theory as a basis for empirical research and policy prescription.

It might be argued, though the task is not undertaken in this volume, that the rhetorical turn of Section III could prove compatible with a form of scientific realism, rather than with the pragmatism that lies at the heart of the Neorealist position and is retained here. The reason for hesitancy is that attempts to spell out this compatibility too easily run into philosophical quicksands. While scientific realism (a philosophical position quite unrelated in its origins to political Realism) is basically an ontological position--a view of what sorts of things there are--it inevitably throws up old epistemological questions of what is involved in identifying such things as there are through concept and language, let alone knowing anything about them. Roger Spegele, for example, with whose work we have sympathy, seems rather too trusting when he bases his "quasi-naturalistic" scientific realist theory of reference on the perceptions of a community of experts, who are able to dodge dogma, ideology, and the unconscious to find agreement on the reference of basic terms employed in discussion of international relations (Spegele 1987:203). Yet a transcendental path in the manner of Roy Bhaskar, important though it may be, seems to require a complementary empirical track to help guide and construct research. It is not at all clear what this should look like in practice.