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Where we are now

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 1985

Extract

In reviewing any set of books, it is not often that one has the pleasure of welcoming an obvious classic. There is one here: John Vasquez's The Power of Power Politics, and much of this review article will be devoted to saying why. The other books fit together with it very well. They comprise two undergraduate textbooks, by Chan and by Russett and Starr; two lively contributions from the redoubtable John Burton; and an interesting collection of papers on the inter-paradigm debate, edited and commented upon in a rather muddled way by Maghroori and Ramberg. In different ways, all the books are concerned with the same two problems. How can we explain international relations? And how should we present to students what we think we know about it?

Type
Review articles
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1985

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References

1 ‘Along the Road to International Theory’, International Journal XXXIX, 2 (1984), p. 337.Google Scholar

2 London, 1939.

3 Knorr, Klaus and Rosenau, James N. (eds) (Princeton University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

4 Harmondsworth, 1978.

5 Revised edn, New York, 1969.

6 Edited by Smith, Michael, Little, Richard and Shackleton, Michael, London, 1981.Google Scholar

7 2nd edn, New York, 1981.

8 London, 1977.

9 London, 1978.

10 London, 1984.

11 3rd edn, New Brunswick, NJ, 1981.

12 New York.

13 The term is taken from Braybrooke, David and Lindblom, Charles E., A Strategy ofDecision (London, 1963).Google Scholar As they point out, disjointed incrementalism is a response to ‘the inability of the analyst to find his way to criteria that would, in addition to meeting his own needs for a system, command agreement among his colleagues or even among a larger circle of interested people’ (p. 133).

14 The ‘wave’ metaphor is used in the well-known paper by McClelland, Charles, ‘On the Fourth Wave: Past and Future in the Study of International Systems’, pp. 1540 in Rosenau, James N., Davis, Vincent and East, Maurice A. (eds), The Analysis of International Politics (London, 1972).Google Scholar

15 For commentary and criticism see Banks, Michael (ed.), Conflict in World Society (Brighton, 1984).Google Scholar

16 Particularly as stated in the papers by all three philosophers in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan (eds), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (London, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 By Jones, Susan and Singer, J. David, and subtitled, Abstracts of Data–Based Research (Itasca, Illinois, 1972).Google Scholar A decade later Singer described this work as an attempt to record every data-based piece of research on the explanation of war that was published in the period between the Peloponnesian Wars and 1970. Noting that the total amount of such research was doubled by the further work done in the 1970s, Singer nevertheless was forced to acknowledge its ‘failure to achieve theoretical breakthrough’. See Singer, J. David and Associates, Explaining War (London, 1979), p. 14.Google Scholar Vasquez describes his work on Beyond Conjecture as follows: ‘A content analysis of the original articles produced a sample of 7,827 hypotheses. The following information was collected on these hypotheses: number of hypotheses tested in article; number of independent variables; actor, topic of inquiry, and paradigm of independent and dependent variables; name of independent and dependent variables; paradigm of hypothesis; statistics employed; significance level; strength of association. Reliability of the coded part of the data was established as 90’ (p. 176).

18 See his chapter on ‘social maps’ in The Nature of International Society (rev. edn., London, 1975).Google Scholar

19 See Mansbach, Richard W. and Vasquez, John A., In Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics (New York, 1981);Google Scholar and their ‘The Role of Issues in Global Cooperation and Conflict’, British Journal of Political Science 14, 4 (10 1984), pp. 411–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 For a powerful statement of this position see Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, Daedalus 106, 3 (Summer 1977), pp. 4160Google Scholar; see also Krippendorf, Ekkehart, ‘Review Essay’, Journal of Peace Research XIX, 3 (1982), pp. 197202;Google Scholar and the same author's International Relations as a Social Science (Brighton, 1982).Google Scholar

21 The best writings on why positivism alone cannot work are found in other disciplines, e.g. the sociologist Giddens's, Anthony chapter on ‘Positivism and its critics’ in Studies in Social and Political Theory (London, 1977), pp. 2988;Google ScholarBernstein's, Richard J. philosophical discussion in The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar; or the outstanding but little-known historical work by Nelson, Keith L. and Olin, Spencer C. Jr., Why War? Ideology, Theory and History (London, 1980).Google Scholar Against these views, an elegant defence of empiricism is offered by Nicholson's, MichaelThe Scientific Analysis of Social Behaviour (London, 1983).Google Scholar

22 London, 1978.

23 ‘The Anatomy of Futility’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 13, 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 82–5.Google Scholar

24 ‘The Ideal and the Real: Changing Concepts of the International System, 1815–1982’, International Affairs 58, 2 (Spring 1982), p. 223.Google Scholar

25 New York, p. 47.

26 Oxford.

27 In The Study of World Society: A London Perspective (Pittsburgh, International Studies Association, 1974), p. 5.Google Scholar

28 The judgement that research in the discipline should now shift from its past pseudo-empiricist basis to one of competing paradigms is shared by Hayward R. Alker Jr. and Thomas J.Biersteker, in analysing a recent survey of the reading lists used to teach international relations in leading United States universities. They call for a self–conscious mix of ideology and positivism, or as they put it: ‘major ongoing research approaches … composed from the transformative intersection of general political orientations and different cumulation-oriented epistemologies’. ‘The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a Future Archeologist of International Savoir Faire’, International Studies Quarterly 28, 2 (06 1984), p. 137.Google Scholar