establishes his laws seem highly unscientific. A key text here is in the Preface
to the second edition of
Politics Among Nations, where Morgenthau quotes
with approval a sentence of Montesquieu to the effect that the reader
should not judge the product of a lifetime’s reflection on the basis of a few
hours’ reading. This seems to run against the scientific ethos,
which holds
that seniority and breadth of experience must always take second place to the
logic and quality of an argument. If a smart undergraduate spots a genuine
flaw in the lifetime’s work of a distinguished scholar this is (or, at least, is
supposed to be) a matter for congratulation, not rebuke.
In short, the scientific claims of realism are seemingly belied by its appar-
ently unscientific methods – a point that was seized on in the 1950s and
1960s by the comparatively large number of ex-natural scientists who were
attracted to the field, especially in the United States. These people were
either former physicists with a guilty conscience over nuclear weapons, or
systems analysts employed by bodies such
as the RAND Corporation to
improve the quality of United States policy-making, especially in the area of
defence. These figures were joined by imports from the behavioural sciences,
who were attuned to a version of the social sciences that involved an
attempt to study the actual behaviour of actors rather than the meanings
they assigned to this behaviour.
The aim of the behaviouralists was to replace the ‘wisdom literature’ and
‘anecdotal’ use of history represented by Morgenthau and the traditional
realists with rigorous, systematic, scientific concepts and reasoning. There
were various dimensions to this. It might involve casting old theories in
new, rigorous forms – as with Morton Kaplan’s ‘balance of power’
models
in
System and Process in International Politics (Kaplan 1957). It might
involve generating new historical data-bases and time-series to replace the
anecdotalism of traditional diplomatic history – as in J. D. Singer and asso-
ciates’ ‘Correlates of War’ Project at Ann Arbor, Michigan (Singer
et al.
1979). It might involve the use of mathematical models for the study of
decisions – as in game theoretic work and early rational choice theory in the
hands of people such as Thomas Schelling at Harvard (Schelling 1960). Less
conventionally, it might involve the creation of new concepts that under-
mined state-centric International Relations altogether – as in the work of
social theorists such as John Burton (1972), Kenneth Boulding (1962) and
Johan Galtung (1971).
In the mid-1960s, this work generated a fierce
counter-attack on behalf of
traditional, or, as they called it, classical International Relations, led by
British scholars, in particular Hedley Bull (Bull in Knorr and Rosenau
1969); however, unlike the contest between utopianism and realism, this
debate only engaged the interests of a minority of scholars, except, perhaps,
in the United Kingdom, where an educational system still divided into
two cultures meant that the majority of International
Relations scholars
32
Understanding International Relations
were more amenable to attacks on ‘scientism’ than their North American
cousins. In practice, by the 1960s the majority of US graduate students in
International Relations (which means the majority of the future members of
the profession) were receiving training in the methods of the behavioural
sciences, and a methodology which essentially reflected this training took hold
and has not yet weakened its grip. Moreover, the traditionalists/classicists
had little to offer by way of an alternative to the behavioural revolution,
largely because their own ideas of science
and reliable knowledge were, in
practice, very close to those of the scientists. The aspirations to science of
Morgenthau and Carr have been noted, and any doctrine which claims to be
based on how things really are is obviously open to those who claim to have
a better grasp of this reality. Positivism – the belief that the facts are out
there to be discovered and that there is only one way to do this, only one
form of reliable knowledge, that generated by methods based on the natural
sciences –
reigned in both camps, and the differences were largely of style
rather than substance. Indeed the most effective critiques of behaviouralism –
until, that is, the post-positivist revolution of the late 1980s – came from the
so-called ‘post-behaviouralists’, scholars who accepted the goal of science,
but who were critical of the behaviouralists for their unwillingness to engage
with the pressing political issues of the day.
The so-called ‘behavioural revolution’ did, however, generate a number
of new ideas, and these, combined with changes in the real world, brought
about quite striking changes to International Relations theory in the 1970s.
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