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Statesmanship and the Problem of Theoretical Generalization

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Polity

Abstract

In this article we argue that in their quest for parsimony and through their denial of human agency, international relations scholars often endorse deterministic theories. The field of international relations suffers greatly for its devotion to excessive theoretical generalization. In rejecting the more pluralistic methodology of early international relations work, scholars may produce superficially valid predictive theories. Yet these theories rarely grant deep insight into why actual states behave as they do. Because of this, they provide little guidance for statesmen. While we do not advocate the complete rejection of any of the major approaches in the field, we argue that international relations scholars should reorient their work to account for the way leadership can overcome the constraints of structure. We suggest the field strive actively to embrace complexity and foster a greater epistemological modesty than it currently demonstrates.

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Notes

  1. For a discussion of the idea of scientific progress in international relations theory, see generally Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, eds., Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). An alternative perspective advancing an understanding of international relations as art more than science may be found in Chapters 2 and 3 of Donald J. Puchala, Theory and History in International Relations (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).

  2. Of course, we do not mean to say that all international relations scholars need to produce scholarship that is valuable to statesmen, but we would argue far too many scholars simultaneously deny they desire to do this while offering advice regardless. We suggest a proper understanding of international relations theory might be analogous to military planning. Although they know plans never approach reality, generals and military staffers work hard to account for various theoretical possibilities. Because it frames our minds for action, planning is analogous to theorizing; as Eisenhower once said, “Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” Cited in Charles L. Mercier, Jr., “Terrorists, WMD, and the US Army Reserve,” Parameters 27 (Autumn 1997): 113. Also see Richard N. Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Interests, Ethics and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 183–86.

  3. Fred Chernoff argues that although in some sense international relations scholars often construct their arguments in a manner that initially seems determinist, they in fact can and must render only the most probable general trends within the international system. See Fred Chernoff, Theory and Metatheory in International Relations: Concepts and Contending Accounts (New York: Palgrave, 2007), especially 38–39 and 185–88, and Chernoff, The Power of International Theory: Reforging the Link to Foreign Policy-Making through Scientific Inquiry (London: Routledge, 2005), especially 127–29 and 166–67.

  4. For one account of the relative weight those who embrace the idea of science should place on prediction versus explanation, see Stephen Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding: An Inquiry into the Aims of Science (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), especially 18–43.

  5. Against many scholars who deny the link between policy and theory in IR, Chernoff writes, “[s]ince all policy-formulation is future-directed, it is an attempt to influence what will happen in some time to come—near or distant—some connection must obtain between present actions and future outcomes.” See Chernoff, The Power of International Theory, 129–30.

  6. Kenneth Waltz, “A Response to My Critics,” in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 329.

  7. Moreover, far from presenting scholars some neutral record of fact, major historical events like these suggest often-unacknowledged difficulties. International relations scholars often mobilize schematic representations of events for highly partisan ends. Thomas W. Smith notes that “[i]n place of searching historical inquiry, we get a lawyer's brief that confuses evidence and advocacy.” See Thomas W. Smith, History and International Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 3.

  8. According to Stephen Van Evera, “[g]ood theories elucidate by simplifying. Hence a good theory is parsimonious. It uses few variables simply arranged to explain its effects. Gaining parsimony often requires some sacrifice of explanatory power, however” (emphasis in the original). Although Van Evera does warn his readers that “[i]f that sacrifice [parsimony] is too large it becomes unworthwhile,” it is unclear exactly how much complexity he or the international relations community is willing to “tolerate” in order to “explain the world.” Van Evera's work remains the gold standard for introductory political science methodology, and its emphasis on linear elegance reinforces the existing reductionist trend within the academic literature. See Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), especially 17–19. On the limits of prediction, see also Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially 16–17.

  9. For an account of how various scholars before Waltz framed their understanding of international relations, see Chapters 3 and 4 of Smith, History and International Relations, 33–91.

  10. Jeffrey W. Legro and Andrew Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” International Security 24 (Fall 1999): especially 18–22.

  11. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 18 and Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 225.

  12. For two persuasive accounts on this point, see Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War” and Paul Schroeder, “Historical Reality versus Neo-Realist Theory,” International Security 19 (Summer 1994): 108–48. On Schroeder's contribution to the critique of conventional international relations, see Smith, History and International Relations, 75–77.

  13. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 124.

  14. For an excellent example of the logic of X → Y modeling see Van Evera, Guide to Methods, 12–17. On issues regarding nonlinearity see generally Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security 17 (Winter 1992/1993): 59–90; Robert Jervis, System Effects; and Barry Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996). On problems related to the cause-effect dyad, see Walker Percy, “Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning,” The Message in the Bottle (New York: Picador, 1975): especially 161–66. For a recent study emphasizing the difficulties inherent in any predictive models, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), especially 3–22.

  15. Legro and Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” 19–22; Jervis, System Effects, 34–35.

  16. We agree with Thomas Smith that whatever their protestations, most scholars in international relations mean their work to be apropos of current events and problems—our work bears the marks not only of our time, but also of our aspirations to alter the nature of politics. See Smith, History and International Relations, 30–31.

  17. On the break between theory and policy, see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10–12, and Vincent Pouliot, “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities,” International Organization 62 (Spring 2008): 258–61.

  18. On the unintended consequences of social action, see F. A. Hayek, “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design,” Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). For some applications of this idea in international affairs, see Barry Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, 68–78 and Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42 (Summer 1988): 427–60.

  19. Here we follow Taleb's argument in The Black Swan. He writes: “The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events … . This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it)” (xx, italics in the original). More moderately, Chernoff presents an extensive account of various arguments about this issue in Chapter 5, “Prediction, Theory and Policy-making,” in The Power of International Theory, 126–71.

  20. See Paul Pierson, “Big, Slow-Moving, and … Invisible,” in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For analogous views of unanticipated and disruptive technical changes that resulted in profound political changes, see generally James Burke, Connections (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), and Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  21. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, 232.

  22. For this line of critique against Waltz, see R. Harrison Wagner, War and the State: The Theory of International Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 19–20.

  23. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, 225–38, and Waltz, Theory, 69.

  24. Legro and Moravcsik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” 18–19.

  25. Waltz, Theory, 1–17.

  26. These theories are first presented in Waltz, Man, the State, and War, especially 187–210, and are further strengthened and developed in his Theory, 116–123. A notable critic of Waltz's emphasis on micro-economic calculations and power maximizations is Alexander Wendt, who finds Waltz's assumptions unwarranted and overly simplistic. See Wendt, Social Theory, 2–3. Also see Smith, History and International Relations, 181–82.

  27. Interestingly, Waltz did author a book regarding domestic institutions and the foreign policy process. In his second book, Waltz provides a rich description of how democratic institutions influence foreign policy. Although this work does not directly contradict Waltz's claim that the systemic level provides that most predictive leverage for international political analysis, it is interesting to see such a concession to the power of non-systemic factors. See Kenneth Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experience (New York: Little Brown, 1967).

  28. Taleb, Black Swan, 220. On the ways scholars often impute theoretical motives to the policymakers, see Pouliot, “The Logic of Practicality,” 261–62, and Chernoff, Theory and Metatheory, 42–43.

  29. See generally Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

  30. See Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Gilpin, “The Theory of Hegemonic War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Spring 1988): 591–613.

  31. Michael E. Brown, Owen R. Coté, Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller, eds., Offense, Defense, and War: An International Security Reader (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004); Steven E. Miller, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Stephen Van Evera, eds., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War: An International Security Reader, rev. exp. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

  32. For this argument, see G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Barbara Koremenos, Charles Lipson and Duncan Snidal, “The Rational Design of International Institutions,” International Organization 55 (Autumn 2001): 761–99.

  33. For one relatively recent non-theoretical attempt at explaining some aspects of World War I, see Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

  34. For two suggestions along this line of reasoning that emphasize the importance of practice for theorizing, see Pouliot, “The Logic of Practicality,” especially 260–64, and Peter Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, “Eclectic Theorizing in the Study and Practice of International Relations,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, ed. Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 114.

  35. See Chapter 7 in Wendt, Social Theory, 313–69. On some other difficulties with the empirical agenda in constructivism, also see Jeffrey Checkel, “The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory,” World Politics 50 (January 1998): 324–48.

  36. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesmen Back In,” International Security 25 (Spring 2001): 145–46.

  37. On this general idea see Wendt, Social Theory, 1–44.

  38. Jervis, System Effects, 18–19, 61–73.

  39. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992): 391–425. For a lengthier version of this argument see Wendt, Social Theory, 246–312. For two examples of Agentic Constructivism in this vein, see Vincent Pouliot, “The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities,” International Organization 62 (Spring 2008): 257–88; and Antje Weiner, The Invisible Constitution of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  40. Here it may be worth noting that while some scholars rely upon notions of maximizing self-interest as the sole standard of rationality, the idea only emerged as a mode of popular justification and rhetoric in modern times. On this, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

  41. On this, see Katzenstein and Sil, “Eclectic Theorizing,” 112–13.

  42. Pouliot, “The Logic of Practicality,” 265. For an analysis of postmodern international relations that comports well with our analysis, see Chapter 7 in Smith, History and International Relations, 148–78.

  43. See Stephen M. Walt, “Rigor or Rigor Mortis: Rational Choice and Security Studies?” International Security 23 (Spring 1999): 5–48 and the debate articles in International Security 24 (Autumn 1999): 56–130. On rational choice, also see Chapter 5 in Shapiro, The Flight from Reality, 51–99.

  44. This is not to say that first- and second-image theories cannot lapse into equally deterministic styles of argument—only that structuralist scholars more often err against agency at the systemic level than competing theories do.

  45. On this, see the introduction to Richard J. Samuels, Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), especially 5–7.

  46. Waltz, Theory, 19.

  47. Waltz, Theory, 79–81.

  48. For a good critical evaluation of Waltz's theory, see Jervis, System Effects, 103–24. For two accounts of the field's reaction to Waltz's structuralism, see Legro and Moravscik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” especially 22–45, and Michael C. Desch, “Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security 23 (Summer 1998): 141–70. On conceptual “stretching,” see Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misinformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64 (December 1970): 1033–53; David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87 (December 1993): 845–55; and more generally, Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

  49. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1–5.

  50. Wendt, Social Theory, 29–30.

  51. Indeed, early in his career, Waltz admits that without directing our attention to an actual state and the individuals within it, we cannot predict any particular war. See Waltz, Man, the State, and War, 218.

  52. Waltz identifies this tendency in behaviorists, but given the more determinist trends in recent IR scholarship, it also bears on the current state of affairs. See Man, the State, and War, 58–59. Toulmin argues that “the central aims of science are … concerned with a search for understanding—a desire to make the course of Nature not just predictable but intelligible—and this has meant looking for rational patterns of connections in terms of which we can make sense of the flux of events” (Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding, 99).

  53. Alexander George observes that a “passive orientation to action” logically follows from determinism. See Alexander George, “The ‘Operational Code’: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leaders and Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly 13 (June 1969): 203.

  54. Stephen M. Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” International Security 9 (Spring 1985): 12–15.

  55. Wendt, Social Theory, 10, 135, 137–38.

  56. Wendt, Social Theory, 233–38.

  57. Waltz, Theory, 62–64. See also more generally Waltz's criticisms of first- and second-image theories in Man, the State, and War, 16–158.

  58. Jervis, System Effects, 204.

  59. Jervis, System Effects, 208 and Robert Jervis, “War and Misperception,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Spring 1988): 677–79.

  60. Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 49–50. Marx's aphorism may be found in Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Later Political Writings, trans. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32.

  61. Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations, 55–56.

  62. Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations, 200.

  63. Kenneth Waltz, “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18 (Spring 1988): 619. For similarly strong definitions of IR's role vis-à-vis other sorts of thinking, see Waltz, Theory, 67–73 and Wendt, Social Theory, 10–15. Also see Chernoff's summary of the relationship between theory and policy in Chernoff, Power of International Theory, 215 and Chernoff, Theory and Metatheory, 185–88.

  64. On the idea of studying process rather than attempting to theorize, see Desch, “Culture Clash,” 152 and 152n62.

  65. Randall Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,” International Security 19 (Summer 1994): 88–92; Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30 (January 1978): 174–6; and Wendt, Social Theory, 184–89. On the notion of culture creating a kind of inertia in ideas and actions, also see Alastair Iain Johnson, “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” International Security 19 (Spring 1995), especially 33–36.

  66. On this tendency toward reductionism in modern scholarship, perhaps the most insightful account is Alexis de Tocqueville's. Writing of historians—though it equally applies to all social scientists—he notes that “[m]ost of them attribute hardly any influence over the destinies of mankind to individuals, or over the fate of a people to the citizens. But they make great general cause responsible for the smallest particular events.” See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), 493–94.

  67. Samuels observes: “Still, a range of constraints continues to dominate our analytic lenses. We must address two questions: Are real leaders as constrained as most scholars assume? What alternatives do we have to the privileging of constraints and the discounting of choice?” Instead of the default assumption, he approaches statecraft as the “stretching of constraints”—a move that gives leadership real due (Samuels, Machiavelli's Children, 5).

  68. Byman and Pollack note that “[r]ecognizing the importance of individuals is necessary to explode one of the most pernicious and dangerous myths in the study of international relations: the cult of inevitability.” See Byman and Pollack “Let Us Now Praise Great Men,” 145.

  69. Jervis, System Effects, 40.

  70. Taleb, Black Swan, 149. For one account of the consequences of leaders taking this notion seriously, see Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

  71. Glenn Snyder, “The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics,” World Politics 36 (July 1986): 495. On how structure creates incentives to act within the normal boundaries of the system, see Waltz, Theory, 104–07.

  72. Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit,” 96–98.

  73. On this point, Alasdair MacIntyre observes that “it is an obvious truism that no institution or practice is what it is, or does what it does, independently of what anyone whatsoever thinks or feels about it. For institutions and practices are always partially, even if to differing degrees, constituted by what certain people think and feel about them.” Of course, we must acknowledge that most constructivist scholars agree with MacIntyre on this point, but where he suggests this should lead us to reevaluate our methods of studying world affairs, constructivists often view individuals as abstractions embedded in social collectives. See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?,” in his Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 263.

  74. Byman and Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men,” 134–35.

  75. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 1981), 49.

  76. Byman and Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men,” 121–25.

  77. For a relevant discussion on this topic, see Book I, Chapter 3 in Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). This disproportionate influence individuals hold on international affairs brings to mind the Duke of Wellington's description of Napoleon Bonaparte: “in short, I used to say of him [Napoleon] that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.” Cited in Philip Henry Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, 1831–1851 (Boston: Adamant Media Corporation, 2006), 9.

  78. Samuels, Machiavelli's Children, 5.

  79. On unintended consequences, see Jervis, System Effects, 61–67.

  80. One difficulty with modern scholars of all sorts lies in their tendency to embrace general rules. There is an enormous theoretical literature on problems with this. Two of the best examples include Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 5–42 and Part I of F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1979). Tocqueville also observes that in modernity “it becomes an ardent and often blind passion of the human spirit to discover common rules for everything … and to explain a group of facts by one sole cause” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 439).

  81. Andrew Bennett, “A Lakatosian Reading of Lakatos: What Can We Salvage from the Hard Core?” in Elman and Elman, eds., Progress in International Relations Theory, 455. On this point Bruce Bueno de Mesquita notes that “[d]espite the attention of such intellectual giants as Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, and Clausewitz, we know little more about international conflict today than was known to Thucydides four hundred years before Christ.” See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 2.

  82. For a sense of the divide within political science on this topic, see David Laitin, “The Political Science Discipline,” in The Evolution of Political Knowledge: Theory and Inquiry in American Politics, ed. Edward D. Mansfield and Richard Sison (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 11–40, and Ian Shapiro's response in Chapter 6 of The Flight From Reality, 204–12. Even Kenneth Waltz met with significant resistance to the research that eventually became his Man, the State, and War. According to his 2001 preface to the work, when Waltz initially approached his dissertation advisor with an outline for what would become the book, he was told that “it might be useful for a course” he could eventually teach. The dissertation appeared to hang in limbo until “many weeks later, a letter reached me in Korea saying that the tenured members of the department did not understand what I proposed to do but agreed that I should be allowed to go ahead and do it” (Waltz, Man, the State, and War, viii). For a scathing critique of the way the “ism's” fragment inquiry, see in Puchala, “Beyond the Divided Discipline,” 216–17.

  83. To cite just one example, Thomas Smith implies that great works of political thought and history serve this purpose. See Smith, History and International Relations, 26–31.

  84. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, 230–38.

  85. In writing Man, the State, and War, Waltz even suggested that political philosophy—a subfield that in many ways has become the orphan child of political science—would be a fruitful source of ideas (11–12). Until the advent of constructivism, scholars in the field largely ignored this admonition. See also Kenneth Waltz, “Political Philosophy and the Study of International Relations,” in Theoretical Aspects of International Relations, ed. William T.R. Fox (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), 51–67, and Smith, History and International Relations, 67–69.

  86. See George, “The ‘Operational Code,’” especially 190–97. Aron also emphasizes the complexity and indeterminacy of international politics. See the introduction to Aron, Peace and War, especially 1–18.

  87. Vague prescription is one of the most important issues Waltz initially warned against: “One cannot say in the abstract that for peace a country must arm, or disarm, or compromise, or stand firm. One can only say that the possible effects of all such policies must be considered.” See Waltz, Man, the State, and War, 222.

  88. It appears that in many cases statesmen use their past experiences and historical knowledge as heuristic short cuts to make decisions, not the nuanced opinions of experts or political scientists. See Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Given the difficulties intrinsic in successfully governing, one might further ask why statesmen so often write histories or books of maxims rather than theoretical accounts of international politics.

  89. One of the best brief explanations of the security dilemma is found in Snyder, “The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics,” especially 461–62.

  90. Waltz, Theory, 207–08.

  91. Jervis, “War and Misperception,” 688–89.

  92. On this, see Daryl Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially 1–6, 20–28 and 142–61.

  93. For a good account of the dangers associated with applying abstract theories to the conduct of foreign policy, see Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Establishing a Viable Human Rights Policy,” World Affairs 143 (Spring 1981): 323–34.

  94. Schweller explores the extent to which states might not work to maintain the status quo. However, his explanation largely evades extensive exploration of the role statesmen play in changing their state's “intentions.” He mentions statesmen and then moves on. See his “Bandwagoning for Profit,” especially 85–92.

  95. Here again, Tocqueville's arguments remain instructive: Scholars rarely content themselves with showing how events occur and instead, “they pride themselves on proving that they could not have happened differently … . If this doctrine of fatality, so attractive to those who write history in democratic periods, passes from authors to readers, infects the whole mass of the community, and takes possession of the public mind, it will soon paralyze the activities of modern society.” Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 496.

  96. George, “The ‘Operational Code,’” 221.

  97. Clausewitz, On War, 119. On friction's role in politics and war, see Barry Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, especially Chapters. 1, 2 and 4.

  98. For a general account of how this eclecticism might proceed, see Katzenstein and Sil, “Eclectic Theorizing,” especially 119–24. For a deeper theoretical inquiry into this notion, see Rudra Sil, “The Foundations of Eclecticism: The Epistemological Status of Agency, Culture, and Structure in Social Theory,” The Journal of Theoretical Politics 12 (2000): 353–87.

  99. For an inquiry into how this method might be pursued, see Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York: The Free Press, 1986). For an excellent book highlighting the issue of problem versus theory driven research, see also the essays in Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, ed., Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  100. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Portable Machiavelli, ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1979), 78. For Machiavelli and his humanist contemporaries, history served as a source of inspiration; it acted as a “school of prudence” and the principal method by which philosophy teaches us by example. See James Hankins, “Humanism and Modern Political Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123–24.

  101. Byman and Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men,” 113n13; Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 232.

  102. Three powerful examples of this include Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Richard N. Lebow's books The Tragic Vision and A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  103. A recent popular work that explores this is Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 2002). Some scholarly accounts include James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper, 1979); Brian Reed, “A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency,” Parameters 37 (Summer 2007): 19–30; and Robert W. Oldendick and Barbara Ann Bardes, “Mass and Elite Foreign Policy Opinions,” Public Opinion Quarterly 46 (Autumn 1982): 368–82.

  104. For one prominent example of this tendency, see Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 216–24.

  105. On this, see Wendt, Social Theory, 246–308. In a future work, we intend to more fully detail this argument, but we would emphasize the degree to which much modern international relations theory rests on a set of liberal ideas about the interests, goals, and desires of human persons. Two essential studies of the development of this liberal ideal may be found in Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978) and Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests.

  106. See generally Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Jacques Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

  107. Aron, War and Peace, 82; Wendt, Social Theory, 325–26.

  108. For a few representative examples of anthropological and psychological accounts useful for understanding issues in international relations, see Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Stephen P. Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Albert Bandura, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973); and Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

  109. MacIntyre, “Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?” 273.

  110. We are reminded of Beralde in Moliére's satire, The Imaginary Invalid, which suggests we believe in seemingly scientific approaches despite the fact that, “these opinions are pure fancies, with which we deceive ourselves. At all times, there have crept among men brilliant fancies in which we believe, because they flatter us, and because it would be well if they were true … when you test the truth of what he has promised to you, you find that it all ends in nothing; it is like those beautiful dreams which only leave you in the morning the regret of having believed in them.” See Beralde in Moliére, The Dramatic Works of Moliére, trans. Charles H. Wall (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1919), III: 447–48.

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  1. Georgetown University,

    J Furman Daniel, III

  2. Montclair State University,

    Brian Smith

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  1. J Furman Daniel, III
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We thank Gator J. Greenwill, Kimberly Hill, Robert Lieber, Gerald M. Mara, Elizabeth Mercurio, Joshua Mitchell, Jay M. Parker, Kenneth Pollack, Robert Purdy, the anonymous peer reviewers for Polity, and audience members at the Georgetown Working Group on International Security (2007), the New England Political Science Association (2008), and International Studies Association (2009) for their comments on successive versions of this effort.

Some scholars dispute the relevance of international relations theory even in modeling the Cold War. Most notable of these critics is historian John Lewis Gaddis, who claims that every major school of international relations literature failed to accurately predict the end of the Cold War. For us, the failure of the international relations community to predict the end of the Cold War is a troubling symptom of the larger flaws within the international relations community and not the disease itself. See John L. Gaddis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 17 (Winter 1992–1993): 5–58. See also the Ted Hopf and John L. Gaddis correspondence, “Getting the Cold War Wrong,” International Security 18 (Autumn 1993): 202–10. For a more complete discussion of international relations theorists’ failures in predicting or explaining the end of the Cold War see also Richard N. Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, eds., International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

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Daniel,, J., Smith, B. Statesmanship and the Problem of Theoretical Generalization. Polity 42, 156–184 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2009.13

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