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A Clash of Narrative Styles? vs. and International Relations

Andrew R. Hom University of Glasgow

Introduction Peter asked me to think about how I use history in my own work or how Politics and International Relations (PIR) relates to History. I’m still not sure about the first question,1 but what follows attempts an answer to the second based around my previous work on IR theory as a narrative enterprise (Hom 2016a, 2016b). Briefly, I argue that if we focus on the narratological aspects of both disciplines, there is not as much in the way of hard distinctions between History and PIR as is often thought. There are differences, but these are most often ones of degree or proportion in how various elements from a shared discursive toolkit are deployed. However, we can locate a more decisive disciplinary contrast in some seemingly obvious observations about how History and PIR self-consciously relate to time. This takes place over three sections. In the first, I compare the thematic and formal differences between the two and show how these do not sustain a disciplinary distinction. In the second, I do the same for how each discipline approaches the past or ‘uses history’, again highlighting exceptions to any hard core distinctions between the two. In the third and concluding section, I focus on each discipline’s self-understood vocational motivation, that is, the respective justifications for Historical or PIR research, in order to draw a more robust and durable distinction in terms of time. I argue that this distinction is what actually accounts for the other, more fluid differences and reflect briefly on the implications of temporal orientation for both History and PIR.

1 The first question is in fact an uncomfortable one for me because I often worry that I have cherry- picked historical illustrations in my own work on security and time. So perhaps no surprise that the second one gets the attention below.

1 Narrative themes and forms in History and PIR At first blush, the forms of presentation, argumentation, and justification in History and PIR are quite different. There is little apparent similarities between, say, the lengthy twists and turns of a political biography (Jenkins 2002) or a ‘bromance’ history of the between great powers (Gill 2013; Robb 2013), the tragic miscalculations, secrecy, and general fog that tinges a historical explanation of (Tuchman 2014), or the huge sweep and dizzying contours of a macrohistorical/longue durée account of the past (Braudel 1996), on the one hand; and the tersely stated conditions and outcomes of a nomothetic covering (see Ray 2009:144), the mathematical elegance of a statistically significant finding (see Singer 2002:86), or the rigorous tree and branch logic of a game theoretic or rational choice model (see Snidal 2004), on the other.2 Of course, a lot of qualitative, historically-minded, and ‘thick’ descriptive work in PIR blurs any distinction between historical and social scientific work (e.g. Hall 1999; Lawson 2006; Steele 2008). However, for the purposes of establishing a ‘hard case’, I’d like to focus on the purported underlaps between History as a narrative mode and PIR as a theoretical one, for I think that this seemingly wide gap collapses if we take the thematic or rhetorical and the formal aspects of narrative seriously.

Themes and At least since Hayden White (1975), and more likely long before, History and especially has taken the question of the rhetorical or synoptic theme of an account and the political position that it implies seriously. We might think of this as the ‘dramatic’ dimension of Historical explanations. For example, to meet their basic function of rendering intelligible and even logical the underlying ‘course of events’ (Trachtenberg 2006:27) regularly employ ironic or tragic reversals of fortune via unintended consequences (Tuchman 2014). Or they may chronicle the cynical personal or particular ambitions that end up influencing international politics. Or they may invoke cyclical metaphors to explain the rise and falls of historical agents or social systems (see Lemon 2003). And of course there is a whole category that has fallen out of favour, ‘Whig’ history, which propounds a ‘presentist’ logic in which past events make sense primarily in how they necessarily drive states of affairs toward the current condition. If we replace ‘current condition’ with ‘future end ’, then we have the similarly suspect of history as teleology.

2 There also tends to be drastically different word counts attending this split; for example, compare (Jackson 2013) in History with (Schuessler 2015) in PIR, although cf. (Lebow 2008).

2 In PIR, covering , decision trees, and statistical tests do not typically manifest such themes openly. Yet PIR is hard to imagine without them. To excise tragedy and unintended consequences, we would have to do without most of classical realism and its contemporary ‘willful’ or ‘reflexive’ variants (Morgenthau 1945, 1948; Lebow 2003; Williams 2005; Hom and Steele 2010), as well as benchmark neorealist accounts of the tragic effects of systemic constraints (Mearsheimer 2001). We would also need different ways to signify the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and other collective action problems (Hardin 1968; Olson 1974). Neorealists would be left without resort to the metaphor of cycles in making sense of international trends (Gilpin 1981), as would power transition (Lemke 1997) and ‘long-wave’ (Boswell and Sweat 1991) theorists of war. Eliminate cynical ambition or political conflicts before the water’s edge, and theories of war based on deceit (Schuessler 2015) or diversion (Tir 2010), important facets of rational choice theory (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow 2005), and parts of bureaucratic politics (Allison 1969) and institutional pathology accounts (Pierson 2004; Fioretos 2011) also drop out. Elsewhere, critical PIR scholars have for some time decried the Whiggish pretensions of much theory – although in PIR this most often falls under the label ‘presentism’ – which either takes current arrangements as a self-sufficient slice from which to generalize across time, as in neorealism (Waltz 1979), or reduces the past to under-laborer for the present, as in modern IPE (see Blaney and Inayatullah 2010), theories of political development (Fukuyama 2006, 2012) and modernization theory (see Latham 2000; Gilman 2007). These latter themes can also complement teleological themes (Wendt 2003; see Heydebrand 2003), even if it is not always clear whether we have realized the telos in the present or must await a guaranteed future (e.g. see Russett 1993; Owen 1994; Spiro 1994). So although not as self-consciously or self-confidently narrative in their practice, PIR scholars still rely heavily on narrative tropes quite similiar to History. These overlaps mimic the similarities between History and PIR in terms of political positionality or ideological bias. Without delving too deeply into this, I hope it will suffice for now to note that White’s account of the four ideologies of History maps fairly cleanly onto PIR. He has History expressing the political ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, or . Much of domestic , I suspect, falls into the liberal camp.3 In IR the terms do not reflect domestic political affiliations, yet some years ago Martin Wight (1966, cf. 2005) noted that most international theory fell into realist, liberal, or revolutionary camps. Realism is often viewed as the ‘conservative’ view of international affairs insofar as it imputes

3 At least, each time that a poll or survey is taken, political scientists’ political leanings support this.

3 transhistorical truths about power (Morgenthau 1946) or pitiless structural constraints on state action (Waltz 1979). Liberalism maps most closely, while radicalism and revolutionism have clear affinities. Finally, in IR anarchy usually expresses a basic ontological presupposition about international politics.4 As one final bit of evidence about the ideological inflection of PIR, it’s worth pointing out that in the past decade or so critical scholars have begun to call out the implicit political and ideological bias of putatively ‘objective’ and rigorous scholarship in PIR (Linklater 1990), most notably the democratic thesis (Oren 2003; Steele 2007; Ish-Shalom 2013).5 It is issues like these that also underpin the critical IR move toward autoethnographic disclosure and reflection (see Bleiker and Brigg 2010a, 2010b) as part and parcel of a systematic (Jackson 2011:156–87) and/or ethically reflexive (Amoureux 2015) .6

Non-narrative forms? Yet it can be argued that, even if rigorous social science in PIR serves organizing themes or tropes identifiable as narrative devices, the manner of explanation pursued by PIR scholars differs so drastically from historians as to render the aforementioned connections irrelevant. What have explanatory devices like covering laws to do with historical narrative, which sits much closer to literature in terms of form and substantive content?7 Quite a bit, I would argue. Although the level of detail and number of twists, turns, and developments accommodated in a history far exceeds the capacities of social scientific explanations, this does not mean that the latter do not deploy some narrative structure and content. In other words, much like historical narratives, even rigorously ‘theoretical’ propositions like covering laws propound a world of action or a ‘“field of occurrence”’ (Carr 1986:23) by ‘unfolding’ an intelligible sequence (see Ricoeur 1984:3) in their own stark way, which relies on implicit claims about time and history. By invoking a necessary connection between its cause and effect, the covering law model unfolds an absolute rather than a contingent or probabilistic succession applicable to chronologically near or distant events.

4 Although there are calls to reappraise anarchy as an interpretive costruct or a contingent empirical condition. For instance, some view the international system as heteronomous (Onuf 2012:206–218) or hierarchical (Lake 2009; Goddard and Nexon 2016) rather than a flat and homogenized anarchy. 5 In the case of democratic peace research, whether due to funding, prestige, or a truly recalcitrant idealism in the American academy, such reflexive monitoring is a matter of continuous pruning, see (Barkawi 2015). 6 Of course, since well before these movements, feminist scholars have labored to unpack the numerous gendered facets of (international) politics (Tickner 1992; Weber 1999). 7 This is not meant to lodge an arch-postmodernist claim about history as a genre of fiction; only to point out that in terms of plot and character development, attention to detail, and the like, history reads more like literature than most PIR theories.

4 Wherever and whenever the law covers, cause [A] leads exclusively and without deviation to effect [B]. This is an admittedly sparse formulation, but nevertheless a narrative of sorts insofar as it provides an account of some puzzling or important event, [B], that shows how [B] came about (as a result of [A]) and thus renders it more familiar. In a covering law explanation, ‘A entails B’, and all the relevant details in this very short story arc construct an exceedingly well-ordered and intelligible system imbued with ‘necessary consequences’, or a ‘predetermined order of succession’,8 which at the limit is absolute. In this sense, a covering law model unfolds a ‘point-like’ or quasi-punctual narrative sequence, potentially subsuming vast stretches of chronological time and numerous changes in its vacant middle. ‘If A, then B’ easily gives the impression the [B] immediately follows [A], and this quasi-punctual relationship, I would argue, does significant work in rendering [B] more intelligible and perhaps less problematic.9 The putative distinction of great difference between historical and nomothetic explanations does not hold in the other direction, either. Although historical explanations often get diametrically juxtaposed with covering laws as a matter of ideographic vs. nomothetic deduction, zoom in far enough and even the most ideographic, detailed historical explanation relies on covering laws. All historical explanations—and indeed all narratives that do not represent the world in 1:1 scale—rely on the assumption that some connections are so regular, law-like, foreseeable, or simply familiar as to be intuitive. In other words, tiny covering laws or ‘microcorrelations’ underwrite the intelligibility of historical sequences at every point where connections are considered intuitive or commonsensical enough not to warrant elaboration and explanation (Aristotle 1932:1456b; George and Bennett 2004:227– 28).10 For example, in an explanation of political violence, I will not need to explain how a gunshot kills someone (aim; bullet calibre, trajectory, velocity, and angle of impact; skull density; haemorrhaging; etc.)—I can simply say that someone was shot dead and go on to explicate the political motivations or consequences of this act.11 When she declines to

8 (Entail, N. 2012, Entail, v. 2012). 9 Punctuality connotes both a ‘precise’ and ‘finite point’ with no extension and the ‘precise observance of a rule’, both of which comport well with the deductive-nomothetic in that as events become shorter and shorter or more ‘microscopic’, the laws that cover them become ‘“correspondingly more certain”’ (George and Bennett 2004:228). Although for some (Fearon 1995), this relationship suggests that the D-N form is feasible only for phenomena—e.g. the immediate run-up to war—that are too brief to helpfully illuminate the causal dynamics of large-scaled phenomena. 10 This point complements the argument that ‘even simplest literary narrative engages at some level the problem of causation’ (Malchow 2015:4, also 6). 11 Hempel (1965:422–23) maintained that even simple concrete events ‘posses an infinity of physical, chemical, biological, sociological, and yet other aspects and thus resist … complete description and a fortiori, a

5 explicate or explicitly emplot connections considered intuitively plausible, the narrator effectively skips over some parts of the events in question, which silently invokes the quasi- punctual temporal power of a covering law or a ‘constant conjunction’. This means that in the guts of a historical explanation that may indeed accommodate many more confounding, complex, and unprecedented changes than its ‘scientific’ or ‘theoretical’ competitors, nomothetic emplotment is hard at work in the service of a story arc unfolding in an intelligible sequence.12 So in terms of form as well as rhetorical themes, the distance between History and PIR is not as great as it would seem, or some would have it (e.g. Lake 2011:466, 474). Although the narrative devices – or better the degree or extent to which a particular explanation in History or PIR makes use of them – will vary, at times drastically, between historical and social scientific explanations, this does not deny their identity as narrative ways of knowing (Suganami 1999, 2008). Indeed, each sort of explanation discussed makes some strange, confounding, or surprising aspect of lived experience (whether past or present) more intelligible by unfolding a less strange trajectory of events (whether sparsely or richly populated) such that the chronological conclusion is also a sort of hermeneutical fulfillment and what leads to that conclusion makes it ‘seem to arrive by design’ (Ricoeur 1984:43) or ‘as a matter of course’ so that it is ‘not quite so hard to understand (Trachtenberg 2006:24, 27). In this sense, each fulfills the basic narrative function of ‘intelligibilifying’ (Suganami 1999; see also Trachtenberg 2006:23) lived experience and saying something about how we might go on in the world (Carr 1986). Furthermore, in the way that they pick out or construct certain changes, events, actors, and processes as important and then arrange these in an sequence that makes sense, each replaces or resolves the ‘chaos’ and ‘welter’ of lived time with a more orderly and comprehensible ‘temporality’ (Ricoeur 1984; Carr 1986; Hom 2016b).13

complete explanation’. Although he was highlighting the difficulty of using covering laws to explain concrete events, this also explicates why, in the face of a potential multitude of detail, historical narratives can only engage some empirical data by skipping over other, more obvious connections. 12 However, none of this indicates that historical narratives are reducible to a series of covering laws—for one thing, an explicit covering law is all necessity and no volition or chance (Suganami 2008:334 n11). For a somewhat parallel argument that co-constitution is actually the ‘theme and central subject of historical narrative’, see (Onuf 2012:42). 13 As noted earlier, this discussion omits a large portion of PIR that occupies the middle ground between historical and ‘scientific/theoretic’ modes of explanation. For example, much ‘interpretivist’ work in PIR flirts with Collingwood’s (1994) ‘idea of history’. His line was that all a historian can do is put themselves in the place of the historical agent and then ‘rethink’ their decision process in a way that makes sense of the course of action actually chosen (see Trachtenberg 2006:4–5). Although contemporary interpretivists would likely not buy the exclusive merit of such an exercise, there is something of Collingwood’s approach in their efforts to reconstruct the meanings and positionality of agents in order to track how different meanings (especially with regard to ostensibly fixed entities) influence actions and outcomes (e.g. see Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006; Lynch 2014). This seems to me like a difference of degree between interpretivist PIR and an influential philosophy of

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The uses of history The previous point opens up two related questions about how History and PIR related to history as the past, and time in general. Here I outline why I think the matter of history is yet another red herring, much like the distinctions without difference already discussed. In the conclusion I will try to show that the matter of time actually points to a more important distinction that may account for much of the differences that are so apparent between History and PIR works. Thanks to its thriving historiographical sub-field, History displays much greater reflection – in terms of both quantity and quality – than PIR on the matter of how scholarship relates to the past. I have already mentioned Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and David Carr, to which we could add Reinhart Koselleck (Koselleck 2002), Paul Veyne (Veyne 1984), Francois Hartog (Hartog 2015), and Constantin Fasolt (Fasolt 2004), among others. There is not room here to get into this substantial literature, especially since I am coming at this from the PIR side of things. Instead, I would like to highlight two prominent texts on the use of history as a representative sample of how PIR approaches the past. In his work on taking the temporal aspects of politics much more seriously, Paul Pierson (2004:4–6) outlines three uses of the past most prevalent in PIR (in Pierson, more P than IR):

1) ‘[H]istory as the study of the past’, which he describes as what most historians actually do: closely studying past events and processes in order to understand and explain why they turned out the way the did. Notably, Pierson (2004:4–5) positions this as something of a minority or not especially scientific trend in PIR because, internal merits aside, it can be very difficult for such studies to ‘travel’ across cases or support useful generalizations. 2) ‘[H] istory as the hunt for illustrative material’, in which social scientists ‘comb the past for examples’ of their theoretical propositions. Pierson (2004:5) calls out rational choice theorists here for treating the past like a bin from which to pick out ‘credible commitment mechanisms and solutions to a particular class of collective action problems’.14

History—although I’m not sure whether PIR interpretivists would agree and, if they did, whether they would mind much. 14 On this, see also (Malchow 2015:2, 5).

7 3) ‘[H]istory as a site for generating more cases’, an even more damning abuse of the past than (2). In this case, social scientists deploy past ‘events’ as unproblematic data points that can be treated in the same way as contemporary evidence. Put differently, the past is simply a way to increase the ‘population’ of quasi- experimental test subjects or the property space in which to assess a proposition. In this view, which is closely allied with frequentist statistics’ ‘general linear model’ of social reality (Abbott 2001:37–63), the past is not even a legitimate ‘prologue’ in any sense of preparing the ground for the present; rather, it is functionally indistinguishable from the present15 and an unproblematic index of the probability of a future event.

This is not a particularly flattering portrait of PIR’s relationship to history. Nor is Pierson’s (2004:5–6) further point that even where certain corners of PIR have taken a more earnest ‘historical turn’ of the first type, this has not resulted in much PIR work that actually takes the idea that ‘social life unfolds over time’ as a serious ontological starting point for social scientific theorizing. Marc Trachtenberg’s Craft of International History, written for historians but also with a strong inflection toward PIR, provides something of a riposte to Pierson, albeit an oblique one. Trachtenberg (2006:1–29) tracks the evolution of in historiography, from Hempel’s covering law ideal through Collingwood’s ‘idea of history’ and the radical constructivist turn in which history becomes indistinguishable from fiction (and relativism looms), eventually concluding that none of these historiographical proposals makes as much sense for what historians and historically sensitive PIR scholars actually do. Rather, Trachtenberg proposes that a balanced reading of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions not only describes natural science (and by implication, social science) but also the craft of History. Trachtenberg (2006:24) pulls out from Kuhn’s work and the ensuing debate the that theories are indispensable not only to explanation but to exploratory research in the first place – since it is a theory that allows us to discern patterns within which ‘data’ become apprehensible against ‘noise’ of experience. He also highlights the idea that significant changes in theory, argument, and disciplinary trends depend on the collective of an intersubjective community of judgment rather than some objective truth

15 There may be an interesting connection here between arch-neopositivist PIR and the view of time often attributed to ‘ancients’ or ‘pre-moderns’, namely that they understand ancestors and past events as neither dead nor gone nor in any important way ‘passed’ but rather as very much a part of the continually unfolding present (Shaw 2008:110, 74).

8 conditions or criteria ‘out there’ in the empirical world, which can be located by recounting the past ‘as it really happened’ (see also Malchow 2015:3 citing Ranke). Combining these two explorations of how PIR scholars and historians approach the past, what I think is notable is, once again, how little distance there seems to be between History and PIR on the issue. Pierson has PIR scholars taking one of three approaches, inclusive of a ‘properly’ historical approach, to the past. Trachtenberg has the historical field turning to , from which PIR usually draws its scientific inspiration, after philosophy of history fails to provide a coherent and working understanding of how Historical scholars should understand their craft. This is not to say there are no identifiable or significant differences between History and PIR on the issue of how to relate to the past. For one thing, it is hard to imagine most historians brooking the sort of naked instrumentalization of past events found in, say, the Correlates of War databasing project (Singer and Diehl 1990), where years are qualitatively indistinct from state relations (hence the datum of ‘dyad- year’);16 or even the disconnected use of historical illustrations that many PIR scholars – myself included – are known to employ to flesh out or empirically authorize a theoretical argument. And yet, History has had its own nomothetic and quantitative turns (see Klein and Stockley 2009) as well, so both the differences and the similarities between History and PIR seem to be matters of degree and to vary on a case-by-case basis rather than some distinction indexed to the disciplinary boundary between the two.

Conclusion: Disciplinary metanarratives and their relationship to time So what gives, then? History and PIR often produce manifestly different modes of argumentation and presentation, yet the foregoing discussion suggests that these variances cannot be reliably pegged to disciplinary distinctions on their own and that both sides draw from the same bag of narrative tricks – albeit to varying degrees. Finally, it shows that PIR sometimes does and sometimes does not take history (as the past and as a method) seriously while History itself has turned to the same philosophical foundations as much of PIR and further dabbled in the areas that supposedly render PIR ‘ahistorical’ or unable to deal with or account for time. What, then, is the upshot of the differences in how History and PIR make sense of human affairs? I want to conclude by proposing that these differences actually are a matter of how each discipline relates to time itself, and that we can see this by turning to the vocational

16 See .

9 metanarratives that inform and direct each. By ‘vocational metanarrative’ I mean the purposive story that History or PIR tells itself about why scholars do what they do, that is, each discipline’s self-understood raison d’etre. Put simply, History most often presents itself as a discipline concerned to understand the past because the past is worth understanding, or, occasionally, because doing so may shed some light or provide some traction on current dilemmas. It is a primarily backward looking discipline in terms of time, and contentedly so – especially in the contextualist or Skinnerian/Oakeshottian tradition of pursing historical knowledge for its own sake (Skinner 2002; Oakeshott 2015:82). This point, the History proposes to study the past to understand it, seems almost trite, but I think it has important effects that come into sharp relief once we contrast it with PIR. For the moment, however, by way of confirming this rendering of History’s vocational self-identity, it’s worth noting that although some Historians may claim that the point of studying the past is because it ‘repeats itself’ and thus we can learn to avoid past mistakes and maybe produce better outcomes by studying it, more often the claim would be something like ‘the past doesn’t repeat, but it does echo or rhyme’ – a small but significant shift, again when compared with PIR. In PIR, the meta-story is quite different. Across a range of approaches, theories, methodologies, and findings, PIR self-identifies with a more interventionist account of understanding how the world works in order to better foretell the future and thus contribute to its improvement (or at least the amelioration of future ills). For many neopositivist PIR scholars, accurate prediction marks a gold standard of any social science (Schrodt 2011:1), and its true value is to allow us to ‘engineer the future to produce happier outcomes’ (Bueno de Mesquita 2009:xx emphasis added). Even for scholars skeptical of prediction and control, PIR involves generating sound knowledge (by whatever chosen criteria) in order to better understand political structures and thus highlight ways in which they might be progressively transformed (Linklater 1998) or at least prevented from (re-)producing horrible outcomes (Levine 2012). Finally, even scholars who have little explicit to say about how the future could or should go take as their mission the task of using scholarship to speak up for the marginalized, the disenfranchised or ritually abused (or to give them their own voice as much as possible, see Daigle 2015). Regardless of where along this spectrum of scholarly intervention PIR falls, then, its vocational commitment is not as much to developing knowledge about the past (optional) as to making knowledge relevant to the present (mandatory) and perhaps useful in the future (preferable).

10 In terms of time, then, PIR explicitly faces forward, and only turns back in order to see further or more clearly in the other direction (e.g. Malchow 2015:12). It not only develops theories of action (which History also does), it proposes programs of action or understands itself as a form of action in its own right.17 Although hypertrophied, the quote about ‘engineering the future’ above gets to this key distinction between PIR and History. Where History may or may not say something about the present and future – based on its findings about the past – in a fairly pragmatic and contingent fashion (echoes and rhymes don’t guarantee that we will carry the tune), as a social science PIR is tethered to its roots in social experiments and colonial administration (Schmidt 1998; Vitalis 2010). That is, PIR is about using knowledge to do things, to make something happen that might not otherwise happen, all of which is to say it is about changing or ensuring the course of events in a way not dissimilar to engineering.18 None of these distinctions prevent History from laying claim to such present- and future-oriented benefits. The key distinction, however, in the two disciplines’ metanarrative relationship to time is that PIR’s baseline, so to speak, is interventionary or forward-involved, whereas History is more backward-detached. PIR scholars are expected to forecast, predict, or at least elucidate the present and future implications of their research. We can see this in the chronic American PIR anxieties about whether scholarship is ‘ relevant’ and ‘useful’ enough (Nincic and Lepgold 2000; Nye 2008) as well as the growing fashion in the UK for ‘impact agendas’, both trends confirming the engineering metaphor.19 By contrast, it would not be unusual at all to introduce a historical study by delineating the importance of its focal events for past arrangements or by calling out its internal puzzles as ends in their own right. My reading is that such an introduction would be much more conspicuous and a difficult sell in PIR.20 Forcing itself to face the present and future has huge implications for PIR and may even account for its differences with History. Consider how important the promise of

17 For an example of the latter point, the opening line of (Sjoberg 2015) is, ‘My scholarship is a politics.’ 18 Perhaps the Historical analog in this metaphor is architecture. 19 Furthermore, much as it is presupposed that engineering students don’t study physics so they can apply their knowledge to make bridges fail, ‘impact’ and ‘relevance’ agendas tend to be resolutely myopic in their progressive interpretation of the impact and relevance of social science on wider society. For example, they never seem to include the huge policy relevance of social Darwinism or deepseated racism in social theory, Nietzsche’s or Heidegger’s impact on Nazi , or democratic peace theorists’ ongoing impact in the present-day . Then again, I suspect that engineering programs do not trumpet their societal impact in terms of their graduates who become violent extremists either (see Berreby 2010). 20 The closest equivalent may be scholars outraged at current or recently passed events who seek to understand how we got into this mess (e.g. Steele 2007), but even here the purpose is to explicate present affairs rather than affairs that may be long gone.

11 prediction, intervention, and control was to the unprecedented funding boom in American social science research during the – would social scientists have gotten as much money not promising to deduce when the Soviets were most likely to launch a first strike nuclear attack, or what force ratios were most efficient and effective in a future conventional exchange (Kaplan 1991; Wang 1999; Solovey 2014)? Would RAND and any number of other defense-oriented research have been born and thrived by insisting on studying the past for its own sake? Would politicians have been so financially indulgent of political scientists if they weren’t hearing seductive murmurs about better electioneering or reliable ways to cut spending, institute social change, or reduce some social ailment? If the answer to these counterfactuals is ‘yes’, then why did History not enjoy similar levels of funding largesse? By facing the present and the future for the purposes of prediction and/or intervention, however, PIR’s engineering qualities push it towards the sort of nomothetic, sparse, or overly rationalized explanations and theories that distinguish it from History. If I want to understand the past for its own sake, then detail, contingency, and complexity are potential assets. If I want to know how best to produce an outcome now or in the future, then such qualities are self-evidently less helpful, just as a recipe that details molecular gastronomy is no more effective and almost certainly less efficient at helping me get dinner cooked. This inclination, drawn from its disciplinary metanarrative, is why PIR must worry about whether even systematic and rigorously authorized knowledge claims ‘travel’ across particular cases (see above).21 It is what authorizes and encourages PIR scholars to strip away context, contingency, and complexity in order to arrive at a properly ‘scientific’ or ‘theoretical’ account that looks very different from a historical account. It is also what allows conventional scholars to criticize interpretivist, postmodern or poststructrual, and discourse-analytical or ethnographic work as ‘non-scientific’ or too ‘humanistic’. As an extreme example, we might look at how reticent American IR has been to take up securitization theory (Wæver 1995; Guzzini 2011; Christou and Adamides 2013) – which has much to recommend it in terms of intuitive appeal, ample discursive evidence (e.g. US season 2016 or the ongoing European refugee debate), and for rendering the peculiar imbalance of security politics more intelligible – on fairly arid and abstruse methodological grounds or on reductivist claims about parsimony.22 Securitization

21 On this, see also (McIntosh 2015; Hom 2016b). 22 For an excellent recent online discussion of this marginalization, see (Van Rythoven and Hayes 2015) and eleven follow-up pieces.

12 theory holds the potential to tell us much about why past security politics unfolded the way they did, but because it is less obvious how it might result in generalizations productive of predictions and thereby future action, it remains marginalized across much of the American academy. The irony of all these effects is that PIR’s relationship to time often means that its scholarship strips away the temporal context from its data in pursuit of engineering diagrams or cookbook recipes of social action.23 This process, understood as ‘method’, and its effects, understood as ‘modes of explanation’, accounts for much of the distinctions without differences between PIR and History. Better yet, it accounts for the different levels or degrees of narrative employed in each particular intellectual admixture to make sense of the world. If this is the case, then I think the decisive questions, and they are open ones, are: which approach is more coherent on its own vocational terms and practically useful in general? I am unsure about which discipline the latter criterion would favor – and if we take the double-hermeneutic and subject-object contamination seriously, then it may be that we first require a much more robust idea of what would count as ‘practically useful’. However, in terms of vocational coherence, history mops the floor with PIR. This is in part because its temporal ‘degree of difficulty’ is lower: it must make sense of the past but not necessarily produce something in the present or future, and History has indeed shed light on many corners of past experience. But it is also because PIR has failed on its own vocational terms so decisively and for so long: despite substantial funding and decades of work, politics (and especially international politics) remains a pretty nasty and brutish domain. One wonders whether it would have been better if all of the ‘great debates’ within PIR had turned out differently: realists over idealist, classicists over behavioralists, postpostivists over scientists. I have little optimism that this would necessarily produce a ‘better world’ or a more comprehensible political situation, but I do believe it would have produced a more intelligible, coherent, and sensible disciplinary terrain in which PIR scholars could operate.

23 A second order irony of these dynamics is that, having received huge sums of money to accomplish prediction and control via reliable generalizations or covering laws and, for the most part, failed to do so (Gutting 2012; see also Lederman 2012; Singled out 2013), one factor that may have saved PIR from the auditor’s cut is that it has received too much money to simply throw on the scrap heap. If so, then it is not only the banks that are too big to fail. Alternatively, PIR advocates mobilized a form of ‘narrative lock-in’, in which having failed as a discipline to produce their promised results, they argued that the reason for this is that they in fact needed more time and money (which would presumably have been their conclusion if they had delivered the promised results as well, hence ‘narrative lock-in’).

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