Political Theory and the Functions of Intellectual History: a Response to Emmanuel Navon

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Review of International Studies (2003), 29, 151–160 Copyright © British International Studies Association DOI: 10.1017/S026021050300010X Political theory and the functions of intellectual history: a response to Emmanuel Navon

DUNCAN S. A. BELL*

Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion, and the luck of writers prove to be the most powerful thing in the world.1

Introduction

In his recent article Emmanuel Navon offers a scathing critique of the so-called ‘Third Debate’ in International Relations (IR). In short, he argues that the issues that he considers to have infused and shaped the ‘first debate’ (clashing visions of human nature) and the ‘second debate’ (clashing visions of knowledge) remain pertinent, indeed central to IR theory. He thus seeks to challenge the ‘very relevance’ of the ‘third debate’, claiming that it is chimerical, composed of hollow postmodernist rhetoric and the re-hashed ideas of constructivism.2 In this brief reply I challenge these assertions, and in so doing offer a broad defence of an alternative mode of historical interpretation. Firstly, I argue that Navon employs a problematic approach to intellectual history and that consequently he misconceives the evolutionary trajectory of the discipline, and the nature of the purported ‘debates’. The critique is then widened into a general defence of interpretative contextualism: this hermeneutic method is of great utility in furthering IR’s disciplinary self-understanding, and, perhaps more importantly, it can help to further enrich contemporary theoretical discourse. In the final section I criticise briefly Navon’s inaccurate view of recent IR and in particular his cavalier caricatures of constructivism and postmodernism.

* I would like to thank the following (in no particular order) for reading earlier drafts of this essay and/or for discussing the issues raised in it: Istvan Hont, Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, Marc Stears, Casper Sylvest, Ian Hall, Charles Jones, Mike Boyle, Maria Neophytou and the editors of the Review. All the usual disclaimers apply. 1 William Golding, Nobel Lecture, http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1983/golding-lecture.html 2 Emmanuel Navon, ‘The “Third Debate” revisited’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 611–27; quotation at p. 611. 151 152 Duncan S. A. Bell

Before proceeding, I would stress my agreement with Navon on a number of points. Foremost amongst them is the need for IR to engage more systematically with history, and in particular the history of political thought (hereafter HPT).3 We cannot understand where we are today without a comprehensive appreciation of how we got here, of the ideas, practices and institutions that have shaped the world and our relationship to it.4 Indeed, it can be argued that IR is currently witnessing the dawn of a ‘historiographical turn’, albeit faint and partially obscured from main- stream view.5 Furthermore, IR theorists should be deeply concerned with philosophical questions pertaining to rationality, knowledge and ‘human nature’. Finally, Navon is correct to argue that the critique of rationalism does not necessarily imply the rejection of political realism6 (or indeed an endorsement of constructivism or postmodernism).

Great debates?

Before moving to the specific question of the ‘debates’, it is first necessary to challenge Navon’s problematic approach to intellectual history. His rudimentary survey of the history of philosophy serves to conceal more than it exposes; and the schematic, disembodied method he utilises is today widely regarded as obsolete.7 In place of the ‘perennial questions’ approach to philosophy, supposedly elucidated in the sacred canon of Western thought, a far more plausible hermeneutic method to adopt is a form of linguistic contextualism. Here it is necessary to exercise some caution, as there is a danger that such a method could be misunderstood (or read too narrowly).8 The best-known exponent of contextualism is Quentin Skinner, who argues that in order to grasp the meaning of an utterance it is necessary first to situate it in the linguistic context(s) in which it was fashioned originally.9 Skinner’s own methodology is derived from a complex and sometimes unstable mixture of analytic philosophy of language, R. G. Collingwood’s Hegelian-inspired idealism,

3 For the sake of concision I refer throughout to HPT, although the arguments apply to any form of intellectual history. 4 I examine some of these issues in Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27 (2002). 5 As explored in Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 115–26. 6 It is debateable, however, whether many people would make this claim (except in relation to über- rationalist neorealism). See Alistair Murray, Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997) and Roger Spegele, Political Realism in International Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 David Runciman, ‘History of Political Thought: State of the Discipline’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 3 (2001), pp. 84–104. 8 Gerald Holden has recently provided a useful summary of IR misinterpretations of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, and argued that employing his ideas could be useful for IR’s disciplinary history; however, it is noticeable that Holden does not engage other related modes of contextualism. Holden, ‘Who Contextualises the Contextualisers? Disciplinary History and the Discourse about IR Discourse’, Review of International Studies, 28 (2002), pp. 253–79. 9 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Skinner, ‘From Hume’s Intentions to Deconstruction and Back’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 4 (1996), pp. 142–54; and James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Oxford: Polity, 1987). A response to Emmanuel Navon 153 and (late) Wittgensteinian insights.10 However, although he has provided the most systematic articulation of the contextualist creed (as well as the most cogent critique of previous forms of HPT interpretation), not all contextualists are Skinnerian.11 What binds contextualists together, if anything, is the general distrust of older modes of historical interpretation (for example, Namierite or Straussian) rather than one strict methodology for transcending them. While not all contextualists would agree therefore with Skinner’s speciﬁc philosophical stance, the general thrust of his project – which is to say the historicisation of political thought and the attempt to locate texts within their original terms of reference – is central to contextualism as a broad approach. For contextualists, it is dangerous to strip texts from their multiple idea-environ- ments, for in so doing their meaning can be lost, or distorted beyond recognition. With Hobbes, for example: Unless we are prepared to ask what Hobbes is doing in Leviathan, and to seek the answers by relating his work to the prevailing conventions of political argument at the time, we can never hope to elucidate the precise character of his counter-revolutionary theory of political obligation, nor can we hope to understand the precise role of his epistemology in relation to his political thought.12 In placing Hobbes in context(s), the simplistic interpretation of him as a realist avatar – so common in the IR literature – is disrupted by a more nuanced, rounded understanding of his thought.13 Instead of contextualism, Navon deploys what we may call a ‘textualist’ methodology. The textualist approaches canonical works in order to uncover ageless wisdom presented in answer to eternal questions, whether they concern the nature of the state, justice, or human behaviour. In order to answer the prelapsarian question ‘what way is best to live?’ the textualist would dutifully produce her well-thumbed copy of the Republic,ofLeviathan and of A Theory of Justice in order to compare and contrast the respective answers therein. This is the resolutely non-historical method that Navon utilises, with one anomalous exception (on which see the fourth Section below).

10 Methodological criticisms of Skinner usually orbit around (1) his conception of ‘intention’, (2) the ontological status – and potential scope of – a linguistic context, and (3) analytic speech act theory. Samples can be found in Tully, Meaning and Context and Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Cf. Skinner, ‘A Reply to My Critics’, in Tully, Meaning and Context, pp. 231–59, and Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1. 11 Other related forms of contextualism are explored in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Introduction: the State of the Art’, in his Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Dunn, ‘The History of Political Theory,’ in Dunn, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Dario Castiglione and Iain Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and John Burrow, Stefan Collini, and Donald Winch, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 1. 12 Quentin Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action,’ in Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context, p. 104. Note here, that Mark Bevir argues that Skinner’s approach would be better named ‘conventionalist’. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas. 13 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 3: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Cf. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 154 Duncan S. A. Bell

Navon’s textualism leads him to mischaracterise radically the nature of the IR ‘debates’. Even a minimally contextualist reading of the respective periods demonstrates that the ‘debates’ are illusory anachronisms, based on an inaccurate interpretation of the scope, coherence and interests of the field. In the traditional historiography of IR, they serve as post hoc legitimating devices for the construc- tion of a narrative about the progressive evolution of theoretical inquiry: first the supine idealists were defeated by the practical realists, then the sloppy historians were vanquished by the rigorous behaviourists and the discipline evolved into the hard-headed social scientific enterprise that exerts such power today. Or so the story goes. Unintentionally Navon’s argument helps to reproduce this inadequate tale. Referring specifically to the influential writings of E. H. Carr, Navon asserts that the first debate was ‘an extension to the study of world politics of an ideological argument between a “conservative” and a “revolutionary” approach to human nature’. As such it should be seen as ‘part of a broader and fundamental philosophical debate which has been dividing Western thinkers since the pre-Socratics’, a debate over ‘whether man naturally tends towards good or evil’, between ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ conceptions of human nature.14 For the reasons outlined above, this kind of historical claim is extremely dubious; it is not therefore surprising that it leads to a highly problematic rendition of early disciplinary history. In short, as Peter Wilson has observed, the idea that there was a debate is itself ‘highly misleading’.15 Even a cursory reading of IR during the interwar era demonstrates the absurdity of the claim that there was a monumental clash of ‘conservative’ and ‘revolutionary’ views of human nature in IR.16 It is simply not the case that the so-called first debate was a continuation of a purportedly age-old philosophical argument. The ‘first debate’ is an anachronistic, retrospective invention, built primarily upon a crude reading of Carr and his purported role in defeating interwar ‘idealism’ (an ill-defined category under which Carr subsumes a varied cast of ideas and characters).17 The Twenty Years’ Crisis, brilliant as it is in many respects, was written as a polemic and cannot be taken seriously as a work of intellectual history.18 Carr argued that theories are weapons, and he used his so discerningly that the reper-

14 Navon, ‘The “Third Debate” Revisited’, pp. 611–12, 613. 15 Peter Wilson, ‘The Myth of the “First Great Debate”,’ Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), p. 8 and Lucian Ashworth, ‘Did the Realist-Idealist Great Debate Ever Happen? A Revisionist History of International Relations’, International Relations, 16 (2002), pp. 33–53. See also, Miles Kahler, ‘Inventing International Relations: International Relations Theory After 1945’, in Michael Doyle and G. John Ikenberry (eds.), New Thinking in International Relations Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), pp. 20–53; and Brian Schmidt, ‘On the History and Historiography of International Relations’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth. A. Simmons (eds.), Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 3–23. 16 For a fuller picture, see Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988); David Long and Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) and the essays in vol. 16 (‘The World Crisis and the Origins of International Relations’) of International Relations (2002). 17 See Schmidt, Political Discourse of Anarchy,ch.5. 18 IR aside, Carr likewise presented a gross caricature of liberalism. On interwar liberal diversity see Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). On Carr, see Michael Cox (ed.), E. H. Carr: A Critical Reappraisal (London: Palgrave, 2000) and Charles Jones, E. H. Carr and International Relations: A Duty to Lie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). A response to Emmanuel Navon 155 cussions continue to mould the landscape of IR today. As Wilson comments, great damage has been done to the historical understanding of IR through ‘an uncritical acceptance – and indeed, a less than subtle reading – of Carr’s rhetorically powerful text’.19 A contextualist analysis of the period would involve a detailed exploration of the relationship(s) between the multiple currents of thought that intermingled during the period, including moral and political philosophy, international law, military and diplomatic history, political economy, imperial and domestic policy, and so forth. These would have to be related to the history of the relevant discourses, institutions and individuals, and (hopefully) from this analysis a more thickly- textured and sophisticated understanding could emerge. At one point in his argument Navon inserts a curious and ineffectual rejoinder to the ‘revisionist’ historians who have challenged the commonly accepted tale told about the history of the field. He argues that ‘by denying that such “debates” actually exist’ the revisionists ‘are de facto creating a debate (“the fourth debate?”) with anyone who believes that the history of ideas is not a chimera.’20 This is hardly a refutation of the historical interpretations propounded by the ‘revisionists’! Instead it is simply an assertion that through questioning IR’s mythology there is the possibility of generating debate over the (ab)use of history. Such a debate would actually be very profitable for the field. Moreover, it would hardly constitute a ‘fourth debate’ – at least in the terms of reference of the revisionists – if the first two ‘debates’ were themselves chimerical. Navon’s response, in other words, avoids alto- gether the veracity of the revisionist arguments. The second ‘great debate’ was likewise neither great nor a debate, constituting instead a brief and limited exchange between a handful of (Western) theorists over questions of methodology. It was, at most, a skirmish between scholars – Bull and Kaplan in particular – who shared an almost identical set of ontological assumptions but who disagreed over the appropriate manner in which to conduct empirical research. If the ‘debate’ succeeded at all, it was in helping to reproduce the highly restricted scope of the field that prevailed until the 1980s: once again, the main function of the idea of the ‘debate’ in the historiography of IR has been a retrospective shaping of disciplinary collective identity. There was no great clash of epistemological visions, and in reasserting this second foundational myth, Navon merely helps perpetuate the dubious intellectual history upon which much of the current self-image of the field is constructed.21 Navon badly misconstrues the history of IR during the twentieth-century; profound arguments over knowledge, rationality and human nature did not enter IR through the portal of illusory ‘great debates’. If only they did.

The functions of intellectual history

Navon’s misconception of IR’s disciplinary history would appear, then, as the product of his disembodied, decontextualised interpretative methodology. The danger with

19 Wilson, ‘The Myth of the “First Great Debate”’, p. 8. 20 Navon, ‘The “Third Debate” revisited’, p. 623. 21 Steve Smith, ‘The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory’, in Ken Booth and Steve Smith (eds.), International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 17. 156 Duncan S. A. Bell stripping texts from their contexts, of abstracting them from the intellectual environ- ment in which they were produced, is that we lose sight of the reasons why they were written originally. They were not, after all, penned solely to instruct us – as transhistorical manuals to the mysteries of the world – but rather to accomplish one (or more) of a number of specific tasks; for example, ‘to celebrate, to cajole, to subvert, to ridicule, even to amuse’.22 As Robert Cox observed famously, ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose.’23 Take Locke. Long regarded as a key liberal thinker, contextualist readings of Locke highlight formative aspects of his thought that are easily lost in textualist interpretations. For example, in order to grasp its meaning and significance, Locke’s First Treatise needs to be understood as a fierce riposte to Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), a text employed widely to defend monarchic patriachialism in the Exclusion crisis of the 1680s. Likewise, in order to gain a rounded picture of Locke’s work it is essential to appreciate both the essential theological foundations of his thought, and his role in constructing theoretical justifications for early modern empire-building.24 To strip Locke from these discourses is to lose track of his own terms of reference, to fail to understand that he was engaged primarily in specific political debates, not in a transcendental project to explicate the existential problems of human society (and provide possible answers to them). Contextualism thus helps us to re-evaluate and destabilise Locke’s anachronistic placement in the teleo- logically-infused narrative charting the inexorable ascent of liberalism. A reinterpretation of Locke is . . . not only a reinterpretation of one strand of liberalism but also of the ways many liberals and their critics understand the formation of modernity and postmodernity, both of which are standardly defined in relation to interpretations of Locke’s philosophy.25 It might still be objected that it is pedantry, mere scholastic antiquarianism, to challenge the interpretation of writers long dead or, more specifically, IR ‘debates’ largely forgotten. What is the relevance for contemporary theoretical discourse? There are (at least) four broad counters to this claim.26 The first response to the scholastic barb is largely aesthetic. The challenge, it can be asserted, ‘presupposes a depressingly philistine view of historical enquiry. We are told that a knowledge of the past is only worth having if it helps to solve the immediate problems of the present.’27 History need not defend itself in relation to contemporary ‘relevance’. This response certainly has great merit, and would most

22 Runciman, ‘History of Political Thought’, p. 85. 23 Robert Cox and Timothy Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 87. 24 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). On Locke and religion, see John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). On the justification of empire (ch. 5 in the Second Treatise) see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 137–79. The dangers of a non-contextualist reading of Locke are highlighted in James Richardson’s claim that Locke offered a ‘distinctively liberal’ critique of the right to conquest. See Richardson, Contending Liberalisms in World Politics: Ideology and Power (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 56. 25 Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy,p.2. 26 See also Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique’. 27 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 107. A response to Emmanuel Navon 157 likely satisfy many (though certainly not all) historians. However, if a stronger case for the manifold and productive linkages between HPT and contemporary international political theory is to be made, it is necessary to elucidate briefly further arguments. The second reason is that contextualist interpretations can help to challenge the legitimacy and coherence of supposedly transhistorical bodies of thought, for example ‘realism’ and ‘liberalism’. Realism has long buttressed its claim to intellectual respectability by constructing a canon stretching from Thucydides onwards, purportedly embodying timeless forms of political knowledge; as such, realists can claim that they speak with the wisdom of the ages.28 Liberalism has trodden a similar path. Contextualism helps to undermine the veracity of such claims by exposing the hermeneutic fallacies that exist as their conditions of possibility. Nor is realism the only appropriate target; as Richard Tuck has demonstrated, Grotian natural law jurisprudence is best understood as virtually indistinguishable from Hobbes’s position, not as the philosophical foundation for international society in the English school mode.29 The contemporary repercussions of ahistorical interpretation can be extraordinarily pernicious – witness the ‘original intent’ approach to the US constitution, a popular method which reads the document literally, and thus counters claims for it to adapt to modern circumstances (for example, in relation to gun control).30 Indeed, a contextualist reading of the history of political thought compels a serious challenge to the very coherence of vague abstractions such as ‘liberalism’ and ‘realism’: both are largely meaningless phrases unless their theoretical content and morphology are clearly specified whenever they are employed. A third reason is that contextualism offers important lessons for the study of political innovation and change, in the manner in which political language and praxis shift over time, and the specific reasons for such transformations.31 The moral identities of political communities are established and constrained by the languages of legitimacy and justification that they employ for, as Tzvetan Todorov notes, ideas ‘make acts possible, in the first instance; and they make it possible for these acts to be accepted’.32 As such, HPT can be instructive in highlighting the manner in which societies (and individuals) comprehend and shape the social world. Moreover, it can help us to track particular instances where shifts in policy can be related to linguistic transformation; for example, the rhetorical strategies deployed by state represent-

28 Benjamin Frankel (ed.), Roots of Realism (London: Frank Cass 1996); Robert Gilpin, ‘The Richness of the Tradition of Political Realism’, International Organization, 38 (1984), pp. 287–304. Cf. Duncan Bell, ‘Anarchy, Power and Death: Contemporary Realism as Ideology’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 7 (2002), pp. 221–39. 29 Tuck, Rights of War and Peace,ch.3. 30 Terence Ball, ‘Constitutional Interpretation: What’s Wrong with Original Intent?’, in Ball, Reappraising Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 250–73. 31 See Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbrooke versus Walpole’, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society (London: Europa, 1974). See also Peter N. Miller, Deﬁning the Common Good: Empire, Philosophy, and Religion in the Eighteenth-Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 32 Tzetvan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. xiii; and Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique’. 158 Duncan S. A. Bell atives that have helped shape the shifting patterns of humanitarian intervention during the last decade.33 Finally, a central task for HPT is retrieval, the excavation of normative arguments that have been lost to us through the multiform processes of historical evolution. Whilst it would be foolhardy to simply lift one set of arguments from a past age and parachute them into our own, say those relating to authority in Reformation England – for their problems were very distant from our own – we can nevertheless attempt to comprehend what it means to respond to a particular set of issues (and why), and as a consequence both enrich the theoretical imagination and expand the number of options, of choices, available to confront the problems of the present and the future. ‘To read past accounts of what it means to be free is not to learn what it means to be free, but to learn why it is still worth asking those kinds of questions’.34 In political theory, this mode of retrieval has resulted in some important revisions of the scope of current theoretical discourse, and challenges to the often ahistorical interpretations of political ideologies so common amongst Anglo-American political theorists (and correspondingly those who employ historical stereotypes to lambast them35). Perhaps the most instructive is the manner in which contemporary philosophical liberalism has been challenged by historically-minded scholars from within the liberal tradition. There are two main manifestations of this trend. Firstly, the attempt to revive a republican conception of liberty, as freedom from domination, drawing in particular on the political thought of the Renaissance – which was itself written always with at least one eye trained on the Ancients – and seventeenth- century England.36 And secondly, the retrieval of ‘new liberal’ theories to challenge the idea that liberalism cannot accommodate thick conceptions of community and sociability.37 This mode of retrieval is of course useful in IR also, whether it be in trying to resurrect more normatively sensitive forms of realism, or indeed to look towards some of the much-derided ‘idealists’ for inspiration: for questions, if not for answers; for guidance, if not Truth.

Cavalier caricatures

And so to the ‘third debate’. Having construed the previous ‘debates’ as incarnations of antediluvian philosophical battles, Navon asserts a number of dubious claims regarding the latest ‘debate’, that between positivism and post-positivism. In particular, he argues that the debate is essentially between postmodernists and positivists, but also that it has spawned a third popular paradigm, namely con-

33 Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 34 Runciman, ‘History of Political Thought’, p. 92. 35 On postmodernist stereotyping of the Enlightenment, see Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill (eds.), What’s Left of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 36 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 37 Avital Simhony and David Weinstein (eds.), The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). A response to Emmanuel Navon 159 structivism. Navon charges that neither of these purportedly novel approaches have much to offer, as postmodernism is an untenable ‘intellectual fad’ whilst constructivism ‘adds little’ to the work of Weber and other nineteenth-century thinkers. This view represents not only a deeply inadequate account of the current state of the field, but also a serious caricaturing of both postmodernism and constructivism. Much as the disembodied approach to HPT ignores the complexities and ambiguity of past theoretical discourse, so forcing polyvocal theoretical programmes into simplistic caricatures serves to flatten the variegated topography of contemporary IR. There is thus a family resemblance between the manner in which Navon approaches historical interpretation, and the manner in which he points his panoramic lens at the field today. And both, not surprisingly, end up distorted. Navon’s assault on postmodernism brings to mind similar attacks mounted by the hyper-rationalist gatekeepers of social science.38 However, there is one glaring anomaly in his diatribe. Navon asserts that ‘[t]he French ‘deconstruction of language’ has no relevance outside postwar France, as it expressed the revolt of a defeated and disoriented generation against a rhetorical, elitist, and self-centred culture’.39 This is a bizarre claim, not least because the textualist method that Navon deploys throughout the rest of the essay requires him to try and interpret texts stripped from their context, national or otherwise. Either postmodernism is a special case, to be kept locked in its national box – and if so, this assertion needs arguing sufficiently – or this ‘deep contextualist’ claim holds for any set of philosophical arguments. In other words, to state that deconstruction has no relevance outside postwar France is to advance a far stronger contextualist claim than even the Skinnerite historians would countenance. As such, Navon’s history of philosophy would have to be completely redrawn – Plato would have no relevance outside ancient Athens, Kant outside eighteenth-century Germany, Carr outside 1930s England and so forth. It is unsatisfactory to caricature bodies of thought as diverse as postmodernism and constructivism, slotting them neatly into crude, homogenous categories. Both programmes are multi-dimensional and riven with internal disputes.40 Their bound- aries and contours are far from clear. Whilst Navon appears grudgingly to concede this at one stage, he asserts subsequently that critical theorists can be lumped together with postmodernists/deconstructionists because ‘it is hard not to detect the trace of Michel Foucault’ behind their arguments.41 This claim displays a poor understanding of the multiple streams (and philosophical underpinnings) of critical theory, which are often antithetical to Foucault’s project.42 Moreover, ‘constructivism’ encompasses an enormous variety of positions – often philosophically contradictory – ranging from those who discern no significant epistemological break with social

38 As detailed (and dismissed) in N. J. Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 174–84. 39 Navon, ‘The “Third Debate” Revisited’, p. 623 (emphasis added). 40 See Rengger, International Relations, pp. 143–89; and J.G. Ruggie, ‘What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge’, International Organization,52 (1998), pp. 855–85. 41 Navon, ‘The “Third Debate” Revisited’, p. 623. 42 See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), esp. Lectures IX and X. Cf. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 160 Duncan S. A. Bell science, to those who reject the latter entirely. The problem with Navon’s argument is highlighted by Alexander Wendt’s bold claim to be simultaneously a critical theorist, a constructivist and a positivist.43 The weakness of Navon’s approach to intellectual history, and its damaging repercussions for his analysis of contemporary IR, is likewise highlighted by his ﬂeeting discussion of positivism. He is of course correct to state that ‘positivism’ can be traced to Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive. However, the story hardly ends there, and over the following decades positivism mutated considerably, resulting in the evolution of a family of connected but nevertheless distinctive positions.44 In order to understand the meanings of this much (ab)used term it is simply inadequate to pick, as Navon does, the canonical text with which it is associated and to use that as a stick with which to beat a richly-textured intellectual tradition. Furthermore, Navon fails to observe that there are many prominent positions in the ‘post- positivist’ camp that are not explicitly constructivist, postmodernist (or critical- theoretic). Where for example, would the historical sociologists ﬁt into his schema, or various aspects of feminism, or the non-positivist Marxist social theorists, the scholars engaged in ‘normative’ international theory, or even the intellectual historians? Rather than viewing the ‘debate’ as between two or three homogenous theoretical programmes, it seems better to understand it – if we are to insist on using the term ‘debate’ – in terms of a multi-dimensional assault upon the traditional epistemological and ontological assumptions of IR.

Conclusions

Whilst a greater engagement with history and philosophy is essential for IR scholars, particularly those ensconced in the rationalist bastions of social science, there is little to be gained from crude stereotyping and the perpetuation of disciplinary myths. It is essential to engage in considered conversation rather than cavalier caricature. Navon displays an inadequate understanding of both the history and current state of the ﬁeld; however, he is only the latest in a depressingly long line of scholars to fall prey to the ‘myth’ of the great debates. This appears to be a consequence of the disembodied method that he employs. A greater engagement with both the methods and the ﬁndings of contextualist HPT would facilitate the re-evaluation of IR’s mythology, and more importantly play a constructive role in current theoretical discourse. In particular, due to their related concern with language, with normative claims, and with social and political transformation, contextualism represents a useful addition to the theoretical armoury of ‘post-positivist’ IR, albeit one that has not yet been adequately explored or embraced. Hopefully its time has come.

43 Alexander Wendt, ‘What is International Relations For? Notes Towards a Postcritical View’, in Richard Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), esp. pp. 207, 220, 224 (n. 7). 44 For a brief discussion see Patrick Baert, Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 174–82.