An American Social Science: International Relations Author(s): Stanley Hoffmann Source: Daedalus, Vol. 106, No. 3, Discoveries and Interpretations: Studies in Contemporary Scholarship, Volume I (Summer, 1977), pp. 41-60 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024493 Accessed: 01/10/2010 07:25 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press and American Academy of Arts & Sciences are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Daedalus. http://www.jstor.org STANLEY HOFFMANN An American Social Science: International Relations In the past thirty international as a years, relations has developed largely autonomous of science. Even it part political though has shared many of politi? cal science's vicissitudes?battles among various orientations, theories, and a own. methods?it also has story of its What follows is an attempt at neither a nor a complete balance sheet capsule history?merely a set of reflections on the and frustrations of a specific accomplishments particular field of scholarship.l Only in America a Political science has much longer history than international relations. The at the attempt studying systematically patterns of conflict and cooperation alien actors?a among mutually shorthand definition of the subject matter?is recent. To be we can all trace our to sure, ancestry back Thucydides, just as scientists can trace to political theirs Aristotle. But Thucydides was a historian. He to be a historian of was was, sure, genius, rightly convinced that he writing for all times because he was one incident to a using particular describe per? manent of behavior. Yet he was to logic careful avoid explicit generalizations, "if . then" and or terms. propositions, analytic categories classificatory Modern and sociology political science emancipated themselves from political and social history, political philosophy, and public law in the nineteenth century. Inter? even national relations did not, though the kind of social (or asocial) action de? scribed never a by Thucydides disappeared from fragmented world, and flourished particularly in the period of the European balance of power. One can wonder this was so. After here was a realm why all, in which political philoso? phy had much less to offer than it did to those who wondered about the com? mon in the vast good domestic order. Except for the body of Roman Catholic literature preoccupied with just war, and not very relevant to a world of sover? there were the of eign states, only recipes Machiavelli; the marginal comments on the state international of nature in Hobbes', Locke's, and Rousseau's writ? some of two short and ings; pages Hume; tantalizing essays of Kant; compressed considerations by Hegel; and oversimplified fragments by Marx. Even so, the little that was available should political philosophy have been sufficiently pro? vocative to make students want to look into the realities. For the philosophers about the nature of the international milieu and disagreed the ways of making it 41 42 STANLEY HOFFMANN more bearable; and they wrote about the difference between a domestic order to a an stable enough afford search for the ideal state, and international contest in which order has to be established first, and which often clashes with any to aspiration justice. Similarly, the contrast between the precepts of law and the was realities of politics sufficiently greater in the international realm than in the to one want domestic realm, make to shift from the normative to the empirical, to if only in order understand better the plight of the normative. Without a one study of political relations, how could understand the fumblings and fail? ures or on of international law, the tormented debates the foundation of obliga? tion unconstrained common values or among sovereigns by superior power? not And the chaos of data provided by diplomatic history did require any less masses ordering than the of facts turned up by the history of states and societies. Why did a social science of international relations nevertheless fail to ap? answer to pear? The the discrepancy may well be found in that sweeping phe? as nomenon which Tocqueville identified the distinctive feature of the modern to ige: democratization. As domestic societies moved from their Old Regimes their modern conditions?parties and interests competing for the allegiance of large classes of citizens; the social mobilization of previously dispersed subjects; an he politics of large agglomerations and unified markets; increasingly univer? or sal suffrage; the rise of parliamentary institutions plebiscitar?an techniques; or the fall of fixed barriers, whether geographic social, within nations?the to study of flux began in earnest, if only in order provide concerned observers some and insecure officials with clues about regularities and predictions of somewhat less mythical, if also less sweeping nature than those grandiosely as strewn around by philosophers of history. With democratization, Comte had came was to own predicted, the age of positivism (his only mistake confuse his brand of metaphysics, or his grand speculations, with positive science). But or international politics remained the sport of kings, the preserve of cabinets? castes the last refuge of secrecy, the last domain of largely hereditary of diplo? mats, as Raymond Aron has characterized international relations the specialized activity of diplomats and soldiers. However, soldiers, to paraphrase Clausewitz, own own not an have their grammar but not their logic. It is accident if armies, of and having been democratized by the ordeals the French Revolution Napole? re? onic era, found their empirical grammarian in Clausewitz, whereas the still stricted club of statesmen and ambassadors playing with the fate of nations no to account found logician for its activities. Indeed, the historians who dealt with these succeeded only in keeping them beyond the pale of the kind of mod? was to at ern science that beginning look societies, by perpetuating the myth of to foreign policy's "primacy," isolated from domestic politics. There was, be one was sure, country in which foreign policy put under domestic checks and balances, knew no career caste, and paid little respect to the rules and rituals of coun? the initiated European happy few: the United States of America. But this contests were try happened to be remarkably uninvolved in the kinds of that the actors. daily fare of other Either it remained aloof, eager merely for continental or not consolidation and economic growth; else it expanded, by conflicts and at deals with equals, hut by short spurts of solipsistic exuberance the expense of much weaker neighbors. International relntions is the science of the tests and INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 43 trials of several intertwined actors. Where were no science they intertwined, grew. In the United States before the 1930s, there was no reason for it to grow. to It was only the twentieth century that brought democratization foreign to policy. Diplomatic issues moved from the calculations of the few the passions of the many, both because more states joined in the game that had been the preserve of a small number of (mainly European) actors and (mainly extra European) stakes, and above all because within many states parties and interests or across a established links pushed claims national borders. And yet, World War that saw the mobilization and slaughter of millions, marked the demise of as a the old diplomatic order, and ended kind of debate between Wilson and Lenin for the allegiance of mankind, brought forth little "scientific analysis" of international relations. Indeed, the rude intrusion of grand ideology into this a realm gave new lease of life to Utopian thinking, and delayed the advent of social science. Not "how it is, and why," but "how things should be improved, reformed, overhauled," was the order of the day. Old Liberal normative dreams were at same being licensed by the League of Nations covenant, while the time was the young Soviet Union calling for the abolition of diplomacy itself. It is against this reassertion of utopia, and particularly against the kind of "as a if thinking that mistook the savage world of the 1930s for community, the a a common League for modern Church, and collective security for duty, that E. H. Carr wrote the book which can be treated as the first "scientific" treat? a ment of modern world politics: Twenty Years Crisis2?the work of historian on to intent deflating the pretenses of Liberalism, and driven thereby laying the a a foundations both of discipline and of normative approach, "realism," that was to a are have quite future. Two paradoxes worth noting. This historian who was a founding social science, did it in reaction against another historian, whose not normative approach Carr deemed illusory?Toynbee, the philosopher of commentator the Study ofHistory, but the idealistic of the Royal Yearbook of Inter? national Affairs.