Monday, January 3, 2011

Overstatement

In the course of a post criticizing the journal International Political Sociology for publishing too much postmodernism and not enough "sociology as it is actually practiced by sociologists," Henry Farrell writes that "there are many, many important things that international relations scholars can learn from sociologists."

"Many, many important things" is perhaps a bit of an overstatement. I'd be more inclined to say that there are some things that international relations scholars can learn from sociologists.

2 comments:

hank_F_M said...

LFC

And the other way around too.

LFC said...

Probably right.

Although as people have noted, the intellectual 'traffic' has tended to be largely one-way: IR borrows from sociology, economics, history, but those disciplines don't draw very much on IR in return.

Barry Buzan and Richard Little had an article some years ago called 'Why IR has failed as an intellectual enterprise' (or something like that)in which they made this point.