Reason of state and the ethics of statecraft

When was the last time a politician used the phrase "reason of state"? I'm not sure, but it must be quite a while. Phrases such as "the national interest" displaced "reason of state" in leaders' vocabularies long ago. But a brief historical look at reason of state may be interesting, at least (if you'll pardon the tautology) to those who are interested in this sort of thing.

The statesman most associated with the notion of raison d'état is Richelieu, who sided with Protestant princes/polities in the Thirty Years War, breaking the link between religion and foreign policy. Richelieu's main concern was to counter the Habsburgs, though not necessarily to defeat them: according to one historian, "French policy aimed to restore a balance in Germany, not to bring about a Protestant triumph" (R. Briggs, Early Modern France, 2d ed. 1998, pp.102-103). At any rate, as David Bell wrote last year in reviewing a recent biography of Richelieu, the Cardinal "was hardly the first European statesman to place national interest above moral or religious imperatives...."  No doubt that's true, but by now Richelieu's name is so firmly linked with reason of state that the connection is probably unshakeable.

While Richelieu is the politician most associated with reason of state, the writer most associated with the notion is Machiavelli, even though he never used the phrase. As Michel Foucault observed in one of his 1978 lectures at the Collège de France, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates about reason of state were "conducted through" Machiavelli; the invocation of his name became, to some extent, a signaling device. In the debates of the time, opponents of Richelieu used the accusation of Machiavellism to signal that the lodestar of policy was the ruler's (in this case Louis XIII's) "whims or interests," not -- what reason of state more properly should have denoted -- an "autonomous and specific art of government," as Foucault put it. Writers more favorable to raison d'état were divided, some distancing themselves from the charge of Machiavellism, others praising the author of The Prince (see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. G. Burchell, pp.243, 245).

Controversies and polemics invoking Machiavelli began not long after the posthumous publication of The Prince in 1532, five years after his death. In 1559 the Church put all of Machiavelli's books on the Index of condemned works. Before that the English cardinal Reginald Pole had concluded that The Prince was devilish; Pole "issued a warning against Machiavelli" in his Apology for Emperor Charles V, which was "written in the late 1530s but not published for over two centuries" (R. Bireley,The Counter-Reformation Prince, 1990, p.15).

Some Protestant writers also fiercely criticized Machiavelli. A key event in this connection was the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (August 1572) in which several thousand Protestants were killed in Paris (and more in the following days in other parts of France). Many Protestants blamed Catherine de Medici, an Italian and a Catholic and the French king Charles lX's mother, for the massacre, though she intended not a mass killing but "the elimination of a relatively small group" of Protestant leaders (Briggs, Early Modern France, pp.21-22). However, Catherine's intentions were probably unclear to everyone outside her inner circle.
 
The Huguenot lawyer and writer Innocent Gentillet penned a Contre-Machiavel or Discourse against Machiavelli (the full title is longer; it was written in Latin in 1571 [thus actually before the St. Bartholomew Massacre], then published in French in 1576 and in English in 1602 [or 1608, depending on which catalog entry one goes with]). Gentillet linked Catherine de Medici to "Italian statecraft" as allegedly exemplified by Machiavelli. Gentillet's book, as Robert Bireley notes, "was the first attempt at a systematic refutation of Machiavelli and was to have a far-reaching influence on Catholic as well as Protestant authors."  Interestingly, Gentillet referred to The Prince as the "Koran of the courtiers" (Bireley, Counter-Reformation Prince, p.17). 

As mentioned above, Machiavelli did have defenders. There was an attempt or two to argue that his views were compatible with the Bible (see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p.245), and today at least a couple of scholars argue that Machiavelli was not hostile to Christianity (see C. Nederman's entry on Machiavelli in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here [with a good bibliography]). A considered view is that "Machiavelli's whole work is based on the contrast between ordinary Christian ethics and the ethics of statecraft...not an 'immoral' code of behavior, except by Christian standards, but a different code of morality, which wills the means to the noble end of civic survival" (S. Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders (1981), p.23). And "[r]ather than an abstract sovereign institution, the state, for Machiavelli, was nothing less -- or more -- than the government, the prince himself at home and abroad" (M. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (1997), p.97).

One might argue that the notion of raison d'état lives on, albeit in sometimes very attenuated form, in two ways: first, through the mushy idea of the national interest; second, through the view, famously stated by Weber in "Politics as a Vocation," that politicians must always weigh the likely consequences of their actions rather than just acting in accord with a principle regardless of likely results -- though in this second case the connection to reason of state is debatable.

Following the Weberian line, various writers have argued that the ethics of statecraft is "situational." As Robert Jackson puts it (in The Global Covenant (2000), pp.135-36), "scholars of international ethics should...lay open the conduct of statespeople to appropriate moral standards" but also should take into account the circumstances in which that conduct occurs. Stated in this general way, the position leaves open the questions of which moral standards apply in a given case and which circumstances are the more or less relevant ones. But those questions are probably best debated and answered in the context of specific decisions. (Note: I don't entirely agree with R. Jackson that the ethics of statecraft is "conservative more than progressive" (ibid., p.139) but won't pursue this here.)

P.s. A post on this subject shouldn't neglect to mention Friedrich Meinecke's 1924 book The Idea of Reason of State in Modern History (later translated into English under the title Machiavellism).

Added later: The chronology in this post, I've sort of belatedly realized, goes in reverse: it starts with the 17th cent. (Thirty Years' War), then goes back to the 16th cent. (French Wars of Religion). That's probably not the best way to have organized it, but you know, you get what you pay for here... ;)  

That McCain-Hagel exchange

I caught a snippet of the questioning of Sec. Def.-designate Chuck Hagel by Sen. John McCain the other day. McCain wanted to know whether Hagel still would have opposed the 'surge' in Iraq if he had to do it over again. Hagel responded that he would let history write the verdict on the surge (that's a paraphrase, not a verbatim quote).

McCain replied that history had already written its verdict on the surge. My inclination is to think that's mostly b.s. It'll be a long time before the historical judgment on it is rendered. Yes, the surge reversed the U.S.'s (and the Iraqi government's) fortunes in Iraq in the short run, but in aid of what eventual outcome for Iraq? That very much, as of this writing, remains to be seen.

P.s. McCain has long believed that Americans are privileged 'makers' of history.

A billion dollars spread over 10 countries doesn't go that far

So there was an attack not too long ago on a natural gas facility in Algeria. The attackers took hostages. The Algerian military staged an op to free them. People died (militants, hostages, Algerian soldiers), though the majority (if I recall aright) of hostages were freed alive. The mastermind behind the attacks was a jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar. 

And now the handwringing and the fault-finding have begun. A WaPo piece notes that

In 2005, the U.S. government started the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership — the innovative, $1 billion collection of programs designed to prevent the spread of radicalism. It delivered humanitarian aid and security assistance to 10 countries in North and West Africa, drawing on the combined resources of the military, the State Department and the Agency for International Development.
The partnership was dogged by problems from the outset, however, as U.S. agencies squabbled internally and struggled to understand an unfamiliar cultural and political terrain.

You know what might have been another problem? A billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but spread it over 8 years and 10 countries and it might not go that far.

(In the extremely unlikely event that this post is read by someone who  knows something about this program -- which I, of course, do not -- please feel free to leave a comment. Of course, other comments are, as per usual, also welcome.)

Noted

Laura Seay on Mali (h/t).

Argentina and Iran headed for closer ties?

Not sure exactly what to make of this -- whether the 'truth commission' is more-or-less a figleaf to make possible closer relations between Iran and Argentina, or something more than that. Since one of those accused by Argentinian prosecutors is the current Iranian defense minister, it does make one wonder.

A call to end 'extreme wealth' by 2025

This is offered without comment, as I don't have much time right now, except to say that it might have been framed in terms of ending extreme inequality. But the point of the 'extreme wealth' phrase is the symmetry with 'extreme poverty.'

A soldier's video goes viral

I'm linking this without any remarks because it's late (and I'm tired). I thought some readers might find it interesting.

Stray thoughts on revolution

A somewhat meandering discussion of revolution at Crooked Timber (CT) prompted me to open Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979), which I hadn't looked at in a while. The distinction between political revolution and social revolution is central to that book's framework, and at the end of it Skocpol suggested that social revolutions -- i.e. those which transform not only political structures but social or class structures as well -- would be relatively unlikely to occur in postcolonial states whose "modern military establishments," while they might stage coups, would generally act to suppress upheavals from below (cf. p.290).

With the benefit of more than thirty years' hindsight, it appears that this forecast probably overestimated the strength and independence of postcolonial militaries. Skocpol herself, in an essay written several years later, i.e. in the early 1980s, about the 1979 Iranian Revolution, noted that "in most contemporary Third World countries, it is hard to distinguish political and social revolution in any firm way, because the state and its incumbent elites are so central to the ownership and control of the economy." But she judged the Iranian Revolution to be more like the great social revolutions of the past than "simply a political revolution, where only governmental institutions are transformed." [1]

Which brings one to the revolutionary upheavals of the last couple of years in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. (Not to mention the ongoing civil war in Syria, which is also a kind of revolution.)

The news summary on the NewsHour this evening contained this:

There were clashes in Egypt today as anti-government rallies marked the second anniversary of the revolution. At least four people were shot and killed in the city of Suez. The scene in Cairo's Tahrir Square was reminiscent of the massive crowds who helped topple President Hosni Mubarak. Street battles with police broke out in Cairo and elsewhere, and well more than 300 people were hurt. The protesters said the revolution was hijacked by Islamists, who now control the government.

Was the toppling of Mubarak a political revolution or a social revolution? I haven't been following events in Egypt very closely, but my impression is that it has been a political but not a social revolution. The upper classes, so far as I'm aware, have not fled the country en masse or been expropriated, whereas the Iranian Revolution by contrast did see "the dispossession of many (especially politically privileged) capitalists...." [2] The basic elements of the state apparatus in Egypt -- the judiciary, the army, the presidency, parliament -- are still in place, and the current struggles have to do, it seems, with the relative influence of Islamist versus liberal/secular forces in the framing of the new constitution, etc. Faced with popular protest, Morsi had to scale back his attempt of a month (or so) ago to seize extraordinary powers, but obviously the non-Islamist (or anti-Islamist) forces protesting in the street on this second anniversary feel that their hopes have not been realized.

In light of this, it is interesting that only one lone commenter on the CT thread, at least the last time I checked, had mentioned the Arab Spring and the associated upheavals. Whether this says something about the CT commentariat or about the difficulty of grasping a process that has yet to reach a conclusion (or both), I'll leave to others to judge.

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1. T. Skocpol, "Rentier state and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian Revolution" (1982), reprinted in her Social Revolutions in the Modern World (1994), p.241.

2. Ibid., pp.240-41.

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Added later: A commenter on CT points helpfully to this bibliography on the Arab Spring, compiled by the Project on Middle East Politics based at George Washington Univ.
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Note: This post was edited slightly on 6/19/15.

The second inaugural

Apart from its content, i.e. considered purely as a piece of oratory, Pres. Obama's speech at his second inauguration was a beautifully crafted address, beginning with the central pillar of the national creed -- the single most famous sentence Jefferson ever wrote -- and ending in precisely the same place, with a reference to citizens' obligation to lift voices "in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideas."

The basic conceptual content of the speech is firmly rooted in two major strands of the American political tradition: Enlightenment liberalism on the one hand and civic republicanism on the other. The former's emphasis on individual freedom is linked with the latter's emphasis on civic duty: thus "we have always understood that... preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." And as citizens "you and I...have the power to set this country’s course."

The speech was seen by many commentators as an expression of full-throated liberalism (or progressivism). Richard Norton Smith called it "the most ideologically assertive" speech since Reagan's first inaugural, "this being the un-Reagan." Harold Meyerson (with whose politics I am more likely to agree) also made the Reagan contrast. Yet one should not overlook that there were certain parts of the speech, notably the emphasis on support for democracy abroad and the line about one person's freedom being inextricably linked to everyone's in the world, that would have been perfectly at home in a speech by Reagan or George W. Bush. The big difference from Reagan is in how Obama sees the role of the government, as an enabler and protector of, rather than threat to, individuals -- but this distinction is of course nothing new. And what some commenters called a "communitarian" emphasis in the speech is perhaps better seen, as I already suggested, as an expression of civic republicanism.

The commentators who stressed the speech's liberalism were using 'liberalism' in its contemporary U.S. political sense. Obama's speech, however, can also be seen as liberal in a more philosophical sense, as I indicated above. It is important here to distinguish liberal from radical. A very brief excursion into intellectual history may help. 

We don't have to go back to the Enlightenment philosophes or to those writers, discussed in J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, who carried the tradition of Florentine civic republicanism into the Atlantic world. We can go back instead just a half-century, to Louis Hartz's 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America. 

Hartz argued, among other things, that the U.S. had escaped many of the travails of the Old World because it had no indigenous feudal past. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis summarized it thirty years later, Hartz maintained that "the history of class antagonism in liberal capitalism is due not to inherent properties of the system itself but rather to its emergence from a system of feudal privilege...." (Bowles & Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 1986, p.30)  Lacking a feudal past, the U.S., in Hartz's somewhat rose-colored view, had escaped the history of class conflict and violent social upheaval that characterized large parts of Europe; the U.S. was thus "the archetype" of liberal capitalism, which Hartz saw, in Bowles and Gintis's words, as "intrinsically harmonious" (ibid.). Bowles and Gintis, by contrast, saw liberal capitalism as marked by a conflict between "the expansionary logic of personal rights" and "the expansionary logic of capitalist production" (ibid., p.29).

The much remarked-upon passage in Obama's speech in which he mentioned landmarks in the progress of civil rights for oppressed groups -- Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall -- traces this "expansionary logic of personal rights."  But unlike Bowles and Gintis in Democracy and Capitalism, Obama sees no conflict between the rising trajectory of personal (or group) rights and the imperatives of capitalism, provided that it's a capitalism whose worst excesses (including tendencies toward destruction of the environment) are curbed by state action, a capitalism enabled, not stifled, by legislatively enacted rules of the road. 

On the basic issue of whether liberal democratic capitalism is inevitably prone to internal conflict and contradiction, Obama thus is closer to Hartz. This President clearly is a believer in the possibility of harmony, of reason, progress, freedom, and all the other keywords of the Enlightenment. He also made a point of saying, toward the end of the speech, that fidelity to the founding ideals "does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness." But action cannot wait for these never-ending debates to be resolved, he went on, implying that the thought of a resolution of those particular questions is an illusion anyway. In all these senses, Obama is a liberal, not some kind of radical. But then, we knew that already.

P.s. (added later): There were some omissions, I thought; for instance, Obama should have acknowledged the unacceptably high incarceration rate in the U.S.

Democracy and individual capacities: a postscript on Knight & Johnson

Before returning Knight & Johnson's The Priority of Democracy to the library, I want to mention something I neglected to mention in my earlier post on the book. It concerns K&J's reference to Rawls in their discussion of "the relevance of individual capacities" in ch.8. They write:

Our pragmatist defense of democracy envisions active participation by citizens in processes of mutual discussion and persuasion. Such participation requires that each citizen be able to advance arguments that others might find persuasive. Thus, equal opportunity of political influence must attend to the conditions under which all citizens would be able to engage in discussion at this level. The depth of the anticipated participation highlights the importance of the effects of individual-level capacities for effective institutional performance. (p.234)

In other words: One of the requirements for democratic institutions to work properly is that individuals must have the capacities (abilities) to participate effectively in deliberation. Presumably that means that most adults must be able to speak and/or write coherently enough to have the possibility of persuading others of their point of view.

Knight & Johnson proceed to criticize Rawls for paying "no explicit attention to issues of equality of capacity" (p.236). Citing Rawls's Political Liberalism [PL] (1993), they note Rawls's statement that everyone must have "a fair opportunity...to influence the outcome of political decisions" (PL, p.327). But, K&J continue, Rawls

limits analysis of [this] fair opportunity to the ownership of the minimum threshold of primary goods and merely assumes that actors possess the capacities needed to effectively use these resources.... On the dimension of moral and intellectual capacities and skills, Rawls concludes that any variations above the minimum threshold [of primary goods] are acceptable and consistent with the principles of justice as fairness. Ultimately, Rawls treats as an assumption what equality of capacity treats as a fundamental feature of political equality. (p.236; footnotes omitted)

Perhaps Rawls would indeed be untroubled by some inequalities in capacities or, to put it differently, perhaps he doesn't focus explicitly enough on ensuring that individuals engaged in democratic deliberation have roughly equal capacities ("roughly" because obviously some inequality in capacities is unavoidable: not everyone has the eloquence of a Martin Luther King).

However, it's worth considering in this connection an implication of Rawls's views as expressed in A Theory of Justice [TJ]. There he says that "the primary social goods, to give them in broad categories, are rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth," and -- importantly -- self-respect, i.e. "a sense of one's own worth" (TJ, 1971 ed., p.92). The sense of one's worth depends on a number of things, and one of them, Rawls suggests, is an ability to participate in the public life of one's society, as the following passage (p.101) indicates:

...the difference principle [i.e. the principle that social and economic inequalities must benefit the least advantaged] would allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-term expectation of the least favored.... And...the value of education should not be assessed solely in terms of economic efficiency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his [or her] own worth. (emphasis added)

Thus, given the importance of self-respect in Rawls's view and the effects of the difference principle, the Rawlsian just society, at least as described in A Theory of Justice, would likely be one in which the large majority of adults would have the capacities needed to participate effectively in democratic deliberation and, more broadly, in their society's public affairs.

Book notes

--  Forthcoming books by A. Scott Berg (a Woodrow Wilson bio) and Robert Stone.

-- A prize-winning novel (it's on this list) about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

Bad Brooks

Brooks calls for "learning to crawl" but predicts that the nasty Dems will play hardball instead. (H/t: HC)

P.s. S. Lemieux got there first.

Voices from Mali

This post (by two political scientists from Notre Dame) reports data from surveys of 500 Malian villagers conducted in Jan. 2012 and summer 2012.

The main message:

...while the international media has fixated on political crisis, the respondents actually cared much more about a different sort of crisis: daily survival in the context of increasing desertification and unprecedented drought....We hope that their testimony is a reminder of the many underpublicized crises that rural citizens experience every day, regardless of political instability. Coups and rebellions incite international action and capture headlines, but [lack of] access to food, clinics, and potable water continually create life-or-death situations for many Malians.

McChrystal interview

With Margaret Warner: here. Note, among other things, his somewhat odd, at least to my ears, description of the Marshall Plan as 'counterinsurgency'. YMMV.

The airport as nightmare

Reflections by Joe at The Disorder of Things.

A smidgen of autobiography

An outfit called Kashmir Tour Packages has left a comment on the previous post (actually it's an ad, not a comment, but whatever...). [Note added later: I have deleted the ad.]

I've been in Kashmir once, as a child traveling with my family; we were living in what was then East Pakistan and the Kashmir excursion was part of a vacation. We stayed on a houseboat for part of the time; I don't remember the trip very well. The landscape in Kashmir is indeed beautiful; however, these days I wouldn't want to travel in the immediate vicinity of the Line of Control, since Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been exchanging fire there, with resultant fatalities, in the last week or two. Tourists are presumably never allowed to get near the LoC anyway.

Btw, what about the UN observing/monitoring contingent in Kashmir? There is one, I believe, and has been for many years. But unless I'm mistaken, their terms of engagement, which are less 'active' than those of certain UN contingents elsewhere, don't permit them to do  anything once firing starts. It's strictly an observational mission. The rationale is that the presence of UN observers, even if they're not empowered to do much of anything, will have a pacifying effect. This proposition is non-falsifiable, since we don't know exactly how much more violence, if any, would have occurred if the UN weren't there. But on balance I suppose it's better to have them there than not.

Added later: For the LoC clashes through the prism of 'the spiral model', see here. (H/t D. Nexon)

Tourism (sic) in Afghanistan

Courtesy of yesterday's 'AfPak Daily Brief', this NYT story about tourism in Afghanistan. A Canadian man and his pregnant American wife have been missing in Wardak province since October and are likely being held by the Taliban, though this has not been confirmed. The article also refers, among other things, to a hotel in Bamian province known for its "improbable but excellent sushi."

There is something incongruent, for lack of a better word, about being a tourist in a country at war. According to the article, however, a small number of tourists do travel to Afghanistan every year, including, for instance, a wealthy Russian couple who hired their own armored car and bodyguards.

Unequal 'justice'

Re the tragic death of Aaron Swartz: I thought this remark by a commenter at Crooked Timber was much to the point:

I do not understand why downloading a slew of academic articles was a crime worthy of up to 50 years in jail + a million dollar fine – and people who crashed the economy and laundered money are not at all held accountable.

And this is poignant.

(Update: He was apparently offered a plea bargain involving a half-year's jail time, but the larger point about how prosecutors exercised their discretion stands.)

Friday miscellany

-- The bombings in Quetta: analysis.

-- P. Kennedy vs. P. Kennedy?: Paul Kennedy's new book on WW2, Engineers of Victory, due to be released at the end of this month, is reviewed very favorably in the current Foreign Affairs by Lawrence Freedman. The book's focus is the contribution to the Allied victory of (quoting Freedman's capsule review) "middle managers, such as...logisticians, engineers, and operational analysts...." So it wasn't just the top commanders or "superior productivity" that led to success. Now this is interesting, because if I had to sum up, in one oversimplified line, what I took away from Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers when I read it some years ago, it would be: Superior productivity explains just about everything when it comes to war, or at least great-power war, in the industrial age.
[note: edited slightly after initial posting]

The Yorba Linda brigade

From a piece (WashPost) in what used to be called, many years ago, the 'society pages'  -- the subject is the Nixon Centennial Gala:

Thirty-nine years after the scandal that ended his presidency, Nixon’s family, staffers, and friends gathered for what would have been his 100th birthday at the Mayflower Hotel — site of his inaugural balls in 1969 and 1973. The night was a curious mix of family reunion (with birdhouse replicas of his Yorba Linda [California] birthplace as decor), defiant pep rally and time capsule (old campaign posters and old campaign staffers). “There’s a wax museum in there,” teased one former staffer walking into the party.

Somehow I think no comment is required.

A new version of structural realism

In their recent article "The Struggle for Autonomy: A Realist Structural Theory of International Relations," International Studies Review v.14, Dec. 2012, pp.499-521 [gated; abstract here], Richard Harknett and Hasan Yalcin propose "a new variant" of structural realism (p.499). 

Harknett and Yalcin (H&Y) replace the struggle for power (or the struggle for power and peace, as Morgenthau's famous subtitle has it) with a 'struggle for autonomy'. Rather than assuming that states always want power or security, H&Y say that the only motive that can be derived from structure -- i.e. from 'anarchy' (lack of a central authority) and the distribution of capabilities -- is a desire "to possess the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances [units'] capacity to act into the future -- they merely want to remain autonomous" (p.506; italics omitted). However, if units (states or non-state actors) don't survive they can't remain autonomous, a point to which I'll return.

Before getting into the weeds, I'll try to give a brief overview of H&Y's approach. Some of their points, when put simply, seem cogent clear enough, if debatable. A problem with the article, though, is that the points are usually not put simply but wrapped up in verbiage and often inelegant sentences. (In some -- not all -- scholarly IR journals, there seems to be no copy-editing to speak of, which means that stylistically everything is left to the authors.)

H&Y argue that states respond to shifts in the distribution of power by adjusting their behavior, based on a calculation of what they want and what they think it's possible to get. When one state has a much larger share of power than all the rest, the other states will not embark on a likely fruitless revisionist quest to change the system. Rather, they will maneuver within it, seeking to enhance their freedom of action without directly challenging the leading state. (This, incidentally, is close to the situation Stephen Walt describes in Taming American Power, a book H&Y don't cite.) Conversely, when the distribution of capabilities is more even, states, H&Y say, will seek to advance their positions more directly and less subtly, leading to the likelihood of intensified security dilemmas and increasing the chances of major war. Put in this way, the argument is plausible enough to be tested, at least in a loose sense, through historical inquiry. The authors don't undertake such a test, though they do have a brief section at the end applying their theory to the Cold War, which they split into three periods characterized, they say, by different distributions of power between the U.S. and USSR.  

The authors distinguish their approach from the extant varieties of structural realism, i.e. defensive and offensive realism, on the grounds that those approaches supposedly assume invariant state motivations (i.e., states always seek to maximize either security or power). According to H&Y, both defensive and offensive realism have erred by taking motives as given, rather than seeing motives as shaped by structure. They write:

[S]tructure shapes not only behaviors but also identities and orientations of agents. In offensive and defensive realist theories, state identities and motivations are defined and assumed independently from the shaping power of structural factors. States are taken to have a specific motivation whatever the constraints and opportunities of structural conditions. Structure does not affect the survival motivation in neorealist theories of IR, which assume that even if there is no direct threat to state survival, it is a survival instinct that is driving action. In contrast, in the structural autonomy theory developed here, units rearrange not only their behaviors, but also their identities and motivations in response to the distribution of power (p.502; italics in original).

The description of structural realist theories in this passage is not, I think, entirely accurate. There is more going on in offensive realism than "a survival instinct." True, Mearsheimer does write that "the only assumption dealing with a specific motive that is common to all states says that their principal objective is to survive" (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.32), but in an endnote (p.414, n.8) he writes: "Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as for any other structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition."

H&Y insist that "one could assume a survival motivation" only in "an environment with no opportunity but full of threats" (p.509). The problem here, however, is that the word "motivation" has more than one meaning. "Motive," according to the dictionary I have at hand, can mean "some inner drive, impulse, intention, etc. that causes a person to do something or act in a certain way," but "motive" can also mean simply a "goal." And units can have a goal of surviving regardless of whether the environment is threatening or non-threatening. Indeed, as I mentioned before, a unit that doesn't survive obviously can't remain autonomous. In this sense autonomy presupposes survival. Now it is true that the rate of state death in the present international system is very low and thus survival is not often a motive in the causative meaning of "motive"; but survival can remain a goal even when the desire to survive is not an immediate driver of behavior. H&Y seem wrong to assert that the "traditional realist-ascribed motive of survival implies a logic in which helpless states would eventually require the delegation of state autonomy to a higher authority in a fearful environment populated by units wishing for survival" (p.509). Where do they get the notion that states in a "self-help" system are or may become "helpless"? It doesn't follow.

H&Y proceed to distinguish between "diffuse" and "concentrated" power structures. In diffuse power structures, a category that includes both bipolarity and multipolarity, gaps in power between units are relatively small; in concentrated power structures, as one might guess, power gaps are large and one unit is clearly more powerful than the rest. Diffuse structures are more war-prone, they argue, and against Waltz they maintain that bipolar systems (and balanced multipolar systems) are not more stable than the alternatives. They write:

In what in Waltzian terms would be considered a balanced system, states will feel less threatened (or more secure), but this does not translate into behavior promoting stability. Since the primary motivation is not security (or survival) but autonomy, "balanced" systems will not necessarily be stable, but rather have strong structurally induced incentives to change the power structure (and the relative distributions within it) to gain autonomy. The Cold War behavior of the two superpowers became more change-oriented during periods in which their power was more "balanced" with each seeking a breakout capacity via military technology, additional allies, exploitation of minor states (the competition over the Third World), or expanded realms of competition (the Space Race). The structure, itself, induced intense change-oriented policy, not stability-seeking on the part of the superpowers. (p.514)

This is interesting, but there is at least one problem with the argument in this section: H&Y maintain that a diffuse power structure decreases autonomy ("the very existence of other actors with equal capabilities decreases the level of autonomy for all" -- p.514), but it's not clear why this should be the case given their definition of autonomy, quoted above, as "the capacity to act in a sustained manner that preserves and enhances...capacity to act into the future" (p.506). What seems to happen in this part of the argument is that H&Y take autonomy to mean the degree of a unit's freedom of action, but that's not how they define autonomy at the beginning of the piece.   

***

Reading "The Struggle for Autonomy" raises, among other questions, the issue of what is the most promising direction for realist (or realist-inflected) theorizing about international politics. In their first footnote the authors say that "neo-classical realists with their multi-causal and multi-level frameworks are increasing the number of factors across the realist paradigm. This is a degenerative process from a structuralist perspective."  Yet neoclassical realism emerged precisely because structural realism is limited both in what it can explain and how well it can explain it. Waltz's main substantive generalization -- that given states-under-anarchy there is a strong tendency toward balancing -- has received sustained and quite persuasive criticism, and Mearsheimer's view that supposed uncertainty about intentions pushes great powers to act aggressively (albeit calculatedly) to each other is, if anything, even more questionable. Harknett and Yalcin think the problem, in effect, is that Waltz and Mearsheimer are not structural enough. But is this indeed the problem, or does it rather lie in structural realism's inability to take into account factors that matter -- domestic politics, regime type, ideology, bargaining, to name several? Parsimony is not desirable if parsimonious theories can't explain important outcomes.

Neoclassical realists bring in perceptions and domestic politics not because they want a "hybrid" theory for its own sake but in order to explain outcomes more satisfactorily. Even sticking with H&Y's example of the Cold War, as Lobell et al. observe (see the introduction to this edited volume) the system's structure by itself can't explain why the U.S. after 1945 opted for containment rather than "competitive cooperation" with the USSR. (In the interest of keeping this post shorter than a mini-treatise, I will not go into H&Y's discussion of the Cold War in detail. Suffice to say it is open to criticism.)

In short, it's far from clear, at least to me, that a "refinement of structural realism" (H&Y, p.499) in an even more structural direction is the way to go. To be more direct, I think it's not.  Those interested in these matters can of course read the article and reach their own conclusions.

Added later: There is another issue (well, lots of them but one I should have mentioned): The decreased likelihood of major war in the present period may have very much less to do with structural factors (i.e. with the "concentrated" power structure) and much more to do with  long-term trends and factors that are not structural. Since I've discussed this fairly extensively elsewhere on the blog (see the "decline of war" label under topics), I won't harp on it further here.

Added still later: For Waltz on the survival motive, see Theory of International Politics, pp.91-2.    

On a roll

I've put up two ephemeral posts today -- might as well write a quick third before calling it a night.

One "roger," commenting on this Erik Voeten post at The Monkey Cage, wonders why American IR scholars calling for a "lean forward" posture (as opposed to "pull back") haven't learned anything from postcolonial theory. Yes, that's what 'roger' asks, no doubt rhetorically, but I'll take it non-rhetorically.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe they haven't learned anything from po-co theory because they haven't read any; maybe they've tried to read some and been turned off by the style of much of it. (Or maybe whatever one might learn from po-co theory would not necessarily affect one's policy views.)

A few months ago I took Inayatullah and Blaney's IR and the Problem of Difference out of the univ. library where I can borrow books. I thought it was something I should look at. The copy had been extensively underlined and scrawled in, always a turnoff, but I can't honestly claim that's the main reason why I only dipped into it as opposed to reading it. It was more: "do I really want to read this?" Answer: Not right now. I wonder how many of the authors whom 'roger' criticizes have read it. How many of those authors have read Hardt and Negri? How many have read the people who post at The Disorder of Things? How many read journals other than IO, IS, Foreign Affairs, and maybe APSR or EJIR or JCR occasionally?

So, 'roger', that's my off-the-cuff 'answer' to your question.

By the numbers: Howl at Pluto vs. Lawyers, Guns and Money (LGM)

2012 LGM in numbers (link):
Posts: 2,723
Comments: 163,243
Visits: 3,934,352
Unique Visitors: 803,173
Pageviews: 7,459,130

2012 Howl at Pluto in numbers:
Posts: 148
Comments: [number not counted]
Visits: 7,273
Unique Visitors: 4,108
Pageviews: 11,391

Sources for Howl numbers
# of posts: Blogger
all other #s: Google Analytics

The JFK tapes

The other night I spent 15 or 20 minutes with Listening In, which contains selections from John F. Kennedy's White House tapes. (Didn't buy it.) There is a good deal here that will interest those students of the history of U.S. foreign policy who haven't already had access to the tapes (not sure of the details, but I think the Kennedy Library has now made a lot of them available online, though perhaps the audio is not always great; with this book, however, you get transcripts, Ted Widmer's comments as editor, plus a couple of CDs).

There are, among other things, sections on nuclear weapons, Vietnam, and the Cuban missile crisis. Looking through it quickly, I was particularly struck by a phone conversation between Kennedy and Harold Macmillan in which JFK several times calls the considerably older Macmillan 'Prime Minister', while the latter, without in any way seeming to give affront, manages to avoid calling JFK 'Mr. President'.

The book has a foreword by Caroline Kennedy, who refers to her father as the "first truly modern president." There are various ways in which I think that's true (one thinks here in terms of style, the opening of the White House to artists (e.g. the Casals concert) and intellectuals that was so much a part of the Camelot aura, and the fact that JFK was the first president born in the twentieth century ("the torch has been passed to a new generation, born in this century....")). However, it was during his predecessor Eisenhower's administration that the U.S. became recognizably 'modern' in some ways that persist (e.g., the centrality of the car, the rise of the suburbs).

As Widmer points out, the tapes would have been used by Kennedy as raw material for his memoirs, had he lived to write them. The fact that he didn't makes them all the more valuable to historians and the interested public.

Friday evening quote

From Sonia Faleiro's essay "The Book Boys of Mumbai", in the current NYTimes Book Review:

The tragic irony of Mumbai’s illicit book trade is that its best salesmen will never fully understand the value of what they’re selling. They can rattle off book titles and the names of best-selling authors. But because they forgo school for work, they can’t read, and so view books as no different from anything else they’ve sold — like boxes of tissues or bags of oranges. The pleasure, indeed the magic, of literature that shapes so many avid readers as children, defining who we are and influencing what we make of our lives, is beyond their reach. Yakub is poignantly aware of this. “I’ve grown up with novels,” he told me. “But I have never read one.”

The fiscal crisis of the state

Listening just now, on the radio version of the PBS NewsHour, to Shields and Brooks bemoaning the country's inability and/or unwillingness to make difficult choices on spending and taxes, I was reminded that a leftist scholar named James O'Connor wrote a book many years ago called The Fiscal Crisis of the State. Never read it; one of the many things I probably should have read and never did. First published in 1973, the book was reissued in 2001, according to a glance at Amazon, by Transaction (a publisher not at all known for leftism but known for reissuing important works of social science).

Drone strikes continue, but who are the casualties?

I've started to get in my inbox, as of this a.m., Foreign Policy's 'AfPak daily brief' and also the more general 'morning brief' (not sure I'll continue with the latter). Since I haven't been following the international news through other means as closely as I might, these roundups may be useful.

The 'AfPak brief' cites various news reports about a drone strike that killed "top Pakistani militant commander" Maulvi Nazir, who staged attacks on U.S./ISAF forces in Afghanistan. The brief mentions that this same strike also killed nine people in a house in S. Waziristan but says nothing about their identities. Also mentioned is a drone strike in N. Waziristan that "killed four people whose identities could not be verified." This sort of thing highlights how difficult it must be for those journalists and analysts who try to keep track of exactly who the drone strikes are killing, and underlines why there is no definitive count of civilian casualties.

Paraphrase of the day (fiscal cliff edition)

This might read "quote of the day" but I just returned the book from which I could have taken the verbatim. D.W. Brogan, referring to the French Third Republic, described it as having so many brakes that it slid toward immobility (the actual sentence is rather more elaborate but that's the gist). I hadn't been following the fiscal cliff drama very closely but the way in which it was "resolved" and the prospects for further showdowns (cf. the summer '11 debt ceiling 'crisis') after the new Congress is seated -- estimates of which admittedly vary depending on the analyst -- made Brogan's remark jump out when I ran across it.

Happy (?) new year

Slated for deletion in next day or two, absent a comment. Treat it as a very ephemeral  'happy new year'.

Outcasts and thugs in the Egyptian revolution

This post from last January by Ahmed Badawi, which opens with a vivid description of Egyptian street children (of whom there are approximately a million, he says), is still worth reading a year later, I think. (I learned of it because it is quoted in the opening of an article in the current issue of Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. -- an article which, as it happens, has nothing directly to do with Egypt.)

Lal Bahadur Shastri, anyone?

Just over at Stephen Walt's blog, where I hadn't been for a while. On Dec. 10 he wrote a post asking readers to nominate foreign policy makers of integrity. In order to look at the comments I had to create (yet another) account on ForeignPolicy.com. (What is with those people? Every time you go there they have another sign-in hurdle.) Anyway, I created the account and looked at the comments. The most interesting nomination? Lal Bahadur Shastri, India's second prime minister. I don't know offhand whether or not that nomination makes sense.

Knight & Johnson on pragmatism and democracy

I've recently finished reading Jack Knight & James Johnson's The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism.  (NB: I haven't read it with the care I would if I were writing a proper review of it; I skipped some of the footnotes and skimmed a few bits of the text here and there. So take this post for several thoughts on the book, nothing more.)

The Priority of Democracy maintains that democracy -- meaning both political argument and voting -- is able to perform certain tasks that other kinds of governance mechanisms cannot. When it comes to "facilitat[ing] effective institutional choice" and "addressing the ongoing conflict that exists in modern society" (p.20), democratic institutions, when operating under the right conditions (an important proviso), have an advantage over markets, courts, and bureaucracies, Knight and Johnson (hereafter K&J) contend.

K&J say that democracy is not necessarily the best way to deal with any given substantive issue, but it is the best way to decide how and through what means particular issues should be addressed. In this sense democracy has what they call a 'second-order priority'. A properly functioning democratic system constantly monitors its own performance and that of its component parts to ensure that they are working effectively. The point of democracy, on K&J's view, is not to bring everyone to the same views but to ensure that contending positions clash productively, over the same conceptual landscape so to speak, rather than talking past each other, and that all sides get a roughly equal chance to be heard. Drawing on Dewey's pragmatism, the authors favor institutional experimentation and argue that good institutional performance depends on effective democratic participation, which in turn requires what they call 'equal opportunity for political influence'.

The book, as might be gathered, proceeds at a high level of abstraction, despite the authors' claim -- not put in exactly these words -- that they are bridging the gap between normative and explanatory theory. They pay virtually no attention to the literature on historical institutionalism and to the actual historical record of institutional performance. Instead their main engagements are with rational-choice models of institutions, on the one hand, and theorists of deliberative democracy on the other. Against Habermas, they maintain that democratic deliberation should aim not to bring people to consensus or agreement but rather to "structure the terms of disagreement." (On the rational-choice point, see the end of this post.)

K&J write that "[t]heoretical analysis can make important contributions to our understanding of issues of institutional performance, but alone it cannot provide definitive answers to questions of actual effect. Such answers can only come from the cumulative experience of using the various institutions at our disposal" (p.165). Despite this statement and others like it, they make, as already mentioned, little or no effort to examine the historical record of such "cumulative experience" to see whether, or to what extent, it might support their argument.

That said, I'm inclined to agree with their critique of markets, which as I understand it boils down to saying that markets require demanding conditions in order to function properly but -- and here is the contrast with democratic institutions -- markets are not good at monitoring their own performance and ensuring that the necessary conditions for their effective functioning exist. In their terminology, markets, unlike democratic institutions, are not "reflexive."

However, like markets, democracy requires demanding conditions -- such as equality of influence -- to work properly, and meeting those conditions is simultaneously a normative imperative and a practical prerequisite of effectiveness and legitimacy, K&J argue. But they don't go into much detail about the kinds of state intervention that would be required to ensure something approaching 'equal opportunity for political influence'. 

The authors view political actors as mostly (though not always) self-interested, rather than as acting from a conception of the public interest (p.281). 'Winners' will seek to keep their advantages, while 'losers' -- the relatively disadvantaged -- will seek to change institutions in their favor. The push-and-pull of such democratic contention involves, they say, "an inherent learning process" (p.281) and presumably conduces to (gradual) improvements -- though the words "progress," "reforms," and "improvements" are not much in K&J's vocabulary, preferring as they do the more antiseptic diction of academic political theory. Note, too, that for 'losers' (i.e. those previously or currently disadvantaged) to play a constructive part in democratic struggles, they have to have resources and influence to begin with (hence the 'equal opportunity for political influence' condition).

The authors' range of reference is impressive and their book is clearly the result of much thought. Those with a professional interest in democratic theory and social choice theory will want to read it if they haven't already.  

However, as someone without such a professional interest, I found the book to be somewhat frustrating. K&J claim to reject the dichotomy between ideal and non-ideal theory, but I think the book is mostly the former, in spirit if not under the technical definition of 'ideal theory'. It makes a good theoretical case for a kind of democracy that does not presently exist, at least not in the U.S., but offers few concrete suggestions about how to bring such a democracy into being. Since the authors never said they would do that, I suppose this amounts to criticizing the book for something it never claimed to do. However, the authors do say that political theorists have explanatory and analytical tasks as well as normative ones, and I think the explanatory part of their argument could have benefited from a more historical and empirical perspective.


In terms both of its ambitiousness and its rather ponderous and repetitive style, The Priority of Democracy may bear some comparison with Rawls's A Theory of Justice (TJ). Of course The Priority of Democracy is less monumental in length and scope than TJ -- most books are -- and not only its 'project' but its targets are different. The latter fact partly reflects, I'd suggest, the difference in the intellectual climate between the mid-twentieth century, the era of which TJ is a product, and the early twenty-first century. To oversimplify for the sake of contrast, Rawls's main target in TJ was utilitarianism, whereas K&J take aim at what might be called market fundamentalism and, by extension, neoliberalism (though they don't use these terms in the book). Neoliberalism really came to the fore in the late '70s and early '80s, well after TJ was published. And the sources of inspiration are different: for Rawls it was the social contract tradition and (especially) Kant, for K&J it's pragmatists like Dewey, Richard Rorty, and Richard Bernstein. (Note that Dewey's name appears only twice in TJ, both times in a footnote.) K&J also frequently cite Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom and Richard Posner's Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, among others. 

At the beginning of the book K&J criticize Rawls, charging Rawlsian ideal theory with neglecting "the tasks of showing how any institutional arrangement governed by [the] principles [of justice] could emerge or sustain itself" (p.16). But as already indicated, I found their own account of institutional emergence and functioning to be too abstract and not empirical enough.

Finally, since I have criticized K&J for ignoring the literature on historical institutionalism (including the work on path dependency), I should mention that this a conscious choice on their part: they acknowledge that "several brands of institutionalism have emerged in recent years" (p.17) and say that they focus on rational-choice models of institutions for several reasons, among them that such models are usually and mistakenly assumed to "underwrite a robust challenge to democratic theory" (p.18). By making their case on this supposedly unfriendly terrain, they write, "we tacitly assume a rather substantial burden of argument" and, via a "distinct interpretation" of rational choice, "aim to place pressure on advocates of rational-choice approaches to explore more carefully the ways their analytical proofs, their explanatory claims, and their normative pronouncements hang together" (p.18). I haven't gone into this aspect of the book in this post and will leave others to judge whether and to what extent K&J succeed in this particular aim.

Added later: Compare Cosma Shalizi's take on the book, which I read after writing and posting my own. 
Added still later: See also H. Farrell's and C. Shalizi's draft paper (May '12) on cognitive democracy (link via here).
And see my postscript on democracy and individual capacities.                  

LaPierre's press conference

I just read the transcript of LaPierre's remarks. Among other things, he blamed violent entertainment for creating a culture of violence. But Fareed Zakaria answered this claim very effectively in a column yesterday:

Is America’s popular culture the cause [of gun violence]? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.
The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns.

As Zakaria pointed out, the previous assault weapons law in the U.S. that expired in '04 had a large number of loopholes and exceptions. This is what allows the NRA to claim such laws don't work. They haven't worked because they have been too weak.

After reading LaPierre's remarks, I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that it is going to be difficult if not impossible to carry on a reasonable conversation with him and his organization. He wants to put armed guards in every school in the country, he hires a former secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security to create a so-called Model School Shields Program, he wants to turn schools into fortresses. He would rather do this than deprive the four million members of the NRA of their "right" to possess what he called "civilian semi-automatic firearms." 

LaPierre claimed that we have no time to debate legislation that "won't work". But it is disingenuous to imply that Hutchinson's task force is going to come up with its model plan tomorrow. Hutchinson, whose remarks followed LaPierre's, made a point of saying that he would consult with all sorts of experts and so on. That takes time. So the notion that legislation would be too slow, while the NRA's task force will be speedy, I find dubious. I suppose, as a short-term 'solution', some schools may want to hire armed security. But the real solution is much tougher gun regulation. Australia did it. It worked. There is no reason the U.S. cannot do it if the political will is there.

Update: Recent conversation at Crooked Timber has underlined for me how little I know about guns. For ex., is it true, as a commenter at CT says, that virtually all guns in use today are semi-automatic, so that an effective, 'non-cosmetic' ban on semi-automatics is equivalent to a ban on all guns? I don't know.
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P.s. For those here who may be new to Blogger and its ways: "No comments" below the post does not mean comments are forbidden; it means no one has commented yet. There usually are not many commenters here; however, for the record, I will delete any obscene, libelous comments or those that I deem to be obvious trolling. Disagreement is welcome, but I may decide not to answer particular comments or get into an extended debate.

If I had a Twitter account...

...I'd say: "Plowing (or struggling) through to the end of Knight & Johnson, Priority of Democracy. Hope CrookTimb has its promised seminar. Otherwise may want these hrs of my life back."  But this way I don't have to count the number of characters.

[added later]: Just found out about the Erik Loomis thing. Sigh.

Update: See this statement in support of Loomis.

A tipping point?

There are indications of some shifts of legislative opinion (at least in the U.S. Senate) about guns in the wake of the Newtown CT shootings. Such changes in position (e.g. by Sens. Warner and Manchin) are good signs, as anything that indicates a weakening of the NRA's grip on many legislators is to be welcomed.

The murder of young children is especially shocking and revolting, and I hope that reactions rooted in normal emotions of revulsion will lead, in this instance, to some change in policy.  

Albert Hirschman on "the intended but unrealized effects of social decisions"

Note: I altered the title of this post slightly on 4/2/21. It's otherwise unchanged.

The death of Albert Hirschman prompts me to interrupt the break to quote a couple of passages from his The Passions and the Interests. First, from p.117:

In an old and well-known Jewish story, the rabbi of Krakow interrupted his prayers one day with a wail to announce that he had just seen the death of the rabbi of Warsaw two hundred miles away. The Krakow congregation, though saddened, was of course much impressed with the visionary powers of their rabbi. A few days later some Jews from Krakow traveled to Warsaw and, to their surprise, saw the old rabbi there officiate in what seemed to be tolerable health. Upon their return they confided the news to the faithful and there was incipient snickering. Then a few undaunted disciples came to the defense of their rabbi; admitting that he may have been wrong on the specifics, they exclaimed: "Nevertheless, what vision!"

Ostensibly this story pours ridicule on the human ability to rationalize belief in the face of contrary evidence. But at a deeper level it defends and celebrates visionary and speculative thought no matter if such thought goes astray. It is this interpretation that makes the story so pertinent to the episode in intellectual history that has been related here. The Montesquieu-Steuart speculations about the salutary political consequences of economic expansion were a feat of imagination in the realm of political economy, a feat that remains magnificent even though history may have proven wrong the substance of those speculations.

I wish I could quote the ensuing discussion in toto. There is a bit on pp.130-31, however, that is too good not to quote. Here Hirschman contrasts the "unintended effects of human actions," for which social scientists are often on the lookout, with intended effects that never occur:

Curiously, the intended but unrealized effects of social decisions stand in need of being discovered even more than those effects that were unintended but turn out to be all too real: the latter are at least there, whereas the intended but unrealized effects are only to be found in the expressed expectations of social actors at a certain, often fleeting, moment of time.

What's more, the original expectations that are not borne out are 

likely to be not only forgotten but actively repressed. This is...essential if the succeeding power holders are to be assured of the legitimacy of the new order: what social order could long survive the dual awareness that it was adopted with the firm expectation that it would solve certain problems, and that it clearly and abysmally fails to do so?

And there is a further consideration here. Writing in 1977*, Hirschman noted that "no twentieth-century observer" (p. 118) could maintain that the Montesquieu-Steuart view -- i.e., that commerce would have a peace-inducing, "gentling" effect on politics within and among nation-states, a view by the way that Marx (predictably) ridiculed (see p.62) -- had been vindicated by events, although Hirschman added that "the failure of the [Montesquieu-Steuart] vision may well have been less than total" (p.118). Fast forward to 2012. How does the Montesquieu-Steuart position look now? Perhaps somewhat better than it did thirty-five years ago? Or perhaps not.
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*[note added 12/15/12, edited 1/26/16]: The book was published in '77 so the words were actually written earlier, and in the acknowledgments Hirschman says he wrote a first draft of the book in 1972-73. But nothing of consequence turns on precisely when in the 1970s the passages were composed, at least as far as this post is concerned.     

Last post before the break

V. Yadav at the Duck notes that Obama is planning a trip to Myanmar/Burma and adds:

Meanwhile, Burmese Nobel Laureate and opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has supported the idea of sending more government troops to Rakhine state to quell the violence between Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslim minority population — increasing the correlation between winning the Nobel peace prize and supporting a “troop surge” to two.

The situation of the persecuted Rohingyas is an underreported story in the U.S. and something I've been meaning to mention for a while. Vikash beat me to it. It is probably connected, in probably complicated ways, to recent tensions and violence between Muslims and Buddhists in Bangladesh (h/t HC). (Might help to be a specialist on the region fully to untangle these threads.)

This is my last post before I take a break from posting (which will also entail something of a break from my perusal of the blogosphere in general). [So this is also your last chance to comment before the break.]  

Mead strikes out

From the opening of Walter Russell Mead's review-essay "Peace Out," in the current issue of Foreign Affairs:

The modern peace movement is almost 200 years old; its origins can be traced to the period that followed the devastating wars of the Napoleonic era in Europe. In those two centuries, peace movements have had little discernible impact on world events, and what effect they have had has often been bad: the European peace and disarmament movement of the 1930s, for example, greatly facilitated Hitler's plans for a war of revenge. For all the good they have done, those well-intentioned souls who have sought to achieve world peace through the organization of committees, the signing of petitions, the holding of rallies, and the promotion of international treaties might just as well have stayed home.

Mead may be half-right about the peace movement of the 1930s, but overall this passage is wrong. Modern peace movements obviously failed to prevent the twentieth century's world wars but they have nonetheless had a long-term positive impact: see e.g. here.

Then in the next paragraph Mead refers to "the argument of the economist and British parliamentarian Sir Norman Angell that war's economic irrationality would prevent twentieth-century wars...." In fact that is not what Angell argued, as I've had occasion to point out before.

That's two strikes, and let's give Mead a third strike for writing and publishing this at all. So Mead strikes out.

Fidel asked FDR for ten dollars

Via C. Blattman.

Substance vs. 'the horse race'

There's been some blogospheric gnashing of teeth on the question of Nate Silver's accuracy vs. the innumerate pundits' stupidity. That's right, as far as it goes, but it overlooks the point that a relentless focus on prediction (however accurate) does contribute to the draining of substance from a political atmosphere already struggling to keep a small amount of substance in the discourse (sorry, mixed metaphor). 

As Bob Somerby says here (h/t), that's not Silver's fault, and good predictions are to be preferred to stupid predictions; nonetheless, it does happen to be the case that the more focus there is on prediction the less time there will be to focus on other things. Michael Gerson tried, I think, to make this point in a column quoted by Somerby in the linked post, but Gerson made the mistake of taking some overly broad swipes at political science in general, thereby earning a rebuke from Prof. John Sides.

P.s. Speaking of substance, I am very aware that I have not bestirred myself to say much of substance about the election results. I will be linking to something else soon by way of partial remedy. [added later]: Actually I won't be. Changed my mind.

Harrington event

If you're in the vicinity of Georgetown U. this evening, might want to know that the documentary "Michael Harrington and Today's Other America" is being shown at 7 p.m., followed by a panel discussion. (This year marks the 50th anniversary of Harrington's The Other America.) I gather the film was made in the late '90s (could be wrong about that) but I've never seen it. Details about the location of the event etc. can be found here. 

The U.S. election

It's over.

How's that for sophisticated analysis?

By the way, I turned on my computer this morning to see the final results and the Wash. Post, which comes up as my home page, had a headline "a second term." I read some of the accompanying story, which said Obama had passed the 270 electoral vote threshold even though Fla. remains too close to call. I then clicked on the map that went with the piece, the banner (or headline) of which showed Obama with 249 electoral votes, not 270. WaPo hadn't bothered apparently to update the banner on the map. Typical of WaPo's coverage of the returns, which I thought was deficient, to put it very politely.

Update: WaPo has now fixed the map.

Quote of the day

"Speaking French also means speaking about human rights, because the rights of man were written in French."

François Hollande in the Dem. Rep. Congo, on the occasion of the summit of the Int'l Org. of La Francophonie, as quoted in Newsweek, Oct. 29, 2012, p.8.

Kindred W. and LFC debate voting (and other stuff)

Here and the comment thread.

'Big-picture' historical sociology: still rolling

Just discovered (thanks to this post) that M. Mann has published the third volume of The Sources of Social Power and the fourth volume will be coming out in Jan. 2013. Meanwhile, I. Wallerstein published the fourth volume of The Modern World-System in 2011.

ISA-NE postscript

As with any conference, but even more in this case because I was there only briefly, there were a number of papers I would have liked to hear but didn't.

A very small sampling: Andrew Yeo (Catholic U.), "Realism, Critical Theory, and the Politics of Peace"; Tomohito Baji (Cambridge), "Global Governance and IR in History: Alfred Zimmern's Political Thought from the mid-1930s"; Eric Blanchard (Columbia), "International Lying: A Constructivist Response to Mearsheimer"; Sherrill Stroschein (University College London), "Institutional Change and Identity Shift: The Case of Scotland"; Giovanni Mantilla (Minnesota), "The Political Origins of the International Rules for Internal Conflicts."

Onuf and 'heteronomy'

Yesterday afternoon I drove to Baltimore and went to a couple of sessions at the ISA-NE conference (the program is here [pdf]). One of the sessions I attended was a roundtable on Nicholas Onuf's work.

At the roundtable Onuf made a reference or two to "heteronomous" orders. I couldn't recall how he used the word in his recently reissued 1989 book World of Our Making (it had been a long time since I'd looked at it), so earlier today I pulled my copy off the shelf and briefly perused ch.6, where the idea is discussed. To simplify, for Onuf "heteronomy" is a form (or "category") of rule (the other two being hierarchy and hegemony) in which exploitative social relations are disguised under a mantle of formal equality and the ruled (including workers dependent on the sale of their labor-power) in effect participate in their own oppression, under the illusion that they are exercising some sort of self-determination. Though the word "heteronomy" is taken from Kant, Onuf's description of a 'heteronomous' order (or form of rule) owes a good deal to Marx, as he acknowledges. 

As far as I'm aware, however, Onuf's use of 'heteronomy' has not been adopted, even by those who might agree with his analysis. Nor did the papers or subsequent discussion at the roundtable directly address this aspect of World of Our Making. Onuf sees exploitation as inevitable, as he makes clear at the end of the book, so perhaps it's not too surprising that, embedded as it is in a quite pessimistic worldview, the word 'heteronomy' as he uses it has not (again, as far I'm aware) caught on with those who might have been its natural constituency, namely Marxists (of one sort or another) and critical theorists. I stand open to correction in comments, as I'm not an expert on critical IR theory (or all the strands of constructivism, etc.).

P.s. I was not at the conference today, where there was a follow-on session "Whither Constructivism?" I hear that the debate was lively and I understand that ProfPTJ will be posting a recording of the session, which I will link to when it's available.

Update: PTJ has now posted the audio here. I'm planning to listen to it soon.

A.M. linkage

Pressman on whether the U.S. and Israel continue to share values.

D.C. Exile on sovereignty and drone strikes.

[added later] More on Israel: The Fall 2012 issue of Dissent, which I just bought in a bkstore, contains an exchange on Israel between James Rule and Michael Walzer, as well as a review-essay "Zionism and Its Discontents." Haven't read either one yet.