Monday, February 9, 2015

Noted

Buzan and Lawson open a symposium at The Disorder of Things on their book The Global Transformation.

Added later: The previous symposium at the same blog, on Anievas's Capital, the State, and War, should also be noted. (I've just been glancing at it and those interested in Marxian approaches to IR will find it worth a look, if not always especially easy going.)
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16 comments:

Ronan said...

I was just coming over to link to it, the book looks pretty good. Their point at the end, that IR has become too attached to its relationship with POLSCI, seems right to me, and that a more interesting (and convincing) research agenda would deal more fully with ALL the social sciences and humanities..what do you think ?

February 9, 2015 at 1:03 PM
LFC said...

Well, yes, I agree with that.

What Buzan & Lawson know, however, and may or may not be saying (they prob do say it, actually), is that outside the U.S. the IR-polsci link is less tight. Even in the U.S., it's not quite as tight as it used to be, i think, even tho most people who 'do' IR in the U.S. academy are still in pol sci depts.

---

Btw, a Mideast post in the works for estimated pub date of Friday. (I have some non-blog things i have to do this week betw. now and then.)

February 9, 2015 at 2:21 PM
LFC said...

Under the heading Bizarre Developments of No Particular Importance: unless I'm quite mistaken, Google Analytics now seems to think I live in Va., not Md. I don't know WTF is up with that. (I just hope it doesn't indicate some kind of (attempted) infiltration... don't know whether that's paranoia, or appropriate caution in the digital age, or a mixture of the two...) I guess I'll know there's a problem if posts start to show up that i didn't write/post. ;)

February 9, 2015 at 2:47 PM
LFC said...

Of course why anyone wd want to **** w this blog, considering its minuscule readership, is beyond me...

February 9, 2015 at 2:50 PM
Ronan said...

Someone's trying to get to you before you can put up that middle east post. Bin Laden would be my guess.; )

February 11, 2015 at 9:02 AM
Ronan said...

"What Buzan & Lawson know, however, and may or may not be saying (they prob do say it, actually), is that outside the U.S. the IR-polsci link is less tight."

The political economist Mark Blyth once wrote an article about this, how he felt trapped btw the US school (quant driven, answering very specific questions) and the 'UK school' (more historically and sociologically driven, answering larger, more general questions)
His sympathies are clearly with the UK school (at least in a general sense) but by the end of the article he makes the point, which sounds plausibly true to my ears, that the mirror image of the obsession with quant methods in the US is the obsession with long dead philosophers in the UK (at least that was implicitly ONE of his points, I think.I cant get access to the article now)
The article (torn between two lovers) was more sophisticated than that, my retelling is a bit of a caricature (obviously things dont map this easily) Worth a read sometime if you have the time.

ps I enjoyed the 'capital state and war' book seminar, parts of it are pretty enlightening. I think this idea of combined and uneven development can explain the realtionship btw Ireland and the UK pretty well .. though Id have to get a second and third opinion on that.

February 11, 2015 at 10:53 AM
LFC said...

Re the 'Capital, the State and War' bk seminar -- I read it somewhat cursorily. I also took a brief glance at the book itself via Amazon Look Inside.

I wasn't aware of the Blyth article, but I think the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Mark Rupert's complaint in the book seminar about the continuing dominance of postivist/quant (or what some wd call neo-positivist) approaches is something one regularly hears, but actually that dominance is not what it once was in the U.S., I think. Rupert also said that heterodox approaches have been allowed "in" by the U.S. discipline only if they "don't pee on the carpet," i.e. aren't too radical. But that's something that can prob. be said about a whole range of social-science fields, though IR may be worse.

It is useful for writers of dissertations etc to have a foil. Thus, e.g., neo-positivism (in terms of methods and methodology -- the two words not being synonymous) and/or a putatively arid, ahistorical, 'timeless' Realism show up in these roles fairly often. Both foils can be turned into exaggerations, I think (which doesn't mean they don't exist).

The other thing about the Anievas bk seminar is that C. Craig I thought had an interesting pt about the post-1945 changes in world politics and whether the bk's theoretical framework cd deal w them. (Which Anievas, at least in the version of his reply that was posted at the blog, didn't really address except v. briefly at the end of the reply.)

February 11, 2015 at 11:57 AM
LFC said...

p.s. The other thing about Anievas's reply is that it had short-form (not full) references, which is one reason I left a comment over there asking if the full version of the reply is available.

February 11, 2015 at 12:28 PM
LFC said...

Just saw your question about Spruyt at Disorder of Things and left a comment there.

February 14, 2015 at 5:22 PM
LFC said...

So you'd rather spend time commenting on the 'male nerds and feminism' thread than reading IR books, eh? ;)

February 16, 2015 at 5:31 PM
Ronan said...

I'd rather be drinking cocktails on a beach somewhere ; )
(I havent got round to reading your main post properly yet, btw)

February 16, 2015 at 6:27 PM
Ronan said...

Your comment on the Spruyt book was interesting by the by, I read it the other night (I have nought more to say on that topic though, due to my considerable ignorance of it! I do want to read that book sometime .. and Buzan's aswell. Unlikely on both counts though)

February 16, 2015 at 6:30 PM
LFC said...

I'd rather be drinking cocktails on a beach somewhere ; )

Me too (esp given the weather here right now).

---

I'm about to take a break from posting for a while, but will be checking in here periodically.


Re Spruyt: you know, it's really not that exciting. (His second, later bk might interest you more -- i've only looked at it fairly briefly.)

But as for his first bk, I read it b.c it bore directly on my diss. and i was taking issue w some of its arguments, using it as a sort of foil in some ways. If you want to get kind of the substantive heart of his 'model' -- and this was something i did not discuss or take issue with (i was dealing w other aspects) -- you can look at ch.4, which is fairly short, and esp. the 2 tables and the conclusion on p.76. Wd take maybe about 15/20 mins.

The late-medieval towns (specifically the merchants in them) and their different preferences stemming from what kind of trade they were involved in, are key to his explanation of the different outcomes in his cases. E.g., Italian towns were larger and wealthier than German or French towns, involved in luxury long-distance trade, and w an aristocracy that was more 'mercantile' than the feudal lords in the Holy Roman Empire and the French kingdom. So in Italy the political form winds up being city-states. Ok, I'm considerably oversimplifying the argument, but you get the idea. [It is perhaps overly schematic, but then, after all, it was a pol sci diss at a major U.S. dept (UC San Diego).]

His dating of the emergence of the sov state, that Mulich and i agree is too early, is in ch.5 on France -- on p. 79 is the passage that i slightly misquoted in my comment at the Disorder of Things:

"It would be too much to suggest that we find modern France in the 1300s. ... Nevertheless, we do already find the essential traits of modern statehood."

It occurs to me that the sentence "It would be too much to suggest that we find modern France in the 1300s" might be a good candidate for greatest understatement in an English-language work of social-science/history pub. in the last 25 yrs.

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Sorry, long comment -- I was using it to refresh my own memory about Spruyt.

February 16, 2015 at 9:35 PM
LFC said...

p.s. I left out a step in the argument -- Italian towns larger/wealthier from the kind of trade they were involved in, therefore they cd be independent pol. actors, didn't need an alliance w the monarch (which is, by contrast, what he says happened in late-medieval France).

February 16, 2015 at 9:40 PM
Ronan said...

His second book does look pretty good actually, thanks for the rec.
Were the mistakes in the first book corrected by later research or was it sloppiness by Spruty?

February 17, 2015 at 3:43 PM
LFC said...

Well, I wouldn't call them mistakes, exactly.

It's really more a matter of historical interpretation. Various people (incl me) think he dated the emergence of the sov territorial state too early, but it's not as if there is a right and wrong answer about that.

I wouldn't call the first book sloppy. In its way, v. impressive. But academics and wd-be academics need to criticize each other, specially in the social sciences, otherwise they don't stake out their own positions. Which is considered more or less necessary. Unless you're doing a big synthetic work and you can just say "I agree w everybody!" Which actually is close to impossible tho no doubt someone has pulled it off.

I'm starting to babble and i really need to shut off my computer for the day!

February 17, 2015 at 4:00 PM

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