Table Of ContentInternational Relations, Political Theory
and the Problem of Order
At the turn of the millennium, and now after the fall of the Berlin wall, the best
way to map the trajectories of contemporary international relations is hotly
contested. Is the world more or less ordered than during the Cold War? Are we
on the way to a neo-liberal era of free markets and global governance, or in
danger of collapsing into a new Middle Ages? Are we on the verge of a new
world order or are we slipping back into an old one?
These issues are amongst those that have dominated International Relations
theory in the late 1980s and 1990s, but they have their roots in older questions both
about the appropriate ways to study international relations and about the general
frameworks and normative assumptions generated by various different
methodological approaches. This book seeks to offer a general interpretation and
critique of both methodological and substantive aspects of International Relations
theory, and in particular to argue that International Relations theory has separated
itself from the concerns of political theory more generally at considerable cost to
each.
Focusing initially on the ‘problem of order’ in international politics, the book
suggests that International Relations theory in the twentieth century has adopted
two broad families of approaches, the first of which seeks to find ways of
‘managing’ order in international relations and the second of which seeks to ‘end’
the problem of order. It traces three specific sets of responses to the problem of
order within the first approach, which emphasize ‘balance’, ‘society’ and
‘institutions’, and outlines two responses within the second grouping, an emphasis
on emancipation and an emphasis on limits. Finally, the book assesses the state of
International Relations theory today and suggests an alternative way of reading
the problem of order which generates a different trajectory for a truly global
political theory in the twenty-first century.
N.J.Rengger is Reader in Political Theory and International Relations at the
University of St Andrews. He is the author of Political Theory, Modernity and
Postmodernity; Dilemmas of World Politics; and Retreat from the Modern.
The New International Relations
Edited by
Barry Buzan
University of Warwick
and
Richard Little
University of Bristol
The field of international relations has changed dramatically in recent years. This
new series will cover the major issues that have emerged and reflect the latest
academic thinking in this particular dynamic area.
International Law, Rights and Politics
Developments in Eastern Europe and the CIS
Rein Mullerson
The Logic of Internationalism
Coercion and accommodation
Kjell Goldmann
Russia and the Idea of Europe
A study in identity and international relations
Iver B.Neumann
The Future of International Relations
Masters in the making?
Edited by Iver B.Neumann and Ole Wæver
Constructing the World Polity
Essays on international institutionalization
John Gerard Ruggie
Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy
The continuing story of a death foretold
Stefano Guzzini
International Relations,
Political Theory and the
Problem of Order
Beyond International Relations
theory?
N.J.Rengger
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2000 N.J.Rengger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rengger, N.J. (Nicholas J.)
International relations, political theory and the problem of order:
beyond international relations theory? / N.J.Rengger.
(The New International Relations Series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Romanized record.
1. International relations-Political aspects. 2. International
relations-Philosophy. 3. Political science-Philosophy.
4. International relations-Methodology. I. Title. II. Series:
New International Relations.
JZ1251.R46 1999 99–32333
327.1′01-dc21
ISBN 0-203-98345-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-09583-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-09584-0 (pbk)
For VMH, MWJ, EH
who remind me that Aristotle was, as usual, right:
Nobody would choose to live without friends, even if he
had all other Good things.
Nichomachean Ethics, 115a4
And
for HDR 1926–1997
Father, teacher, teller of tales and friend,
‘with whom I shared all the counsels of my heart’. Farewell.
Contents
Series editor’s preface vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: International Relations theory and the 1
problem of order
PART I Managing order? 36
1 Balance 37
2 Society 72
3 Institutions 102
PART II Ending order? 143
4 Emancipation 144
5 Limits 175
Epilogue: ordering ends? 192
Select bibliography 212
Index 229
Series editor’s preface
Political theory and International Relations theory have drifted into a rather odd
and unsatisfactory relationship. This has happened despite the role that some
classical political theory plays in most introductory courses to IR, where
Thucydides, Hobbes, Kant, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill and others are paraded as
foundational formulations of the problems of peace, war and international
political economy These roots are mostly noted as part of the intellectual history
of IR, and occasionally argued over in the context of debates about the validation
of more contemporary versions of realist, liberal and Marxian doctrine. But these
obeisances do not constitute any kind of coherent contact between the discourses
of political theory and IR. While political theorists have focused more and more
on the logical and normative dimensions of what goes on inside the state, IR
theorists have turned more and more to the interactions between states and the
structures of the international system as a whole. A few brave souls have tried to
sustain contact: think of Stanley Hoffmann, Michael Walzer, Michael Joseph
Smith and Michael Doyle in the United States; Brian Barry, Chris Brown,
Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami in the United Kingdom. But it is
probably true to say that most of the core debate in political theory largely
ignores the international dimension, and most of the core debate in IR is largely
ignorant about the concerns of mainstream political theory.
In part the blame for this can be laid at the feet of the usual demons: narrow
academic specialization, and the bizarre intellectual barriers erected by both the
creation of jargon-based discourses and the institutionalization of disciplines. But
there is a deeper problem of style as well. As Hidemi Suganami (On the Causes of
War, 1996) nicely observes, there exists a more general division between those
people who find the minutiae of philosophical argument cosmically important to
understanding the real meaning of things, and those who see it mostly as irritating
nit-picking that distracts from the really important things by posing questions that
cannot be answered, and treating them as necessarily prior to dealing with more
practical matters. The philosophical mind revels in always finding another logical
difficulty, no matter how arcane, that undoes everything that comes before it.
This continuous drive towards highly abstract forms of demolition quite quickly
bores and frustrates audiences whose concerns are more pragmatic, and who think
viii
that there are urgent problems that we need at least to get to grips with, if not
solve.
In this audacious and thought-provoking book, Nick Rengger tackles this
difficult and lamentable state of affairs head on. In the context of a breathtaking
survey of the main bodies of thought in the two areas, he argues that the growing
alienation of political theory and IR has weakened both, and proceeds to show
how they can and must be remarried if either is to have any hope of successfully
addressing its agenda. His linking theme is the problem of order, what it is, and
how to achieve or avoid it, and how to rediscover the central normative question
of politics: how to live well? This is a work that achieves real depth and authority
while covering a huge swathe of thinking in a remarkably compact manner. It
commends itself for making a sustained argument that should affect how both
political theory and IR conduct their business and understand their subject. On a
more mundane level it will also attract because of its wide-ranging literature
survey; its short, pithy and incisive summaries of many schools of thought; and its
grand tour of the disciplines. For those in IR, it contains both a masterful
overview of the discipline (realism, the English school and constructivism,
liberalism, critical theory, postmodernism) and a useful crib for all whose training
has left them ill-equipped to deal with the currently fashionable impact of
philosophy of knowledge questions on debates about IR theory.
Preface
By temperament and training, I am a political theorist, and as a member of this
rather endangered company in the modern academy, I have long agreed with
Judith Shklar, surely among the most influential political theorists of the last fifty
years, that political theory is the place where history and ethics meet. In our own
day, therefore—and whatever may have been true of earlier periods1—this must
mean that one of the central sites for that meeting is the increasingly blurred and
contested boundary between the ethics and politics of (allegedly) ‘settled’
communities—usually, though not always, states—and the ethics and politics of
the relations between such communities. That distinction, in other words, that
usually issues in separate spheres called ‘domestic politics’ and ‘international
relations’, respectively
Given this allegiance, I have for a long time been primarily concerned to probe
both political theory and international relations in terms of their relations with
one another, though over the years the balance of my interests has shifted from
questions of intellectual history and context to more straightforwardly normative
questions. For example, when writing a book about the ‘modernity debate’ in
contemporary political theory, as I did a few years ago,2 I made a point of
emphasizing the extent to which that debate had ramifications for the way we talk
of ‘domestic’ politics—that is to say, as opposed to—‘international’ politics.
This trajectory has also, rather naturally, formed the basic staple of my
teaching, whether that teaching has been courses that I have specifically offered
on political theory and international relations or the more ‘usual’ courses political
theorists teach; those courses, that is, on the history of political thought usually
known as the ‘canon’. In the latter case, I have usually made a modest attempt to
broaden said canon, or at least to suggest that students should bear in mind that the
‘canon’ as currently constructed was developed at a time when the state was seen
as (at least) the inevitable political form of the modern age and (more infrequently)
necessarily the best one. Thus, theorists who did not happily fit into the
straitjacket of modern reflections about the centrality, even the inevitability, of
the state tended not to make it onto the ‘canonical’ list. This is even true for
theorists recognized in other contexts as central, even seminal, thinkers, for
example Grotius or Leibniz.3
