International Politics and Inner Worlds: Masks of Reason under Scrutiny PDF
Preview International Politics and Inner Worlds: Masks of Reason under Scrutiny
CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL PRACTICE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND INNER WORLDS Masks of Reason Under Scrutiny Kurt Jacobsen Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice Series editor Stephen Eric Bronner Department of Political Science Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpre- tations of the classics and salient works by older and more established thinkers. A new generation of academics is becoming engaged with immanent critique, interdisciplinary work, actual political problems, and more broadly the link between theory and practice. Each in this series will, after his or her fashion, explore the ways in which political theory can enrich our understanding of the arts and social sciences. Criminal justice, psychology, sociology, theater and a host of other disciplines come into play for a critical political theory. The series also opens new avenues by engaging alternative traditions, animal rights, Islamic politics, mass movements, sovereignty, and the institutional problems of power. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice thus fills an important niche. Innovatively blending tradition and experimentation, this intellec- tual enterprise with a political intent hopes to help reinvigorate what is fast becoming a petrified field of study and to perhaps provide a bit of inspiration for future scholars and activists. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14938 Kurt Jacobsen International Politics and Inner Worlds Masks of Reason under Scrutiny Kurt Jacobsen Department of Political Science University of Chicago Chicago, IL USA Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice ISBN 978-3-319-54351-2 ISBN 978-3-319-54352-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54352-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938154 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Credit: CoverZoo / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In memory of Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Teachers, friends, and marvelous people. Paying it forward. C ontents Introduction: Politics All the Way Down 1 Perestroika and American Political Science 17 Dueling Constructivisms: A Post-Mortem on the Ideas Debate in Mainstream IR 41 Why Do States (Bother to) Deceive? Managing Trust at Home and Abroad 73 COIN Flips: Counterinsurgency Theory and American IR 109 Why Freud Matters: Psychoanalysis and IR Revisited 149 The Mystique of Genetic Correctness 187 Loose Ends: Considerations on the Aftermaths of the Celtic Tiger and the Northern ‘Troubles’ 207 Conclusion: Algren, Academe and Conformity 217 Index 227 vii Introduction: Politics All the Way Down Social scientists long have grappled with the influence upon their research of interest-driven or theory-derived ideas that can shape what they see and do.1 This nettlesome plight deepens when one allows for emotional affinities between theory and theorist too.2 ‘External reality has a way,’ as John Steinbeck literarily put it, ‘of not being so external after all.’3 These tricky factors may well be unintended, so much so that the researcher is blissfully unaware of them. The search for knowledge, psychologist Abraham Maslow noted, validly can be viewed as an anxi- ety-allaying enterprise in which science is ‘considered a technique with which fallible men try to outwit their own human propensities to fear the truth, to avoid, it, and to distort it.’4 Given that there is no such critter as immaculate perception, no matter how hard some analysts try to achieve or contrive it, state managers employ doctrines, the public resorts to ‘rules of thumb,’ and social scientists apply models as useful shortcuts, which do not always work. Yet there is no way to maneuver through our ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ without doctrines, rules of thumb and models, at least at the outset of any venture. When pioneering the sociology of knowledge, Karl Mannheim described how particular and total versions of ideology, arising from our skewed class and cultural experiences, affect the way we behold the wider world.5 ‘The ideas expressed by the subject are thus regarded as func- tions of that point of view,’ Mannheim realized.6 ‘This means that opin- ion, statements, propositions and systems of ideas are not taken at their face value but are interpreted in the light of the life-situation of the one © The Author(s) 2017 1 K. Jacobsen, International Politics and Inner Worlds, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54352-9_1 2 K. JACOBSEN who expresses them.’ So an ideology is not just a device for masquerad- ing motives, as is commonly understood. Ideologies are unconscious in significant ways too, which is where psychoanalysis can help to pry them out into the sunlight. ‘Orthodoxy,’ Orwell pinpointed, ‘is unconscious- ness.’7 Those under orthodoxy’s spell don’t know it and most, who feel safely nestled in a paradigmatic cocoon, wouldn’t care if they did. Examples? Christopher Lasch reproached Cold War intellectuals in the 1960s who so thoroughly ‘internalized an elitist bureaucratic point of view that they were no longer aware of the way in which their writ- ing had come to serve as rationalizations of American world power.’8 Another searing critic chided nuclear strategists, entranced by math- ematical models, for failing to detect that changes in nuclear strategy were occurring in reaction to technological innovations, rather than on the basis of circumspect political thought, as they portrayed it.9 Philip Mirowski depicted the Nash equilibrium, a RAND gimmick stipulat- ing economic agents are serenely rational, as the supreme mathematical expression of the ‘essence of the closed world mentality of impervious rationality,’ of the perfectly ‘paranoid core of the Cold war fascination with axiomatics that so pervaded the social sciences in the post-war period.’10 One can go on. Scientists, as historian E. A. Burtt attested, are no more immune against zeitgeists, cultural prejudices and fads as they grow up than are used-car salesmen or grammar school teachers.11 An inquiry into the sordid history of eugenics should be enough to dis- pel the notion that scientists cannot wittingly or unwittingly don masks of reason. An archetypal motive for doing so is the all too human passion for creating a precise order, one pleasingly attuned to familiar concepts and amenable to available tools. In the field of psychology a century ago John Watson’s behaviorism once ‘meant to many young men and women of the time a new orientation and a new hope when the old guides had become hopelessly discredited in their eyes,’ Woodworth found.12 ‘It was a religion to take the place of religion.’ The spread of scientism—a compulsive reduction of all forms of knowledge to the pro- crustean categories of natural science—became ‘an evangelical gospel of salvation—promising, in its characteristic expression, escape from the irrational freedom of the human will.’13 Scientism constantly reappears in new guises because the impulse behind it—the quest for absolute cer- tainty—is an ineradicable human yearning. There is nothing necessarily wrong with it if you understand it and do not let it get a grip on you, but the sirens’ song is eerily sweet.14 INTRODUCTION: POLITICS ALL THE WAY DOWN 3 ‘Men are disturbed not by things,’ Epictetus surmised, ‘but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.’15 A realist way of saying the same thing is that the world is out there, but our per- ceptions of it are not. ‘Inasmuch as man is a creature living primarily in history and society,’ Mannheim explains, ‘the “existence” that surrounds him is never “existence as such,” but is always a concrete historical form of social existence.’16 Mannheim stressed the difficulties of think- ing outside of an historical context, ‘outside the box’ in modern par- lance. Thorstein Veblen accordingly judged about a philosophical foray that this noteworthy work ‘is logically consistent and convincing, but it proceeds on the ground of reasoned conduct, calculus of advantage, not on the ground of cause and effect.’17 What worried Veblen was that the ‘conclusion reached by public or class opinion is as much, or more, a matter of sentiment than of logical inference; and that the sentiment which animates men, singly or collectively, is as much, or more, an out- come of habit and native propensity as of calculated material interest.’18 Veblen was criticizing Marxism, not rationalist theories, but his point holds for positivist renditions of both intellectual enterprises.19 Sound scientific theories dispel the errors of ideologies or the blind spots of superseded scientific theories, but in time can encrust into forms of ideologies themselves, Feyerabend warned.20 Mannheim saw social science as a way of prying through ideological barriers through appli- cation of ‘relationism,’ which is what Perestroikans in political science (next Chapter) would call a ‘methodological pluralist’ device for flush- ing out into the open self-interests and unconscious biases.21 Awareness, not extinction, of biases is the primary objective because for Mannheim without a personal interest, or bias, there would be no projects we would choose to undertake.22 The Frankfurt School scholars stated explicitly that their investigations were guided by the emancipatory intent of call- ing into being a ‘rational’ society, by which they meant rationality drasti- cally different from formal theorists.23 Every critic could take their intent into account when assessing their studies. Debates about paradigmatic blinders can get very touchy very fast because they strike so close to home, so close to the inner worlds of the disputants. Since Kuhn, at least, social scientists confronted the proposi- tion, in its most radical implication, that paradigms decide for us what it is scientifically valid to perceive.24 There is no avoiding Kuhn’s bedrock conclusion that every paradigm, however useful, constructs ‘for a time’ an inherently limited and incomplete picture of the universe—unless we deny the conclusion.25 For formal theorists from the Vienna Circle onward, the
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